Rhetoric on the Borderlands of Science

The Power of Theory In Science

The Power of Theory In Science 

Check out the comments to Ethan Siegel's post discussing the meanings of the word theory as it is used in popular and scientific contexts. By comment 6 someone has rejected the Big Bang cosmological model, and by comment 12 someone has weighed in against the anthropogenic global warming model. The next commenter even cites Siegel's post as invalidating climate change arguments. 

Respect his authority! : Pharyngula

The Minnesota Senate's loudest voice against climate change, it's chief denialist, is a Republican (of course) named Michael Jungbauer.

via scienceblogs.com

Hilarious post from the always interesting PZ Meyers. Prominent and/or outspoken climate change denialists often claim science while denouncing it, and Jungbauer is no exception. Scrolling down to the comments Moggie asks why "must Christians create parallel, Christian versions of everything?" Why indeed. Putting on my anthropologist's hat for a moment, I suggest the we need to be able to answer Moggie's question before we can adequately deal with denialists. Denialism isn't just about rejecting science or being ignorant of scientific principles (it is about these things, for some, but only partly), it is an aspect of a worldview that has its own internal coherences. This worldview expresses the beliefs of a community that both claims the authority of science, and at the same time attempts to compete with it. So if you are a science denier--climate change denier, evolution denier, etc-- it makes sense to construct alternative media and institutions directly or indirectly challenging "official science." This can take the form of websites and blogs, universities, and museums. Taking the anthro hat off I can say that people like Jungbauer both amuse and alarm me, but putting it back on again I want to point out that people like Jungbauer--at least the ones who aren't bought and paid for--really think that they are right. Is this a symptom of ignorance, or is something else motivating their convictions?

I'm Back! (I hope)

Various circumstance led me to put my blog aside for the past couple of years, but now, circumstances permitting, I'm back.

One recent development is a book proposal that I have started circulating. Like the blog, is an investigation of the climate change debate.

More soon!

The CRU Hack Controversy

Anyone who has made their way to my little corner of the internet is no doubt already aware that hackers recently broke into the servers of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia and released some thirteen years of email to the public. Of course, this event has been hailed not as a break-in but as a breakthrough by the community of global warming skeptics and deniers, who alleged to have found in the email records hard evidence of a global warming "conspiracy." A good place to start for those interested in taking a look at what the skeptics are saying is Climate Depot. Of course, climatologists have not been sitting on their hands throughout all of this. The folks at RealClimate have posted a response/rebuttal here and offer context for some of the more controversial email exchanges here. It is unclear if this story will receive much attention from the MSM, although most of the major news services have reported it. Here's the AP's AP's version, via Yahoo News, and Andrew Revkin of the New York Times discusses it here. 

I'm just an anthropologist, not a climatologist, so I'll leave it to others to respond to the specific claims of the skeptics. For what its worth I've read through some some of the posted email exchanges and I see no evidence of a global conspiracy. What I did see reminds of a point Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgard made in Laboratory Life, that scientific facts are constructed as much from social/political relations of communication as rational/logical processes. Scientists generally have a dim view of science studies guys like Latour and views assertions that scientific facts are socially constructed as attacks on scientific authority. But if science studies is an attack on the authority of science, it pales in comparison to attacks leveled by creationists against evolutionary biology and climate warming skeptics against climatologists. 

If the non-scientific public entertained a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the scientific method, would the rhetoric of climate change skepticism be as influential as it is?  Obviously I don't know, but I suspect it wouldn't. I can see how elements of the public, suspicious of the power they think elites (such as scientists) have over their lives, could find in the social and communicative complexity of scientific practice evidence of bias and, as the CRU case shows, fraud. The complex communications of the CRU emails confound the picture most people have of scientists as dispassionate priests of Reason and Objectivity, whose mandate is to deliver the light of truth to those who live in the cave of ignorance. The rhetoric of climate skepticism presents environmentalists and sympathetic scientists as either hypocrites or deceivers (well, to be fair, skeptics also fond of presenting "warmists" as weak-minded and ignorant, which you would think undermine the whole diabolical cabal thing, but what would I know). Any material that can be construed to show the scientific facts of anthropogenic climate change as something other than inherently truthful will inflame this rhetoric and embolden the skeptical community. To the extent that the CRU email hack reveal a Science that diverges from popular notions of Science, wherein scientists are objective observers of truth, and looks more like the science of Latour and Woolgard, it will play to a sense of betrayal and contribute to a distrust of the scientific community. For climate change skeptics, any suggestion that science is "man-made" means it's made-up.

