Emotions play important role in research, say climate scientists

Climate scientists who were mocked and criticised after speaking up about their fears for the future have said acknowledging strong emotions is vital to their work.

- Damian Carrington

The researchers told the Guardian these feelings should not be suppressed in an attempt to reach supposed objectivity. Seeing climate experts' fears and opinions about the climate crisis as irrelevant suggests science is separate from society and ultimately weakens it, they said.

The researchers said they had been subject to ridicule by some scientists after taking part in a large Guardian survey of experts in May, during which they and many others expressed their feelings of extreme fear about future temperature rises and the world's failure to take sufficient action. They said they had been told they were not qualified to take part in this broad discussion of the climate crisis, were spreading doom and were not impartial.

But the researchers said that embracing their emotions was necessary to do good science and was a spur to working towards better ways of tackling the climate crisis and the rapidly increasing damage being wrought on the world.

They also said that those dismissing their fears as doom-laden and alarmist were frequently speaking from a position of privilege in western countries, with little direct experience of climate impacts.

The three experts have published a comment article - Scientists Have Emotional Responses to Climate Change Too - in the journal Nature Climate Change. They said that, at a point when the climate crisis has already arrived and the key questions are how to limit and survive it, their aim in speaking out was to start a discussion about how climate experts across all disciplines can best communicate the urgency needed with the public.