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Digging Deeper into the Why: Cultural Dimensions of Climate Change Skepticism Among Scientists
... The historical experiences of the climate agenda have crafted at least two fundamental aspects, which are based on a political and ideological rhetoric led by particular challenges that generate contradictions across the field in contemporary negotiations. First, we observe a dispute over the subject-matter itself, both in terms of narratives about its existence, 1 causalities and impacts (Lahsen 2015;Dryzek et al. 2011;Chakrabarty 2009), as well as in terms of public policy responses, regulations and development models. Second, when it comes to the legitimacy of norms and the implementation of rules to address both the complexities of social conditions of vulnerability and effective actions to fulfil distributive and climate justice principles, climate change still faces a discrepancy between political announcements and incongruous practices. ...
Climate change has been socially constructed crisscrossed by public and private interests, asymmetries and world-view conflicts. When it comes to the legitimacy of norms to address the complexities of social conditions of vulnerability and effective actions to fulfil distributive and climate justice principles, climate change still faces a discrepancy between political announcements and incongruous practices of international actors. While analysing the cases of China and the European Union, we point out contradictions stemming from their policy goals guided by strategic interests. From a global climate justice perspective, we analyze recent power dynamics that operate at two levels: first, economic relations and negotiations between Brazil and the two poles of power, considering the scenario of socio-environmental injustice and climate insecurity; second, policy practices of both global players in climate governance, bearing in mind the notions of climate justice and development as conceptual guides to understand when and where contradictions emerge. To do so, this article is structured around three sections: (i) a brief historical account of China’s and the EU’s roles in international climate policy; (ii) their legacies in climate governance and the inextricable relationship between their normative behaviour and their development objectives; (iii) an overview of the signing of the strategic memorandum of understanding for economic and trade agreement between Mercosur and the EU in 2019, as well as Sino-Brazilian relations facilitating investments and trade in multiple segments vis-à-vis the most recent multifaceted backlash in Brazil’s socio-environmental and climate policies.
The environment and climate change have achieved global, imaginary and institutional, centrality. Yet, despite efforts by social movements and intellectuals to change the status of ‘nature’ in social life, its unsurpassable exteriority in relation to ‘society’ remains a defining feature of modernity. While the imaginary is to a large extent fluid, these are core elements that hardly change, and by the same token are hard to change, one of the reasons being that they are crystalized in institutions, which contributes to their recursiveness and reiteration. This article explores the reasons for this, reconstructing the modern perspective, the role of subjectivity in it and some alternative views while focusing on the political dimension of modernity. It then goes on to tackle contemporary issues. If we aim to bring about a different world, and this does not exclude recourse to different civilizational alternatives, I argue that it is mostly from within the modern imaginary and institutional framework that we must face up to present challenges. I also suggest that the concepts of collective subjectivity and materiality may contribute to a renewed understanding of these questions within a critical theory perspective.
Während Klimaforschung lange als rein naturwissenschaftliches Unterfangen galt, wird sie zunehmend auch in den Sozialwissenschaften betrieben. Die Popularisierung in und außerhalb der Wissenschaft hat dabei nicht nur zu neuen Problembezügen geführt, sondern auch eine wachsende Unübersichtlichkeit produziert: Es ist ein Bedarf entstanden, disziplinäre Einstiegspunkte, interdisziplinäre Anschlussmöglichkeiten und transdisziplinäre Austauschgelegenheiten zu sondieren. Die Beiträge des Bandes thematisieren zentrale Schlüsselwerke der sozialwissenschaftlichen Klimaforschung und ermöglichen so einen ersten und orientierenden Zugang zu diesem Forschungsfeld.
