UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY
Contested Science in the Global Warming Controversy
by
Michael C. Zajko
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DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY
CALGARY, ALBERTA
JUNE, 2010
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ABSTRACT
The global warming controversy involves public disagreements over various scientific, political, and moral issues, with significant implications for humanity.
Participants in the controversy employ opposing scientific claims concerning the climate, as well as competing definitions of science, and different rhetorical attempts to redraw or close off the boundaries of legitimate debate. Recent developments have also revealed the power of a new online medium in the controversy that has enabled “climate skeptics” to challenge traditional scientific boundaries, and provided the means for all sides to engage with a broader public on the topic. The global warming controversy demonstrates the range of possibilities in the establishment of global warming expertise, as has been constructed by a number of prominent public actors without traditional scientific credentials. However, the discourse of the debate continues to be dominated by problematic conceptions of scientific truth and objectivity, which this work ultimately cautions against.
i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is greatly indebted to the support and confidence of my supervisor,
Augustine Brannigan. I also appreciate the cooperation and assistance of all those who helped me find my feet in this topic, including interview participants, online contacts, and
Liza McCoy. I also appreciate the input of my committee, including Cooper H. Langford and the keen eye of Erin Gibbs Van Brunschot.
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract………………………………………………………………………... i
Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………. ii
Table of Contents……………………………………………………………… iii
List of Figures…………………………………………………………………. vii
INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………. 1
Plan of the Proceeding Chapters……………………………………… 5
CHAPTER ONE: A CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACH TO THE STUDY
OF SCIENTIFIC CONTROVERSY………………………………………… 9
An Orthodox View of the Global Warming Controversy……………. 9
The Constructivist Approach to Scientific Fact……………………… 13
Bringing Nature into Sociology……………………………………… 20
Truth, Falsity, and Symmetry………………………………………… 27
Defining Science……………………………………………………… 29
Rhetoric, Discourse, and Reflexivity…………………………………. 31
A Theoretical Summary………………………………………………. 34
Notes…………………………………………………………………... 36
CHAPTER TWO: CONTEXT OF THE GLOBAL WARMING
iii
CONTROVERSY…………………………………………………………….. 37
The Conjunction of Global Warming Science and Politics...... 37
Resistance and Counter-Movements in the United States and Canada.. 42
The Friends of Science...... 44
Countering the Counter-Movement...... 49
Recent Developments in the Global Warming Debate...... 50
The Context of Recent Global Temperatures...... 52
Notes...... 56
CHAPTER THREE: CONTESTED CREDIBILITY AND THE
PERFORMANCE OF EXPERTISE IN THE GLOBAL WARMING
CONTROVERSY...... 58
Scientific Expertise in Environmental Controversies...... 59
Dr. Tim Ball – Climatologist...... 63
The Public Performance of Climate Expertise...... 71
Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth and the Nature of David Suzuki...... 79
Christopher Monckton – the “Anti-Gore”...... 86
Reflections on the Public Performance of Expertise...... 93
Notes...... 96
iv
CHAPTER FOUR: THE RHETORIC OF CLOSURE...... 98
The IPCC as a Mechanism of Closure in the Global Warming
Controversy...... 100
Climate Skeptics and the Rhetoric of Closure...... 105
Challenging the Climate Consensus...... 106
Uncertainty in Science-for-Policy...... 111
Closure Despite Uncertainty...... 113
The Rhetoric of Closure via Demarcation...... 119
Implications of the Rhetoric of Closure...... 128
Notes...... 131
CHAPTER FIVE: THE INTERNET, CLIMATEGATE, AND SHIFTING
BOUNDARIES IN CLIMATE SCIENCE...... 133
Scientific Knowledge and the Internet...... 135
The Global Warming Controversy on the Internet...... 138
Peer-Review as a Contested Boundary in the Global Warming
Controversy...... 140
The Publication of Soon & Baliunas 2003...... 144
Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit...... 149
Information Wars in the Global Warming Controversy After 2005...... 155
The Internet as an Agent of Change in Climate Science...... 163
