Facing the Heat with Epistemic and Civic Duty
Just as in previous years, people around the world grappled with extreme weather this summer. While Czechs sighed at a rainy season, southern Europe battled devastating wildfires, the Arctic Circle endured unprecedented heat, and other regions suffered destructive floods. For climatologists, none of this comes as a surprise. Extreme temperatures, violent storms, torrential rains, prolonged droughts, and other meteorological extremes have long been the signature marks of climate change—charted, measured, and predicted by scientists for decades. Their warnings have been consistent and unambiguous: such events will only become more frequent, more intense, and more damaging.
Climate science also establishes other sobering facts: climate change is driven by human-produced carbon dioxide emissions. The concentration of this gas in the atmosphere is now the highest it has been in two million years. Since 1900, global sea levels have risen by 20–25 centimeters, and in 2024 the average global temperature exceeded pre-industrial levels by 1.5°C. To keep warming near this threshold, climate science says the world must reach carbon neutrality by 2050, emitting no more greenhouse gas than can be absorbed by natural carbon sinks or captured by future technologies.
Yet these fundamentals of climate science remain largely absent from public debate and everyday understanding. A 2020 survey conducted by Czech Radio, PAQ Research and CVVM found that while 93% of Czechs acknowledge climate change, many misunderstand it. Only one-third are convinced it is caused by human activity and support immediate solutions. Roughly a quarter remain skeptical, doubting either human responsibility or the urgency of the problem. A similar picture emerges in Slovakia, where 2022 data from a Slovakian climate survey revealed major gaps in public understanding. Strikingly, seventy percent of respondents mistakenly believe the ozone hole is responsible for climate change.
A Brief History of Climate Science
Climate science has roots stretching back nearly two centuries. It began with studies of the greenhouse effect—the process by which greenhouse gases (water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide) trap heat radiating from the Earth’s surface. Several nineteenth-century scientists described this phenomenon. Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius estimated that doubling atmospheric CO₂ could raise average global temperatures by five to six degrees Celsius. In the twentieth century, Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass made the link between CO₂ concentrations and human-made emissions. In his landmark 1959 Scientific American article, Plass identified fossil fuel combustion emissions as the central driver of rising carbon dioxide levels.
From the late 1950s onward, the science of anthropogenic climate change became increasingly established. In 1958, oceanographer Charles David Keeling began measuring CO₂ concentrations atop Mauna Loa in Hawaii. These measurements, now known as the Keeling Curve, remain one of the most reliable datasets in climate science. They show a steady rise in CO₂ from 315 ppm in 1958 to about 427 ppm today—the highest level in two million years. (Ppm, or “parts per million,” refers to the number of molecules of a gas such as carbon dioxide in every one million molecules of air.)
Knowledge of past climate deepened with ice core analyses in Antarctica. By drilling deep into the ice, scientists could examine air bubbles trapped for up to 800,000 years and, through oxygen and hydrogen isotope analysis, determine the temperature at the time the water froze. These methods enable the reconstruction of past atmospheric composition and climate. In 1750—considered the dawn of significant human influence on nature—CO₂ stood at 280 ppm. Today’s 427 ppm represents a 50 percent increase in just 275 years, far greater than the typical 80 ppm swing between glacial and interglacial periods over the past million years.
The Unique Role of the IPCC
Modern climate science is vast, complex, and multidisciplinary, drawing on physics, chemistry, geology, oceanography, glaciology, and more. It investigates ocean currents, sea-level rise, glacier mass, and methane in permafrost, while producing sophisticated models of Earth systems. What sets it apart from other sciences is the degree of international coordination, embodied in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Founded in 1988 by the UN Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization, the IPCC provides unprecedented global scientific cooperation. With 195 member states, its task is not to conduct original research but to review, evaluate, and synthesize thousands of studies, producing rigorously peer-reviewed assessments of the highest reliability. This level of coordinated knowledge production and consensus-building is unique among scientific disciplines.
The IPCC’s reports offer systematic, verified, and authoritative knowledge about climate. The Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), released in parts between August 2021 and March 2023, confirmed with the strongest possible certainty that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide from fossil fuels, deforestation, and other human activities cause warming of 1.1–1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. This warming is driving ocean heating, sea-level rise, glacier retreat, and increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather—rainfall, droughts, and heat waves.
Crucially, the report warns that warming is accelerating, and that irreversible changes and risks grow rapidly beyond the 1.5°C threshold—already surpassed in 2024. It underscores the urgency of international cooperation and rapid emissions reductions to prevent catastrophic outcomes: the loss of coral reefs, mass extinction of species, melting of polar ice, further sea-level rise, and escalating weather extremes that will trigger food and water shortages, the spread of disease, migration, and conflict.
The Moral and Civic Duty to Accept Climate Science
The certainty and consensus among scientists that climate change is real, caused by human activity, advancing rapidly, and threatening social stability, fueling conflict, and driving disruption, is firm and compelling. It is as reliable a fact as the Earth revolving around the Sun, gravity pulling objects to the ground, smoking causing cancer, or vaccines preventing disease. To deny it while accepting other scientific facts is inconsistent and contradictory. Climate change is not a matter of political opinion or personal belief, nor an expression of healthy skepticism or resistance to conspiracies—it is a denial of reality.
Accepting scientific consensus is also a moral duty, rooted in the responsibility to face facts and to enable collective decisions about how to address them. Two strong ethical arguments support this claim. The first is grounded in individual epistemic virtue and responsibility; the second in the ethics of public reason and its role in democratic decision-making.
Epistemic virtue, a concept developed by American philosopher Linda Zagzebski in Virtues of the Mind (1996), calls on individuals to cultivate intellectual qualities such as openness, curiosity, conscientious self-education, long-term thinking, and resistance to manipulation. It also requires the willingness to accept uncomfortable truths based on evidence and to respect expert knowledge grounded in trusted methods of inquiry.
Closely related is epistemic responsibility—the duty to form beliefs based on reason, evidence, and rational trust in expertise that we cannot produce ourselves. We rely on this principle daily: we trust doctors who diagnose illnesses, engineers who design bridges, or meteorologists who forecast hurricanes. We do not verify every detail ourselves, but trust institutions and scientific procedures. Accepting the consensus on climate change is no different. To reject it is irresponsible, because denial and inaction directly harm others. In the case of climate change, refusing this knowledge is not a neutral personal choice but a refusal to engage with a problem that endangers everyone.
The second argument draws on the American philosopher John Dewey. In The Public and Its Problems (1927), Dewey emphasized that scientific inquiry, its public availability, and the institutions that sustain rational debate—what he called public reason—are the foundation of democracy. He described science as a form of collective intelligence, created through cooperation, transparency, and verification, and essential for solving problems that affect us all. Climate science shows the power of collective intelligence: no single person can produce it, but without it, democracy can’t respond to climate change effectively. Accepting this knowledge is therefore a civic duty, on par voting, paying taxes, or obeying the law.
Accepting climate science, then, is both an epistemic and civic responsibility. For it to become common knowledge, scientists must communicate their findings clearly; journalists and educators must translate them into accessible forms; and politicians must turn public debate into policy. But the responsibility does not end there. Individual citizens must also regard climate facts as knowledge, not opinion; seek information from reliable sources; resist misinformation; and challenge it in both public and private conversations. They should support initiatives for change, vote for leaders committed to sustainability, and pursue the most sustainable lifestyles possible. This is the fulfillment of both epistemic and democratic duty.
The author is a political scientist currently based at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. Her research focuses on international political theory, international law, and global justice.