Wahrheit und Gewissheit; Klimaschutz und Politik / Truth and Certainty; Stabilizing the Climate and Politics

The currently dominant view in climate research is that mankind is endangered by climate change. As there are some different and less disquieting voices in climate research, as - even assuming the validity of the dominant view - the currently advocated means to mitigate climate change might be very costly or inefficient or incompatible with other values like human freedom, the role of wide agreement or consent in human thinking in general and in science in particular is discussed. The idea that the consent of experts can ever establish certainty about possession of the truth is rejected. Human knowledge always remains conjectural and subject to later revision. Too much closeness between the practitioners of science and politics is a threat instead of a promise. To counter this threat some social norms have to be observed and the institutional prerequisites for protecting the autonomy of science have to be established. Not only in markets, but in the sciences, too, competition is a discovery procedure. The task of science should never be an early consensus and the suppression of criticism and doubts. Instead it must remain organized scepticism and finding incompatibilities between widely accepted policy goals - even if doing so makes governance more difficult.