This document discusses the challenges scientists face in communicating their research findings to decision-makers and the public. It describes how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) addresses these challenges through rigorous assessment processes. However, adapting to climate change at local levels will require different approaches than those used by the IPCC. Knowledge action networks that include social scientists can help connect research to community-level adaptation by building trust between experts and local leaders.

1. Afterword
Speaking Scientific Truth to Power
Charles F. Kennel, University of California, San Diego
This essay takes up three issues associated with connecting knowledge with social action.
First, we discuss some of the pitfalls of communication and perception that are always
there when natural or social scientists present their versions of truth to decision-makers.
Next we review how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) deals
with these pitfalls in producing its global assessments. While there is only one global
assessment, there will be thousands helping local communities adapt to climate change.
Each will need its own analogue of IPCC, its own ‘knowledge action network’. Social
Anthropology will play a key role in such networks, and so will have to devise its own
ways to cope with the same issues that face climate scientists when they provide advice
to action leaders. The way assessments are done at the regional and community levels,
especially in the developing world, will necessarily differ from IPCC practice, but the
considerations that brought the IPCC into being will still apply.
Keywords: Scientific communication, Climate change, IPCC, adaptation, knowledge
action networks, community action
Introductory Remarks
Our civilization will have to deal with the climate change that started in the twentieth
century for the next thousand years. In a companion paper (Kennel forthcoming), I
have argued that a widening diversity of academic disciplines and technical specialties
will be drawn into the effort to reduce the risks to ecosystems and societies around the
world. In this essay, I will argue that social anthropology will have a very important role
in helping communities around the world adapt to climate change. It is in this context,
then, that I thought it might prove useful to share my personal reflections on how
climate scientists have coped with communicating their knowledge to decision-makers
and the public. This paper assembles thoughts that I have published elsewhere, but now
I believe I can propose a more complete list of the lessons learned. I do not expect that
what climate scientists have done in their attempt to connect knowledge with action
will prove totally relevant to social anthropologists, but it does indicate how another
discipline has shaped and encountered the issues, and may prove a useful starting point.
Cambridge Anthropology 31(1), Spring 2013: 153–158 © Cambridge Anthropology
doi:10.3167/ca.2013.310111

2. Charles F. Kennel
154 • Cambridge Anthropology
What is Scientific‘Truth’?
At what point does research become established knowledge? Scientists believe that
the patient application of rigorous methods establishes truth, but how do they decide
that enough is enough, that they know something? What does it really mean when a
research community believes it has reached consensus?
Aside from consolidating their results in review articles and monographs, scientists
by and large have relied on the change of generations for controversies to settle out
and knowledge to be considered established. Unforced intellectual evolution under
peer review has thus been the de facto arbiter of truth. Not until the climate change
clock started ticking did there emerge an urgent need to accelerate the coalescence of
research into knowledge, and to invent a social process to decide how ready research
was for practical use. Codifying ‘textbook-ready’ knowledge was no longer enough.
The knowledge had to be prepared for use, and one had to judge when knowledge was
‘decision-ready’.
Once the knowledge is ready, it has to be communicated. Again, there are numerous
questions. How should specialized knowledge be conveyed to non-experts? How well
can scientific results be characterized in ordinary language? Even if seemingly clear
descriptions are formulated, do scientists and policy-makers perceive them the same
way? Do they only seem to speak the same language? Do the same ‘facts’ evoke different
associations in their different cultural and professional reference frames?
Which scientists coming in the door should harried politicians listen to? Why
should decision-makers trust scientists any more than anyone else? Don’t all groups,
including scientists, have a political agenda? Is science really any different? What should
the politician think when two scientists disagree? Can a non-expert judge whether one
view represents the preponderance of the research community and another, an outlier?