The Changing Face of the Climate Skeptic Counter-Movement...... 166
v
Conclusions Concerning Climategate and its Repercussions...... 168
Notes...... 170
EPILOGUE...... 171
Facts and Values in the Global Warming Controversy...... 174
What Role for Sociology?...... 178
REFERENCES...... 181
APPENDIX: NOTES REGARDING METHODS...... 236
vi
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: A rough model showing the connections through which scientific climate knowledge is transformed and aggregated...... 35
Figure 2: The “hockey-stick” graph as featured in the SPM of the IPCC’s
TAR in 2001...... 146
Figure 3: Preliminary network analysis of the global warming debate conducted by Profero for Oxfam...... 156
Figure 4: My own attempt at network mapping, which traces connections between many of the actors mentioned in this study...... 157
Figure 5: A chronology of included events...... 163
vii
1 INTRODUCTION
There are few social and environmental problems that have been claimed to present a threat as severe as global warming’s potentially catastrophic consequences for our species and the planet. Such claims have been taken up, rhetorically at least, by the leaders of many of the world’s nations, and considerable efforts have been made in the past two decades to forge policy solutions to address man-made, or anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
However, despite the appearance of widespread political and scientific agreement on the existence of the problem, the scientific, political and moral claims associated with global warming are also part of an ongoing public controversy with major implications. The global warming controversy, as I will show, includes debates not only concerning the reality of AGW and the possible measures to be taken to address it, but also competing definitions of science, questions concerning the relationship between science and politics, and struggles over the participation of non-scientists in the work of climate science. The global warming controversy thus not only concerns the future shape of our planet and society, but also includes questions and concerns over the very makeup of science, particularly as it becomes embroiled in political and moral concerns.
It is these questions which are central to my analysis, which does not attempt to determine the reality of AGW, and does not assume it. Rather, I am interested in how science is utilized by participants in the global warming controversy, the majority of whom
(in the public domain of the controversy) are non-scientists. Science can be rhetorically deployed as a resource or weapon in such controversies, often masking divergent values
2 and interests with the language of objectivity (Sarewitz 2004). However, science is also more than a just a rhetorical resource, though the heated nature of the global warming controversy poses a challenge for disentangling science from the context of the debate. I will not attempt to differentiate a “pure science” from that utilized in the context of the public and political controversy, and my focus will remain largely on the public arena instead of the laboratory. I will, however, show some of the links and feedbacks that have developed considerably in recent years between the public domain of the controversy and the traditional institutions of climate science and the sources of their scientific knowledge.
The view of science presented in this work is as, “neither a simple reflection of the truth about nature nor an epiphenomenon of social and political interests” (Jasanoff 2004a: 3), and while my interests are largely concerned with the social uses of science, I will also address the role of nature. What follows is a constructivist analysis of scientific knowledge, wherein facts are not merely discovered, but actively constructed in a specific context
(though it may be more useful to think of them as co-constructions, involving both nature and society). I argue that the public domain of the global warming controversy, despite its underlying political disagreements, can and should be seen as connected to the more primary stages of scientific knowledge production which have received the bulk of attention from the sociology of science. Such scientific knowledge is transformed and re- arranged into new forms as it enters into various public arenas, but despite the flexibility with which this process can be accomplished (often by non-scientists), connections remain between the public understanding of science and the constructions of the laboratory.
