Hello GEPers, As someone who has studied and written about climate skepticism, there are many strands in this discussion I would like to pick up on.
I will start with whether or not skepticism is "almost exclusively a global North position." As I wrote in the 2005 “Democracy, Technocracy and US Climate Politics” article Peter Jacques cited, no other countries dispose of a similarly large body of contrarians. However, I think it is important to stress: (1) We don’t know enough about most national contexts. This is partly because there are surprisingly few studies focused on this topic, especially outside of US and Europe. STS research is overwhelmingly focused on the most industrialized countries. Anthropology and sociology, as disciplines, have engaged with climate change timidly, and have a lot of work to do yet. Knowledge politics – the upstream production of scientific knowledge and the downstream uses of it – are understudied in this area, despite calls for such studies in both fields. This is a longer discussion that I won’t go into here. Suffice it to say that our disciplinary traditions and the institutional structures in which they flourish (universities) are part of the problem. (2) There may be more skepticism than we know of outside of the “global North.” It is important to recognize that science tends to be scrutinized the more economic interests are at stake. As long as countries do not have binding commitments under the Kyoto Protocol nor other types of commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, skeptical views that *may* exist inside such countries – or outside, for that matter – are less likely to be expressed and/or receive a lot of attention domestically. Some non-Annex 1 countries in the UNFCCC process may even have economic interests in belief in climate change, at least as long as they are not being pressured to reduce their own emissions and might receive funding and other benefits through the Clean Development Mechanisms and other similar schemes that have emerged out of efforts to reduce global emissions. Like Dunlap, Jacques, and others, I have analyzed the structural reasons for climate skepticism. I will include references to some of this work below. As an anthropologist, I have focused relatively more on the role of culture and value-related differences in structuring the differences among scientists involved in US climate- and climate science politics. Some of this work may interest those of you who have expressed interest in those dimensions on this discussion list and/or who teach about the subject. For instance, in the 2008 article titled “Experiences of Modernity in the Greenhouse”, I analyze a subgroup of US contrarian physicists supporting the Conservative backlash against global warming, concluding that their engagements are best understood through a variety of non-determining but contributing factors that reflect tensions related to transformations in US science and society since the Second World War. The March 29 New York Times article on Dyson served to support key elements of this analysis. So did the Brazilian Brazilian incident that Dale Jamieson referred to in his contribution to this discussion today, an incident which was provoked by a contrarian publication in the prominent Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo. The incident revealed the global dissemination and use of US climate contrarianism and their proponents; as his scientific authority, the Brazilian invoked US contrarians Fred Seitz and Bill Nierenberg – two of the physicists I analyze in the 2008 article. It also revealed the transnational dimension of skepticism; the person who wrote the contrarian piece in the Folha de Sao Paulo shared not only the rhetoric and values of US skeptics, but also an important part of the traits that I argue – in conjunction with other factors - explain the US physicists’ engagements. For the record, the prestige of the person who wrote the contrarian piece in the Folha de Sao Paulo is debatable. He is a former rector of the esteemed University of Brasilia. However, he is not a climate expert and he gained his rector position due to his alignment with the military dictatorship, which he actively served in that position, according to accounts I have gathered. For those reasons and others, he is also not a credible person in many circles. His arguments reflect deep ignorance about central things, including what the IPCC really does, and he explicitly associates environmentalism with Nazism. When I published a response to his piece in the same newspaper a few months back, his response was a rabid personal attack in which he called me a Nazist. His background, style and other features thus limit both his impact and his prestige. Still, writing in such a prominent newspaper will have some effects, and Dale apparently saw evidence to that effect. It would be interesting to chart who picks up on his arguments and authority, and who does not. It will also be interesting to watch whether Brazilian skepticism – up to the present extremely limited in extent – will begin to grow. The past few years have seen a few skeptical voices appear, on a few occasions, but their influence and public display has been extremely limited thus far. However, it behooves us to study the particularities of different contexts – my bet is that the particularities make for important differences in the shape of climate politics in different countries. To end, I would like to second another strand of this conversation: the need to improve public understandings of both the strengths and limits of science (see my 2005 article for a longer discussion related to that). It may even be a good place to start the kind of “conditioning” that helps reduce the common point-counter-point kind of non-productive discussion Jacques mentions. It might also be a less immediately ideological starting point through which to impress publics about the importance of democratic politics, debate, and finding wise ways of addressing the risks despite uncertainties in our present knowledge. Myanna Myanna Lahsen, Associate Researcher Center for Earth System Science, The National Institute for Space Research (INPE), Av. dos Astronautas, 1.758 - Jd. Granja São José dos Campos, SP 12227-010 Brazil Telephone: Direct tel. number: +55 12 3945-7133; Secretary +55 12 3945 7126 / 3945-7127 Fax: +55 12 3945-7126 Lahsen, Myanna. “Experiences of Modernity in the Greenhouse: A Cultural Analysis of a Physicist ‘Trio’ Supporting the Conservative Backlash Against Global Warming.” Global Environmental Change 18(1), 2008, pp. 205-219. Lahsen, Myanna. “Technocracy, Democracy and U.S. Climate Science Politics: The Need for Demarcations.” Science, Technology, and Human Values, 30(1), 137-169, 2005. Lahsen, Myanna. “Seductive Simulations: Uncertainty Distribution Around Climate Models.” Social Studies of Science 2005 35, 895-922. Lahsen, Myanna. “Transnational Locals: Brazilian Scientists in the Climate Regime.” Book chapter in Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Politics, edited by Sheila Jasanoff and Marybeth Long-Martello (MIT Press, 2004). Lahsen, Myanna. “The Detection and Attribution of Conspiracies: The Controversy Over Chapter 8” in George E. Marcus (ed.), Paranoia Within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation, U. of Chicago Press, 1999. Available at: http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-1893-1999.21.pdf --