How can scientists promote trust in what they are saying? Does the perception of their
individual (or collective) self-interest undermine confidence in their conclusions? Don’t
scientists tailor their presentations according to what they think decision-makers want
to hear, like everyone else? Do their attempts at transparency and full disclosure really
convey an impression of honest process? Does reliance on peer review communicate
integrity or bind scientists into self-referential interest groups? Do independent reviews
by expert panels promote trust or communicate elitist in-group collusion?
Who Should Speak Scientific Truth to Power?
Assessment is the method scientists have invented to speak with one voice to power.1
A good assessment is designed to deal with the issues of integrity and process outlined
above. While there are many variations, assessments usually comprise four basic
tasks. The first is a new form of quality assurance that distinguishes between peer-
reviewed research and decision-ready knowledge. In peer review, disciplinary experts
judge whether a new research result merits examination by the wider disciplinary
community. In the case of decision-readiness, a judgment is rendered, based upon
breadth of acceptance by researchers and users, whether knowledge developed in
research merits use by non-experts. The second task is knowledge assembly, in which
the particular strands of knowledge needed to support specific decisions are gathered

3. Afterword. Speaking Scientific Truth to Power
Cambridge Anthropology • 155
in one place and integrated. The third task is translation of this knowledge into terms
the non-specialist can understand. The final task is to incorporate the knowledge into
an action plan.
While assessment is now used in many areas of environmental decision-making, it
has reached its highest point of development in climate science, to which we now turn.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Since 1988, the world community of climate scientists has carried out four of the most
rigorous assessments of a state of scientific knowledge ever attempted.2
In 1988, the
United Nations Environmental Programme and the World Meteorological Organisation
established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) :
...to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific,
technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis
of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation
and mitigation. IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy, although they may
need to deal objectively with scientific, technical and socio-economic factors relevant to
the application of particular policies.3
The IPCC devised transparent processes intended to promote trust. Its reviews were
restricted to information found in the peer-reviewed literature. Review panels were
chosen with attention to balance among countries, points of view, and economic and
institutional interests. Successive panels recruited a majority of new participants to
avoid an institutionalized IPCC point of view. The return of different panels to the
same issues proved persuasive. The IPCC’s influence grew as succeeding reports
communicated a consistently evolving understanding of climate change.
The IPCC created rigorous ways to express its conclusions in forms policy-makers
could use. It structured a mode of communication between scientists and decision-
makers that aims to preserve the independence and rigour of science while accelerating
the delivery of useful knowledge into the decision-making arena. Its most important
innovation was to separate assessment of science from discussion of policy. After the
scientific assessment is complete, the IPCC engages in a separate process to develop
summaries for policy makers. Together, scientists and policy-makers compose, line
by line, the statements pertinent to policy, with explicit attention to the uniform
characterization of uncertainty.
IPCC assessments transformed the global public debate about climate. Not a day
passes without media discussion of climate change. This is the most important outcome,
since public awareness of the risks of climate change encourages governments to pay
attention and motivates public and private initiatives, especially in energy technologies.
IPCC assessments have also motivated large international agreements – the 1997 Kyoto
Protocol, the 2001 Bonn Agreement, and the 2007 Bali Action Plan. Nearly every
government in the world now pays attention to IPCC assessments and thinks about
climate decisions in IPCC terms.
The IPCC has also transformed climate science. The research community is now
spending a significant fraction of all its energies on preparing the next report, and its

4. Charles F. Kennel
156 • Cambridge Anthropology
research agenda is shaped by the previous report. It is stretched thin by the demands
placed upon it.
Why Has the IPCC Not Been More Successful?
The IPCC prepared the way for the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC), and has been tied to it ever since. The parties to the
convention have met annually since 1995 to seek consensus agreements on limiting
climate change. While the IPCC clearly has accelerated the delivery of climate
knowledge to the public, its success in accelerating climate action is less apparent.
Increased public and governmental awareness and several formal agreements have not
translated into successful global treaties to mitigate climate change, and accumulation
of greenhouse gases has accelerated since the IPCC came into existence.
