ABSTRACT
A confession: I am a social scientist. I came to social science because of climate change. This may seem odd – a social scientist interested in a physical science problem – so let me explain. From a background in English language and literature, I focused on technical writing and editing (teaching and doing) for 20-plus years. Eventually, I found myself co-editing a fascinating assessment of social science relevant to climate change, then writing about the social-institutional issues raised in the assessment. Although I think that climate change is happening and that people are causing much of the change, those are not the questions that I found really intriguing. No, what got my attention and interest were two questions: how do we, as societies, decide that scientific knowledge is valid? And can we as a world of human societies ever hope to agree on what to do about a global issue in which many kinds of knowledge may be contested?