However, few public experts on the topic of global warming possess traditional
3 scientific credentials, which do not appear necessary to achieve credibility. What is crucial for the success of public speakers such as Al Gore or Christopher Monckton is the performance of expertise, which includes both a credible impression of scientific competence, as well as the negotiation of trust with one’s audience. Some climate bloggers have also amassed large online audiences by engaging with and critiquing climate science, and their work has had dramatic consequences for climate scientists and their institutions, despite (and partly because of) efforts to prevent such “amateurs” from accessing scientific data. Much of the information related to these conflicts over the borders of climate science has come to light through a recent scandal which has become known as “Climategate” (a term I will adopt for the sake of simplicity). The revelations and accusations related to
Climategate have been followed by other criticisms of individuals, institutions and texts advocating the reality of AGW. This recent wave of “climate skepticism” has frustrated longstanding efforts to effect closure in the public debate over global warming by establishing AGW as a solid fact which must be urgently addressed. Such efforts to establish closure have focused on the construction of a consensus of scientific opinion, as represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as other means of demarcating a legitimate science that excludes those who disagree with the facticity of AGW. However, climate skeptics have their own means of rhetorically demarcating science and claiming the scientific high ground of objectivity, and both sides of the debate have been active in undermining the credibility of their opponents.
Ultimately, these public disagreements over what legitimate science is and is not also reflect longstanding ambiguities and contradictions in the nature of science itself –
4 including its often tenuous separation from politics.
This study takes an exploratory approach drawing on key texts involved in the controversy as well as a small number of key informants. The texts which I have selected are largely those central to the public controversy, including publications of the IPCC and climate scientists, the Climategate emails, mainstream media accounts, and the public presentations of highly visible experts (which in the era of YouTube, have the potential to become viral videos). On the side of those advocating the reality and threat of AGW, key actors and texts have been somewhat easier to identify, with the IPCC and Al Gore occupying a central role. Climate skeptics, on the other hand, constitute what can be characterized as a more diffuse (albeit networked) counter-movement, with many of their arguments being counter-claims directed at key AGW texts such as the “hockey-stick” temperature graph and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. In considering the claims of climate skeptics, I have focused on the Calgary-based group, the Friends of Science (FoS), who occupy an important role as the most visible climate skeptic group in Canada, but are also representative of a broader trend in the climate skeptic counter-movement. Recent years have seen a rise in a form of grassroots participation by those identified as climate skeptics, who have become connected to pre-existing campaigns to oppose the regulation of greenhouse gases, as spearheaded by conservative think tanks and their supporters.
Before proceeding however, I must qualify the use of some of the conceptual groupings found throughout this work, which should not be mistaken as possessing undue coherence or solidarity. The broadest of these is “the public”, which scholars have long recognized constitutes not a homogenous mass, but rather a great variety of multiple and
5 overlapping publics (Einsiedel 2000; Gregory & Miller 1998: 95-99). However, in this work I will typically refer to the public as it exists in the broadest sense, thus subsuming variation into a deceptively uniform category against which more specific domains (namely science) can be delineated. Much the same can be said about the two key opposing sides or
“camps” in the controversy – the climate skeptics, who question the reality of AGW or the scientific evidence associated with it, and AGW advocates, who argue for the reality of
AGW as a problem. In reality, despite the considerable polarization which has occurred in the debate, there is considerable variation in the positions of those found on both sides, and many individuals are difficult to classify into either camp. My delineation of the controversy in this manner is thus certainly a simplification, although many of its participants can be readily grouped according to either their fundamental acceptance or rejection of the reality of the AGW hypothesis (that the planet is experiencing significant warming due to human influence).
Plan of the Proceeding Chapters
In the first chapter I will directly address the question of the reality of global warming, first by considering some common-sense, or orthodox perspectives on the controversy, before discussing the theoretical foundations of a constructivist account. The question of what role we should accord nature in sociological analysis will be key, especially when considering environmental problems and the knowledge of the natural sciences. I will review a number of works and perspectives drawn from what might be broadly characterized as “science studies”, that can provide us with a way of approaching
6 the global warming controversy without ultimately adjudicating on the question of the reality of AGW.
In Chapter Two I will provide a contextual account of the global warming controversy, with a focus on actors that will recurrently appear in the subsequent analysis, including the FoS and IPCC. I will also briefly revisit the question of the reality of AGW in the light of the background provided concerning the nature of our scientific knowledge of the global climate.
