How Do Climate Scientists Frame Their Knowledge and Expertise in Public Discourse? Russian Climate Scientists’ Communication of Climate Changes

Climate change science is challenging to communicate, and climate issues are often characterized by tension between scientific expertise and policy relevance. In our presentation, we explore how climate scientists' boundary work shapes this tension by examining communication among academic experts, policy-makers, and the public in Russia. We analyze materials from a year-long public seminar featuring ten leading Russian climate scientists. The seminar was organized by a group of STS scholars from a small private university in 2020-2021, aiming to introduce the social science community to climate change issues as they appear from the perspectives of different natural science disciplines.

Our study draws on two main data sources: 1) ten oral presentations, averaging about 1.5 hours each; and 2) ten chapters written by the speakers, averaging 11,500 words. Using this data and applying a discourse-analytic framework, we explore how these scientists distinguish themselves from policy-makers, climate skeptics, and social scientists to construct their public image as experts.

First, we demonstrate that local climate scientists have a highly developed interpretative repertoire for discussing the management and scaling of uncertainty in explaining the Earth's state. Second, drawing on Latour (1979, 1987) and Gieryn (1983), we show how references to scale and uncertainty are implicated in their boundary work and explain how uncertainty has become part of this process. In contrast to studies that view uncertainty as a challenge to be reduced, we argue that a particular style of boundary work allows climate scientists to enact a distinctive form of expert agency. This approach neither attempts to reduce nor increase uncertainty but rather to 'co-opt' and 'organize' it by delineating its spatio-temporal boundaries.