In diesem Buchkapitel umreiße ich, wie die Klimawandelethnologie als Subdisziplin zunächst aus der Umweltethnologie hervorging, sich immer weiter auffächerte und dabei oft auch ihre eigenen disziplinären Grenzen überschritt. Die Autor:innen und Bücher, die ich für den Einstieg in dieses noch junge Forschungsfeld empfehle, umfassen insbesondere Sammelbände, die einen möglichst breiten Überblick über die unterschiedlichen Perspektiven und Forschungszugänge geben, wie Klimawandel ethnologisch erforscht werden kann. Sie stellen keine erschöpfende Auswahl dar, da es weitere vergleichbare Werke gibt, die jedoch thematisch, methodisch oder geografisch enger gefasst sind und sich daher weniger gut als Ausgangspunkt für eine Beschäftigung mit der Thematik eignen.
This chapter explores the cultural dimensions of human security by problematizing the nature of knowledge on climate, climate change, and human security, including its inherent relation with power and varying perceptions across cultures in Asia. The analysis is based on an extensive review of studies that attempt to capture the underlying cultural factors of vulnerability and adaptation. Grounded on an anthropological perspective, the chapter covers the profoundness of culture and its importance in climate change and disaster research from its most popular element of indigenous knowledge and practices to material structures and technology across time and space, different ways of thinking, and ethical considerations. Anthropological approaches that academics and practitioners could use to address human security are also discussed. These simply refer to the set of viewpoints that can be used to frame the analysis of cultural dimensions of human security as informed by theories and practice in anthropology. We argue that adding the concept of human security to climate change and disaster research brings the discourse into a realm foregrounding the human experience to motivate a more powerful political action.
This special section considers contemporary efforts to account for climate change through four frames: measurement, management, morality and myth. Our introduction briefly outlines these perspectives and the relevant literature, asking: 1) How have techniques of measurement and quantification emerged from and contributed to the particular politics of the “Anthropocene”?; 2) How have our efforts to measure socioclimatic systems facilitated new techniques of socio-environmental management and, at times, worked to reshape the very systems they describe?; 3) How have accounting practices worked to both elucidate and obscure questions of morality, value, responsibility and justice?; and 4) How we might address the critique that climate science is a myth and improve understanding with greater incorporation of historical and cross cultural knowledge from human ecology, human geography and anthropology.
The sociological literature on global environmental change emphasizes the processes by which the problem of global warming is socially constructed. However, the opposing efforts to construct the "non-problematicity" of global warming advanced by the conservative movement are largely ignored. Utilizing recent work on framing processes in the serial movements literature and claims-making from the social problems literature, this paper analyzes the counter-claims promoted by the conservative movement between 1990 and 1997 as it mobilized to challenge the legitimacy of global warming as a social problem. A thematic content analysis of publications circulated on the web sites of prominent conservative think tanks reveals three major counter-claims. First, the movement criticized the evidentiary basis of global warming as weak, if not entirely wrong. second the movement argued that global warming will have substantial benefits if it occurs. Third, the movement warned that proposed action to ameliorate global warming would do more harm than good. In short, the conservative movement asserted that, while the science of global warning appears to be growing more and more uncertain. the harmful effects of global warming policy are becoming increasingly certain. In order to better understand the controversy over global warming. future research should pay attention to the influence of the conservative movement by identifying the crucial roles of conservative foundations. conservative think tanks, and sympathetic "skeptic" scientists in undermining the growing scientific consensus over the reality of global warming.
Global climate change is among today's most visible and controversial areas of science-based policy. By almost any measure, number of researchers, size of budgets, attention from the public and from policymakers, the importance of this field has grown dramatically during the last decade. The collective annual budget of the U. S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), a clearinghouse organization charged with coordinating research sponsored by a dozen different US government agencies, hovers near $1.8 billion (U. S. Global Change Research Program, 1998). Although the USGCRP covers many areas in addition to atmospheric science, a large number of these, including oceanography, ecology, agriculture, and forest studies, are linked via the question of how a changing climate may affect them.