In Chapter Three, I will take up the performance of expertise as my main topic of interest. Experts continue to be key voices in the global warming controversy, but their conduct raises interesting questions concerning how scientific expertise is constructed around such a politically and morally charged issue. I will argue that there is a neglected performative aspect in the making of a credible expert, particularly in the public arenas of the debate. The role of trust is key, and while credentials are an important asset for those seeking to establish their expertise, I will argue they are not the most important factor, as evidenced by several experts who have dominated much of the controversy without pretending to be climate scientists. Instead, they have established the public’s (or their public’s) trust in other ways – by performing in a credible manner. This chapter will also help to introduce some of the experts who will reappear in the subsequent chapters.
In Chapter Four I will examine what I call “the rhetoric of closure” in the global warming debate. The rhetorical techniques discussed therein all serve to argue for the controversy’s closure – taking as their most exemplary form the statement “the science is settled”. However there are numerous ways in which both sides have attempted to
7 essentially argue the debate closed over the years, including statements of consensus, petitions, and “conclusive” studies. Such rhetoric has typically been opposed by contradictory claims, and closure in the public arena no longer appears to be in reach, but these argumentative techniques continue to be employed by opposing sides, often in similar ways. One key form that the rhetoric of closure takes is by way of a demarcation that places one’s opponents outside of the boundaries of where legitimate debate is possible – typically by the attribution of interests or other violations of scientific norms.
Chapter Five will continue to look at boundary-work and take up the increasingly problematic demarcation of science in the global warming controversy, particularly considering the implications of the recent scandals involving climate science. With the institutions of climate science currently in some disarray and the public’s trust in them damaged, the relationship between climate science and the rest of society is in a state of significant change. Despite the attempts of some climate scientists to ignore these developments, the growing role of online participants in the controversy has had very serious implications. The internet has been an important agent of change that has expanded public access to climate science and greatly broadened the possibilities of scientific communication.
Finally, I argue that a large part of what has made episodes like Climategate so aberrant is the continuation of a naïve and mythologized ideal of climate science – one that can somehow achieve objectivity, an unrealistic degree of certainty, and can be demarcated apart from politics and personal interest. These notions, along with a simplified conception of scientific truth, have contributed to unrealistic expectations of what science can achieve,
8 and polarized the debate into a dichotomy of “truth” versus “lies”. Instead, climate science has long experienced only provisional autonomy from its political contexts and interests, and its facts (which can be highly uncertain) can be constructed in various forms for various ends. Finally, in should be acknowledged that the “underdetermination” of climate knowledge need not serve as a barrier for action (Stehr 1992), and climate science will continue to serve an important role in the policy discussions currently underway as efforts to address climate change. A more realistic position (albeit, as I will argue, a less “realist” one) might be one that better comes to terms with the open-endedness of climate science, especially as it is embedded within a highly-charged and highly-public controversy.
9 CHAPTER ONE
A CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF SCIENTIFIC
CONTROVERSY
An Orthodox View of the Global Warming Controversy
Before providing an account of the global warming controversy that is informed by the interpretive lens of constructivist science studies, it is helpful to sketch a description grounded in what might be called an orthodox view of science. This allows us to consider the controversy in a familiar and conventional manner, and will highlight the differences and advantages of adopting a constructivist outlook on the topic.
In what I consider an orthodox view of science, I am referring to a perspective that could be characterized as realist (Hacking 1983) or rationalist (Nelson 1994), in the sense that it posits the existence of real objects and entities, states that theories are true or false regardless of what we know of them, and assumes that science has developed universal standards for evaluating the truth or objectivity of evidence. Such a view is also progressive
(Niiniluoto 1980) in the sense that it sees science as progressively advancing towards a true knowledge of reality, so that through the work of science we can say that we know more or know more accurately than we did before. Such a view does not hold that progress has to be unidirectional, or that scientists cannot disagree on matters of fact, but does suggest that such disagreement will eventually be resolved through additional scientific information.
