ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses the role of scientific indeterminacy in climate justice and food security in the global South. Evidence of climate impacts on women farmers in Ghana is presented to demonstrate threat to food security. Climate justice means responding to this threat. Until 2007, the central argument against taking action on climate change (CC) was lack of scientific consensus that anthropogenic CC is real. The Intergovernmental Panel on CC’s 4th Assessment Report made consensus undeniable, but formulated its predictions probabilistically. Probability indicates indeterminacy in science, and indeterminacy arguments replaced lack-of-consensus arguments to stall policy and fuel public suspicion of climate science. In response, this chapter provides arguments that scientific indeterminacy is a much-needed paradigm shift away from the Newtonian epistemology of certainty.
First, certainty is argued to be a Newtonian ideal. Quantum physics and chaos theory exposed its limits. Climate denial arguments from indeterminacy are thus based on a paradigm of knowledge best limited to laboratory rather than real-world conditions. Secondly, demand for certainty hampers response to food security issues in the global South where research is sparse. There can be no certainty when so little is known. CC necessitates a knowledge paradigm that accepts transferability and induction based on empirical data over the deductive certainty of mathematical idealism. Indeterminacy provides such a paradigm. Finally, the epistemological paradigm of indeterminacy promotes inclusion of non-expert voices in policy so risk can be assessed against level of harm; for example, risk of mass starvation can be judged against profit loss. That is, much as Leucippus’s atomic swerve served as a ground for ethical reasoning and responsibility, scientific indeterminacy in contemporary culture opens the door to ethical judgment and care in contrast to the objectivity of Newtonian science. It thereby moves policy-makers one step closer to functional policy, and those most vulnerable to starvation one step closer to climate justice.