Nationally representative surveys conducted in 2008 and 2009 found significant declines in Americans’ climate change beliefs, risk perceptions, and trust in scientists. Several potential explanations for the declines are explored, including the poor state of the economy, a new administration and Congress, diminishing media attention, and abnormal weather. The analysis also specifically examines the impact of Climategate – an international scandal resulting from the unauthorized release of emails between climate scientists in England and United States. The results demonstrate that Climategate had a significant effect on public beliefs in global warming and trust in scientists. The loss of trust in scientists, however, was primarily among individuals with a strongly individualistic worldview or politically conservative ideology. Nonetheless, Americans overall continue to trust scientists more than other sources of information about global warming.
Interviews: 1,001 Adults (18+) Margin of error: +/-3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. NOTE: All results show percentages among all respondents, unless otherwise labeled. Totals may occasionally sum to more than 100 percent due to rounding.
This article argues that climate change produces discordances in established ways of understanding the human place in nature, and so offers unique challenges and opportunities for the interpretive social sciences. Scientific assessments such as those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change helped establish climate change as a global phenomenon, but in the process they detached knowledge from meaning. Climate facts arise from impersonal observation whereas meanings emerge from embedded experience. Climate science thus cuts against the grain of common sense and undermines existing social institutions and ethical commitments at four levels: communal, political, spatial and temporal. The article explores the tensions that arise when the impersonal, apolitical and universal imaginary of climate change projected by science comes into conflict with the subjective, situated and normative imaginations of human actors engaging with nature. It points to current environmental debates in which a reintegration of scientific representations of the climate with social responses to those representations is taking place. It suggests how the interpretive social sciences can foster a more complex understanding of humanity’s climate predicament. An important aim of this analysis is to offer a framework in which to think about the human and the social in a climate that seems to render obsolete important prior categories of solidarity and experience.
In the USA, civilian meteorological organizations traditionally controlled weather services during peacetime, and the military controlled them during wartime. However, after World War II, the military retained control of meteorological research funding. Academics pursued theoretical issues, and the US Weather Bureau concentrated on improving forecasts. Post-war advances in electronic computing encouraged these groups to pool funding, theoretical knowledge, and forecasting skills, to develop numerical weather prediction techniques that would radically change 20th-century meteorology. The Institute for Advanced Study’s Meteorology Project illustrates how research is negotiated across intra-disciplinary boundaries, in relation to Cold War era themes of international scientific exchange, the integration of practice with theory, the role of research schools, and the tension between military and civilian control of science. The present paper also raises a significant epistemological issue characteristic of 20th-century science: who possesses the better scientific understanding - those who crunch numbers, or those for whom observational data hold meaning?
This essay explores how the distinctively anthropological concept of culture provides uniquely valuable insights into the workings of science in its cultural context. Recent efforts by anthropologists to dislodge the traditional notion of culture as a homogenous, stable whole have opened up a variety of ways of imagining culture that place power differentials, flux, and contradiction at its center. Including attention to a wide variety of social domains outside the laboratory, attending to the ways nonscientists actively engage with scientific knowledge, and focusing on the complex interactions that flow both into and out of research laboratories are ways the activities of both scientists and nonscientists can be situated in the heterogeneous matrix of culture. Three images - the citadel, the rhizome, and the string figure - allow us to picture the discontinuous ways science both permeates and is permeated by cultural life.
The climatic effects of a hypothetical large nuclear war have been
simulated by an increasingly comprehensive series of global numerical
models. Short-term climatic effects are now found to be less severe than
predicted by early studies but the chronic long-term atmospheric effects
remain potentially serious. The sum of all indirect effects could exceed
those of blast and radioactivity.
A national survey of AMS weathercasters sponsored by the National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF), a nonprofit founded by Congress in 1990 to advance environmental knowledge. The survey was vetted by an advisory board of climate experts, including NOAA, the NWS, UCAR, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Pew Center for Global Climate Change, and many members of the AMS. When weathercasters were asked in this survey to identify the greatest obstacle to reporting on climate change, their top answer (41%) was to much scientific uncertainty despite the growing consensus of climate scientists evinced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and in direct conflict with the AMS Statement on Climate Change. The survey then asked weathercasters to comment on the most common questions they get about climate change in public. 62% of them said the number one question was that whether they believed in global warming or not. The second most asked question was to predict a link between local weather events and global climate change.
