Last weekend, I wrote a multifaceted diary about global warming. This weekend, with the Copenhagen Climate Summit rapidly approaching, I want to return to the topic of denialism with a little more detail, since the recent wave of denialist attacks reminds us once again that denialism is the big gun in thwarting responsible action.
First and foremost, there's the hack into climate scientists' private emails, peddled to the media and the conservative base as an "exposé". Of course, as noted last weekend, there was nothing exposed. But if we don't know by now that facts don't matter, we've learned nothing. George Marshall--founder and director of projects at the Climate Outreach and Information Network- explained in the Guardian, responding with factual arguments in the media is act of foolishness:
It's like responding to someone calling you a bastard by showing them your birth certificate.
Because the so-called "skeptics" understand this is war, they are much more clear-headed about things. Truth means nothing-the BRAND of truth is quite another matter. And striking at just the right moment is most important of all.
As noted (also in the Guardian) by Bob Ward-- Policy and Communications Director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science- something of this sort was to be expected:
It is inevitable as we approach the crucial meeting in conference in Copenhagen in December that the sceptics would try some stunt to try to undermine a global agreement on climate change.
Marshall's piece is primarily focused on the ineptitude of the response. But in order to explain just why it was so inept, he first explains deep background the lay of the land:
The lay public, when presented with confusing data and competing arguments about climate change, deploy the mental shortcut of believing the people they most trust. Trust in the communicator is therefore crucial.
Unfortunately the three main climate change communicators: politicians, journalists and environmental campaigners, are among the least trusted people in society - fighting it out for bottom place in the ranking with lawyers and car salesmen. No one would pay any attention to them at all if they were not drawing on the aquifer of public trust in scientists.
But climate scientists have always misunderstood the dynamic of public belief and trust. They assume that belief will be built on their data and that public trust is merited by their authority. With the exception of a few outstanding communicators, they often make no attempt to speak to deeper values or make an emotional connection with the public - indeed they see that as contrary to their professional independence.
Climate change deniers have always understood this. They use language that is designed to appeal to deeper values (such as freedom, independence, progress). The narrative they tell of being determined (and even persecuted) free-thinkers, standing against the tide of oppressive and self-interested conformity is designed to create an aura of integrity and trustworthiness.
Of course, the social function and position of science has always been a good deal more complicated than advertised. When "objective" science fits with the dominant elite interests, the "objective" scientists somehow readily get presented to the public as quasi-religious authorities giving their blessings to society's latest crusade, whatever that may be. The nuclear establishment clearly showed us as much during the Cold War, not least via counter-example in the way that non-conformists such as Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Slizard were excluded from such Olympian status. Indeed, the Cold War nuclear physics establishment turns out to be directly implicated in global warming denialism, as is discussed by Brazillian anthropologist Myanna Lahsen in her research paper, "Experiences of modernity in the greenhouse: A cultural analysis of a physicist 'trio' supporting the backlash against global warming"(pdf), in which she writes:
Aaron McCright and Dunlap (2003) identify the conservative movement as a central obstacle to US policy proposals concerning human-induced climate change, and examine how a small group of ''dissident'' or ''contrarian'' scientists lent crucial scientific credentials and authority to conservative think tanks. McCright and Dunlap (2000) analyze the discourses structuring the contrarian scientists' counter-claims related to climate change and how conservative think tanks have mobilized these claims to undermine concern about climate change. Carvalho (2007) found that the American skeptics also have featured prominently in the British ''quality press'' in support of a neoliberal, capitalist agenda.
The above-mentioned sociological work on the antienvironmental movement establishes the what and the how dimensions of scientists' engagement with it. What it does not illuminate is why such scientists have chosen to lend their support to this movement: Who are they? Where do they come from? What motivates them? This paper seeks to answer these questions with regards to three influential physicists who joined the backlash, Frederick Seitz, Robert Jastrow, and William Nierenberg (hereafter referred to as ''the trio'').
The trio is a subgroup within the dozen or so high-profile US scientists who have been staunch and public in voicing their criticisms of environmental concern about human induced climate change and associated policy action. The contrarians represent numerous disciplines and vary also in terms of other factors (age, home institutions, status) etc. but about half of them are physicists.7 This study discusses the sociological significance of this strong representation of physicists among the contrarians, but without drawing conclusions about physicists as a whole.
As the paper continues, more and more is revealed about the trio's embeddedness in the nuclear establishment, and the various things that entails. But, of course, one thing it doesn't entail is any particular expertise in climate science...and, indeed, it remains the case that there is no contrarian climate science in the peer-reviewed scienfitic literature. Thus, these scientists are being cited in a logically illegtitimate manner, a fallacy known as "appeal to authority":
An Appeal to Authority is a fallacy with the following form:
1. Person A is (claimed to be) an authority on subject S.
2. Person A makes claim C about subject S.
3. Therefore, C is true.
This fallacy is committed when the person in question is not a legitimate authority on the subject. More formally, if person A is not qualified to make reliable claims in subject S, then the argument will be fallacious.