We should not expect the UN climate negotiations to make rapid progress. There
are too many participants and the issues are too complex for consensus to come easily
to parties with extraordinarily divergent interests. It will be difficult to accelerate their
decision-making. The IPCC is working with just about the most difficult configuration
of decision-makers conceivable.
Public hyper-awareness of climate change has provoked a strong reaction in some
countries. In retrospect, this is not surprising because the causes of climate change lie
at the very heart of modern industrial society. These countries can expect an extended
period of public controversy in which the ‘denialist’ reaction continues to strike at the
credibility of climate science.4
This reaction has had some success. Though more than
95 per cent of publishing climate scientists accept that human actions are changing the
climate, the U.S. media portray this as controversial within the scientific community.
The IPCC’s scientifically impeccable efforts to promote trust have too often been
undone.5
Promoting Community-Level Adaptation to Climate Change
Every region, nation, community, ecosystem, industry and population that is affected
by weather and its prevailing patterns will be impacted in some way by climate change.
Climate is an issue for everyone, but it is not the same issue for everyone. Communities
are not interested in everything that can happen, only what could happen to them.
They will only pay attention to assessments that focus on their concerns, and many key
adaptation decisions can only be made at the local level.
Decision-makers at the global, regional or national, and local levels have different
interests. Carbon dioxide mitigation is the province of central decision-makers
concerned with energy policies and their implementation. These include national
and international leaders of policy, finance and industry. At the regional or national
domestic levels, the decision-makers have a different mix of concerns. And each region
is different. Each is subject to distinctive social and environmental stresses that reinforce
one another in locally specific ways. Each has its own ways of making decisions. An
assessment based on natural science alone will not seem pertinent or compelling.

5. Afterword. Speaking Scientific Truth to Power
Cambridge Anthropology • 157
Knowledge Action Social Networks
An assessment has to win the attention of local leaders even before it earns their
trust. For perfectly good reasons, they focus on the most concrete local trends, and
assessments made by the international community must compete for salience with local
social, economic, political, legal and cultural concerns. Climate change operates in the
background. It is assessment’s burden to explain how climate change affects the things
their communities care about. Motivating constructive action is even more delicate
(van Aalst et al. 2008). This is surely a province for social anthropology.
Slow decision-making adds to climate risk. An assessment should make local leaders
want to take action. It should transmit the motivation to act as well as knowledge. But
before motivation there has to be human trust. And the degree of trust required to
acknowledge the truth of scientific facts is far smaller than that which persuades a
decision-maker to risk resources and reputation on a potentially controversial initiative.
In many parts of the world, and for many people, motivational trust is conveyed
primarily through face-to-face interaction. At the regional and local levels, we should
not separate experts and decision-makers as climate science does at the global level.
We have suggested elsewhere that we need to construct ‘knowledge action
networks’. By this term of art, we mean managed social networks that link the
international community with regional thought-leaders and local decision-makers.
Social networking can be especially useful to developing countries. It is a tactful way
to support capacity-building while it is creating situational awareness and motivating
action. It can become a peer group for knowledge-leaders and decision-makers who do
not participate frequently in international peer networks.
There are many informal research networks working in developing regions today
(Lidskog and Elander 2010). Some of the more instructive are those from natural and
social science disciplines who work with indigenous peoples in the Tibetan Plateau and
Canadian and American Arctic (Pearce et al. 2009). These regions are expected to feel
the impacts of warming ahead of others, so these research networks promise to teach us
about how to work with similar communities elsewhere. A research network can easily
be converted to a knowledge action network by including local leaders. Such efforts
have already led to adaptation action plans at the village level in the Canadian Arctic
(Pearce et al. 2010). This also makes clear the value of including social anthropologists
and other social scientists in knowledge action networks in other parts of the world.6
The essential point is that social anthropologists know better than most scientists how
to connect knowledge with action.