This book contains the following three selections: The Atmospheric and Climatic Consequences of Nuclear War; The Biological Consequences of Nuclear War; and The Moscow Link: A Diaglogue between U.S. and Soviet Scientists.
The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.
Mobilizing collective action to cope with climate change is difficult at any level, but the larger the community the more difficult the task. How to achieve cooperation in the common interest without imposing excessive governmental coercion is a fundamental political conundrum. Using the cultural typology suggested by Cultural Theory (CT), this paper explores diverse worldviews that inform individual and collective attitudes relevant to climate change. Responses from a sample of 441 individuals to statements drawn from the public discourse on environmental issues are used to classify respondents according to the cultural types posited by CT. Analysis indicates that most respondents mix elements of CT's egalitarianism, hierarchy, and individualism, though many individuals clearly lean toward one or another of the cultural types. There seems to be a melding of individualistic and hierarchic elements in opposition to egalitarian elements. Definitions of what is natural, fair and right – of equity – are fundamental issues between cultures, and non-coercive resolution of issues may be promoted by exploring cultural interstices, where cosmological boundaries are weakest. The cultural typology used in Cultural Theory, less spatially or temporally bound than some other typologies, promises to be a useful analytic tool in exploring cultural differences and overlaps.
This paper identifies cultural and historical dimensions that structure US climate science politics. It explores why a key subset of scientists—the physicist founders and leaders of the influential George C. Marshall Institute—chose to lend their scientific authority to this movement which continues to powerfully shape US climate policy. The paper suggests that these physicists joined the environmental backlash to stem changing tides in science and society, and to defend their preferred understandings of science, modernity, and of themselves as a physicist elite—understandings challenged by on-going transformations encapsulated by the widespread concern about human-induced climate change.
Culture is one of the most complex human dimensions of global environmental change; it is thus perhaps understandably the least well theorized. The objective of this paper is to sketch a conceptual framework for the role of culture in global environmental change in order to support the kinds of research necessary to shed light on this significant though elusive factor. I note limitations in how culture is conceptualized in current human dimensions research, and offer a retheorized notion of culture as a pervasive dimension of meaning in all social processes associated with environmental change, concluding with observations regarding research opportunities.
There is a culture war in America over science. Why? And what should be done to promote the ability of culturally diverse citizens to agree on how science can inform their common interests in health, security, and prosperity? This article uses the findings of Cultural Cognition Project studies to address these question.
"I want to get at the blown glass of the early cloud chambers and the oozing noodles of wet nuclear emulsion; to the resounding crack of a high-voltage spark arcing across a high-tension chamber and leaving the lab stinking of ozone; to the silent, darkened room, with row after row of scanners sliding trackballs across projected bubble-chamber images. Pictures and pulsesâI want to know where they came from, how pictures and counts got to be the bottom-line data of physics." (from the preface) Image and Logic is the most detailed engagement to date with the impact of modern technology on what it means to "do" physics and to be a physicist. At the beginning of this century, physics was usually done by a lone researcher who put together experimental apparatus on a benchtop. Now experiments frequently are larger than a city block, and experimental physicists live very different lives: programming computers, working with industry, coordinating vast teams of scientists and engineers, and playing politics. Peter L. Galison probes the material culture of experimental microphysics to reveal how the ever-increasing scale and complexity of apparatus have distanced physicists from the very science that drew them into experimenting, and have fragmented microphysics into different technical traditions much as apparatus have fragmented atoms to get at the fundamental building blocks of matter. At the same time, the necessity for teamwork in operating multimillion-dollar machines has created dynamic "trading zones," where instrument makers, theorists, and experimentalists meet, share knowledge, and coordinate the extraordinarily diverse pieces of the culture of modern microphysics: work, machines, evidence, and argument.
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