The orthodox view then, might accept the claims of the existence of a scientific
10 consensus concerning the reality of anthropogenic global warming (Oreskes 2004). If such a consensus does indeed exist then climate skeptics such as the FoS would be understood as denying an accepted scientific fact, and we might include them among the groups described by Ehrlich and Ehrlich in Betrayal of Science and Reason (1996: 12), who twist the findings of empirical climate science in order to, “bolster a predetermined worldview and to support a political agenda”. The FoS’s denial of the reality of global warming would then be explained as a distorted science or pseudo-science at the service of political opposition to environmental regulation. We might accord the IPCC and other representatives of the consensus the status of scientific truth, while the FoS could be dismissed as dangerous propagators of falsity, pseudo-science, or political ideology.
Alternately, the orthodox view might remain skeptical of the consensus claim and view the science of global warming as situated in a state of continuing controversy.
According to this view, the FoS would be seen as engaged in an ongoing debate about the existence of anthropogenic global warming, which has not yet been conclusively settled.
One such view is represented by Essex and McKitrick in Taken by Storm (2002), where they argue that the uncertainties inherent in current climate science are too great to justify either according global warming the status of reality, or in proceeding with current trends in government policy towards the regulation of greenhouse gases. Regardless of the ambiguity of the scientific evidence, the orthodox view would maintain that there either exists or does not exist the phenomenon of anthropogenic global warming, and that the truth will be revealed when sufficient scientific information becomes available. In this case, we must still eventually accord truth and falsity to the positions of the FoS and Al Gore, but it might
11 be argued that the available science is either insufficient to currently make such judgment or that the current state of climate science only warrants a probabilistic assessment (such as that offered by the IPCC).
I have offered these speculative orthodox interpretations of the global warming controversy in order to contrast them with the “science studies” view on which this analysis is based. Such a view is relativistic towards scientific facts and refrains from assigning truth or falsity to the claims of the global warming controversy. Yet this form of analysis also begs the question: “Is global warming real or isn’t it?” – the answer to which, it seems, must have some relevance to our understanding of the controversy. Even if the answer is more complex than an unqualified yes or no, should we not attempt an assessment or evaluation of the evidence provided by climate science in order to provide some sort of objective reference to the claims made by the FoS and others in the global warming controversy? I will address these questions again in the pages to follow, but must remark upon them here in order to justify the proceeding analysis.
Surely, there is value in such a realist evaluation of global warming. Particularly for the purposes of informing decisions or determining public policy, some sort of such an evaluation seems indispensible. As an academic, I might follow Anthony Giddens (2009) and accept the reality of AGW in order to propose solutions. Additionally I might heed the alarm of Constance Lever-Tracy (2008), who calls on sociologists to be wary of the corporate interests that motivate the denial of global warming, and argues that a constructivist approach toward nature marginalizes the voices of our discipline. Instead, she encourages sociologists to stop wasting time, and help address the very real problems
12 highlighted by the natural sciences.
I respect the intention to address social problems from a realist perspective.
However there are several reasons why I have chosen another route. In this regard, I am in part persuaded by Nelson (1994), who argues that a constructivist analysis has several advantages over a realist or “rationalist” approach, while refusing to declare that this makes it a superior theory. The choice between the two, according to Nelson, is a philosophical one, since neither can demonstrate empirical superiority in accounting for scientific facts.
While I am willing to agree that neither the realist nor constructivist approach can empirically discredit the other, I have less interest in relegating my choice of theory to a question of philosophy. I would characterize the course used in this analysis as informed by practical considerations – based on what I argue is a superior approach for the study of the nature of scientific controversy. Indeed, this might be construed as an argument for the empirical superiority of the constructivist approach, but I would qualify my decision as based on an appropriate response to the specific research question that is of interest here – namely, how is this particular scientific controversy carried out? In order to formulate an answer, it is unnecessary to begin with the determination of whether AGW is real or not.
Rather, it is far more appropriate to ask how the fact of global warming is made real, or how it can be made unreal. While some may feel that such a constructivist or relativistic approach toward scientific fact renders the objective truth of global warming dangerously irrelevant, I aim to show why this need not be the case, and why we can learn more about this crucial controversy by avoiding the ever-present reference to an objective truth. In order to clarify the advantages of this approach, it is first necessary to trace its history in the
13 discipline of sociology, which will also highlight some of the limitations of the orthodox view of science.
