Values and Methodological Decisions in Climate Intervention Research (Invited Presentation)

Research in climate science on geoengineering and other climate intervention strategies has considerable social impacts. The information that is produced in the course of research can be used by decision makers to determine the feasibility and permissibility of different kinds of intervention strategies based o the impacts of those responses. Much of the time in scientific research the discussions of what impacts matter and what is valued are a feature of the evaluative stage, or final stages, of a project, when there is calculation of model outputs and impacts and interpretation of data for stakeholders. But, it is important to consider how values can inform the conceptualization of research projects and methodologies—values can and do influence the scientific aims of projects and subsequent decisions made in the course of research. More specifically, decisions about interests and purposes, research aims, and representational priorities ultimately inform the methodologies and metrics that are adopted for a project. Given this picture of science, it is important to develop a framework for taking into account values in the conceptualization of research projects, and to recognize how these values inform methodological decisions about research standards and empirical metrics that provide the information for impacts analysis. Values should be explicitly recognized as an important preliminary consideration in climate intervention studies because of how the information from such studies can be used to make judgments about the permissibility of certain responses to climate change. This presentation provides a beginning framework for how and when values should be considered in the course of research project development to determine metrics for impacts analysis and methodological standards, and argues for methodological consistency in the research on different types of intervention strategies.