This sort of reasoning is fallacious when the person in question is not an expert. In such cases the reasoning is flawed because the fact that an unqualified person makes a claim does not provide any justification for the claim. The claim could be true, but the fact that an unqualified person made the claim does not provide any rational reason to accept the claim as true.
When a person falls prey to this fallacy, they are accepting a claim as true without there being adequate evidence to do so. More specifically, the person is accepting the claim because they erroneously believe that the person making the claim is a legitimate expert and hence that the claim is reasonable to accept. Since people have a tendency to believe authorities (and there are, in fact, good reasons to accept some claims made by authorities) this fallacy is a fairly common one.
The appeal to authority is especially appealing to authoritarians, who prefer to have authorities do their thinking for them--particularly when the authorities say what they want to hear. When they don't, well... that's when the character assasination and email hacking begin. All this takes us preamturely away from Lahsen's excelelnt article (I promise to write more about it in the future), but not before quoting one more passage. As she demonstrates, the physics culture they were part of breeds a kind of intellectual arrogance that simply assumes its members possess near omniscience. Unfortunately, no humans do:
Numerous climate scientists interviewed as part of the author's larger research project associated the Marshall Institute trio with this general style of behavior. Thus, a chemist and climate scientist said:
Jastrow, Seitz, Nierenberg-the Marshall Institute in general, I know all of these guys. They are all good scientists-they were: they are all retired, and they have a kind of hubris-an arrogance, you know [y] Physicists can answer any question quickly. These [global environmental] problems are sort of trivia that can be handled by a good physicist on a Friday afternoon [over] a beer. That is the attitude they have [...] They downplay the science of any other community. And they are really arrogant.
An IPCC leader-a physicist himself-echoed the above statement:
[There is a group of physicists among the contrarians who] feel that they are experts [on the climate issue]. There is a long-standing tradition in the physics community that holds that physicists can solve any problem just by thinking about it. There is a group in the US called JASON. These physicists meet down in Southern California, and they were convinced that they could solve any problem. They were convinced they could solve the acid rain problem ntellectually. They didn't care about models and clouds and other detail. They thought they could do it from first principles of physics. And there is some of that left over.
Overhearing the above comments, another IPCC leader and scientist pitched in: ''You see, there are scientists who have been working at the highest levels in science and government, who feel as if they can make statements about any scientific area. But what they have to do first is their homework!''
Unlike the neocons, these scientists are not devoid of expertise--in their own fields. But their success within their fields leads them to have a neo-con like disdain for the most basic facts of fields they pontificate on without any proven expertise. However, also like the neocons, they know how to play the part of experts, since they have actually been experts for many decades... just not experts on climate science.
They are thus well-suited to playing the part described above by George Marshall in the Guardian:
Climate change deniers have always understood this. They use language that is designed to appeal to deeper values (such as freedom, independence, progress). The narrative they tell of being determined (and even persecuted) free-thinkers, standing against the tide of oppressive and self-interested conformity is designed to create an aura of integrity and trustworthiness.
Marshall continues:
The recent hacking of the servers of the University of East Anglia can only be understood within this landscape of competing appeals to public trust. The denial industry (and hordes of climate nerds) has trawled through these emails and found sentences which, when removed from context, support their storyline that climate science is being deliberately distorted and exaggerated for a mixed bag of self-interested and politicised ends.
But you could find anything in here. I looked and found lots of references to lunch and fun, 94 to hate, 31 to love. Generally, though, the emails are extremely focused, technical, and, dare I say it, really dull. As noted on realclimate.org, the emails contain "no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to 'get rid of the MWP', no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no 'marching orders' from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords."
But this is hardly the point. This is an orchestrated smear campaign and does not require balance or context. The speed with which the emails have been cut apart and fed into existing storylines is remarkable. At the very least the UEA email campaign is an application of dirty political tactics to climate change campaigning.
I suspect it goes further than that. The storyline is too clever, the timing on the brink of Copenhagen and the US climate bill too convenient. I wait with interest to find out how these emails were obtained.
We need to understand this smear campaign as reflective of a general worldview--one that is at least partially implicated in the authoritarian worldview described in a previous diary today, "Authoritarianism & Polarization ". The political theatre of delegitimizing enemy authroities and legitimizing one's own is central to the authoritarian worldview's way of doing politics, because of the crucial role that authorities play for authoritarians.
This is the exact same rationale involved in obfuscating and denying George W. Bush's record of going AWOL from his duties with the Texas Air Nationa Guard, while creating an utter factitious and slanderous attack on John Kerry's actual combat medals.
Indeed, the process is far more widespread than that, as Glenn Greenwald showed in his book, Great American Hypocrites. It's the way that virtually all conservative culture heroes are created, by acts of massive biographical fabrication.
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