Concluding Remarks
One day, there will be a global mosaic of regional, local and topical assessments
underway at any given time. We should think of a complex network of loosely
connected initiatives rather than one centrally managed top-down project. There will
be assessments of the impacts of climate change on coastal, riverfront and mountain
communities; on savannah, rangeland and dry-land settlements; on mega-cities; on
agriculture, forests and ecosystems; on pollution and public health; on migration and
trade, and many other issues.

6. Charles F. Kennel
158 • Cambridge Anthropology
Notes
1. Assessment has taken its place alongside experiment, theory and modelling as a basic scientific activity
wherever science and public concerns overlap. It is the most important social technology devoted to
science invented in the twentieth century.
2. The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report appeared in four large volumes in 2007. Its first volume is
devoted to the physical science basis of climate change; the second, to impacts, vulnerabilities, and
adaptation options; the third, to the opportunities and costs of mitigation; and the last, to a synthesis
of the overall findings. The scale of the enterprise required simply to assess the peer-reviewed literature
about climate change is impressive. The 2007 report of ‘Working Group I’ was started in 2004 and
completed in 2007; it involved 152 authors, 400 contributors, 600 expert reviewers, and responded to
more than 30,000 comments. ‘Working Group II’, on the physical and biological impacts of climate
change, reviewed 577 peer-reviewed studies.
3. Cited from Principles Governing IPCC Work. [Approved at the Fourteenth Session (Vienna, 1-3
October 1998) on 1 October 1998, amended at the Twenty-First Session (Vienna, 3 and 6-7 November
2003), the Twenty-Fifth Session (Mauritius, 26-28 April 2006) and the Thirty-Fifth Session (Geneva,
6-9 June 2012)]. Available at http//ipcc.org/organization/history (Accessed 30 December 2012).
4. See Oreskes and Conway (2010) on the causes of denialist reaction in the United States.
5. From my vantage points – first as head of earth sciences at NASA and later director of the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography – and as a participant in numerous U.S. National Academy studies, I
have seen the human cost of speaking scientific truth to power. I have seen my colleagues struggle
to comply with full and open disclosure of data. I have seen them become hyper-aware of possible
denialist criticism. I have seem some turn reticent, afraid of unwanted exposure in the media. I know
colleagues who contributed to the IPCC receive death threats, and have heard that young researchers
receive harassing emails. I have seen nearly all struggle with the ethical complexities. Not a few turn
their efforts to improving communication with the public. One day, someone will make a serious study
of the climate science community in the first half-century of human-induced climate change.
References
Kennel, C.F. forthcoming. Rethinking the Way We Think about Climate Change.Submitted to
Proc. American Philosophical Society, Feb. 2013.
Lidskog, R., and I. Elander. 2010. Addressing Climate Change Democratically: Multi-
Level Governance, Transnational Networks and Governmental Structures. Sustainable
Development 18, no. 1: 32–41.
Oreskes, N., and E.M. Conway. 2010. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured
the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury.
Pearce, T.D., J.D. Ford, A. Caron, J. Prno and T. Smith. 2010. Climate Change Adaptation Action
Plan: Community of Paulatuk, Northwest Territories. Paulatuk, NWT: Community of
Paulatuk.
Pearce, T.D., J.D. Ford, G.J. Laidler, B. Smit, F. Duerden, M. Allarut, M. Andrachuk, S. Baryluk,
A. Dialla, P. Elee, A. Goose, T. Ikummaq, E. Joamie, F. Kataoyak, E. Loring, S. Meakin, S.
Nickels, K. Shappa, J. Shirley and J. Wandel. 2009. Community Collaboration and Climate
Change Research in the Canadian Arctic. Polar Research 28, no. 1: 10–27
Van Aalst, M.K., T. Cannon and I. Burton. 2008. Community Level Adaptation to Climate
Change: The Potential Role of Participatory Community Risk Assessment. Global
Environmental Change 18, no. 1: 165–179.
Charles F. Kennel is former Director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and
from 1994 to 1996 was Director of NASA’s Mission to Planet Earth.