Climate skepticism and denial is in part an astroturf movement, encouraged by industry advocacy outfits like the Heartland Institute, Cato and others. But groups such as these, influential as they are, are speaking to a broader cultural movement, which is more than ready to see scientists as corrupt and deceitful.  Jeffrey Feldman has written insightfully about this movement in a recent DailyKos diary. You may think that the participants of this cultural movement are wrong about climate change (and by the way I think they are too) but it is important to understand that they have ways of convincing themselves they are right. Progressives, environmentalists, and the broader scientific community need to understand how this movement puts together for itself a picture of the world if they hope to contest it in the forum of public opinion.

Is the picture of science presented by science studies scholars like Latour something that progressives and the broader scientifically literate public should embrace? I think so. The social construction of scientific facts does not suggest that science just makes up facts, instead it suggests that facts emerge from and speak to the concerns of a complex network of social actors. The idea that scientific facts are socially constructed may rub some the wrong way, but it provides us with a language and set of concepts with which to better understand the interactions documented in the CRU emails. Broader acceptance of this idea it would go a long way to defanging the climate change skeptics (as well as their creationist confederates) in their attempts to undermine the work of climatologists and environmentalists.

Kevin Grandia: Robert Redford's Sundance Channel to Air Climate Denier Propaganda

When this pseudo-scientific “documentary” was first broadcast on British television to an audience of 2.5 million in 2007, real scientists were appalled. The British Antarctic Survey released a statement that “any scientist found to have falsified data in the manner of the [film] would be guilty of serious professional misconduct."

via www.huffingtonpost.com

OK, life has been complicated over the past two weeks and I haven't yet had a chance to finish my comments on the claims being made in Superfreakonomics. Hopefully I'll be done and post my comments by the weekend. For now I just want to call attention to this posting to the Huffington Post. The relationship between partisan political debate and invocations of science and scientific authority is something I'm thinking a lot about lately, so more interesting to me than Grandia's post are the comments it has elicited.

For me these comments exemplify how the authority of Science operates as a kind of ambivalent political good, alternately cited and challenged, particularly by self-proclaimed climate change skeptics and deniers. Many deniers interpret the claim that there is a scientific consensus on the subject of anthropogenic climate change as either a direct attack on free speech, or even as evidence of conspiracy. When presented with claims of consensus, or with the idea that anthropogenic climate change models are scientifically certain, those sympathetic to the skeptical or denialist argument often invoke a common-sense notion of fair play, such as poster humpfree who asks, "If the film is so "loopy" and notoriously inaccurate, why not air it? Anyone lending it an ounce of critical thought should be able to see through the lies. Right?" Grandia's response, and poster ManUTd1989's retort are also representative of the rhetoric structure of this debate. I hope to (soon) have a lot more to say about this rhetorical structure in an upcoming post.

RealClimate: An open letter to Steve Levitt

RealClimate: An open letter to Steve Levitt

The folks from RealClimate respond to Levitt and Dubner's bestselling SuperFreakonomics. Do Levitt and Dubner echo in SuperFreakonomics the kinds of criticisms leveled at climate scientists, Al Gore and the broader environmental movement by the climate change skeptic/denier community? More on this issue in an up-and-coming first in-depth posting.

The Objectives of Rhetoric on the Borderlands of Science

Let me start out by introducing myself. My name is Tom Nevins, and I am a cultural anthropologist. I've started this blog with the intent of exploring the role of Science and the sciences in political debate. The blog is an outgrowth of my research on the language of climate change skepticism. I am principally concerned with the rhetoric of climate skepticism and the claims made by skeptics that their views (and not those "alarmists") are supported by science and scientific methodology. But since "Science" plays a role in many different public policy and political debates, I will be interested in exploring any issue where there are a multitude of skeptics of and claimants to scientific knowledge and authority.

I'll be discussing the various influences on my work in later postings. For now I would like to single out Bruno Latour's Politics of Nature as starting point for thinking about Science and politics. Of great interest to me is the contrast Latour draws between the politics that emerges in relation to "Science" and "Nature," and what he is proposing as recomposed politics within a "Political Ecology." I don't agree with Latour on some issues, but I find his work nevertheless compelling as I try to understand the complex uses made of "Science" in contemporary political debates.