The Constructivist Approach to Scientific Fact
The most appropriate starting point for reviewing the development of more recent approaches in science studies is the work of Karl Mannheim (1936), who first popularized the notion of a sociology of knowledge. While Mannheim argued that one’s social location affects one’s knowledge (including that of the social scientist) he was careful to avoid being taken for a relativist. “Relationism” was the term he used to differentiate his approach, which saw ideas as situated or determined by certain historical and social influences, but did not conclude that such ideas were arbitrary or devoid of criteria for truth or falsity. Rather, Mannheim said that such criteria were dependent on the relationship of ideas to their social situation. He suggested that some ideas, such as those of “exact” sciences like mathematics, might be off-limits for his sort of sociological analysis; although this was not a claim that mathematics or other “hard” facts approached an absolute truth, but merely that sociology could not aspire to their criteria of stringent objectivity (Lynch
1993: 45-48). In an effort to defend his project against the inevitable critique that it generated a merely relative claim to truth, Mannheim redefined objectivity as a matter of recognizing the appropriateness of ideas within a certain perspective and the ability to alternate between such perspectives. The sociologist who practices such neutrality and self- reflection (what might subsequently be labeled “reflexivity”) could, without aspiring to the level of absolute truth, critique such absolutist notions as rationalism or the “nature of
14 things”, and demonstrate the historical and social processes which give rise to and shape knowledge.
Science first became a devoted focus of sociological analysis through the work
Robert K. Merton, whose approach largely defined and cohered the field of the sociology of science in the late 1950s. Among his many contributions (1973), Merton took an interest in systems of evaluation and reward in the institution of science, including the priority disputes which surround multiple discoveries – when more than one scientist lays an independent claim to a discovery. While such work can hardly be called constructivist
(Merton is typically identified as a functionalist), it does highlight the value that controversies can serve for sociologists interested in the process through which facts become established, even if these facts were limited to the priority claims of scientists.
Merton would later be criticized for his failure to consider the factual content of science as a topic of sociological analysis, and his legacy to the sociology of science would be dominated by what he called the “normative structure of science” (ibid.: 267). This view,
“inferred” from accounts given by scientists of their own work and the work of others, identified several institutionally legitimated norms which serve as “prescriptions, proscriptions, preferences, and permissions” (ibid.: 269) and guide the scientist’s behavior.
These include a universal criteria for the judgment of truth-claims irrespective of the scientist’s personal attributes, and a skepticism of ideas that have not passed such a test.
Following criticisms of Merton’s norms on the basis that such a list does not adequately describe or normatively constrain how scientists behave in practice, Michael Mulkay
(1976) proposed that it is better seen as a “vocabulary of justification” that can be drawn
15 upon in describing, evaluating, and validating scientific work. This view of Merton’s norms as a rhetorical tool rather than an institutionalized framework is one which continues to be valuable.
More than any of the works mentioned thus far, Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions (1962) has had an enormous influence on our understanding of science. Variously credited as a historian, philosopher, and sociologist of science, Kuhn’s book had a major effect on all of these fields. As one of its achievements, it did a great deal of damage to the notion that science could be considered a linear, progressive accumulation of knowledge. While in the postscript to the second edition (1970: 206) Kuhn does state his belief in scientific progress, he conceives of it as an increase in the ability of science to solve problems or puzzles and not as a closer approximation to nature or what “really is”.
In Kuhn’s view, evaluating an ontology in reference to reality is simply impossible, since science can only know reality through theory. His evidence is drawn in large part from the history of astronomy, physics, and chemistry, all of which are marked by theoretical revolutions that have overturned the ways in which these sciences have understood nature and interacted with it. These dramatic upheavals are what Kuhn (1970: 175) calls
“paradigm shifts”, with paradigms representing a scientific community’s set of beliefs, values and techniques, as well as the key “puzzle-solutions” that are used as models for future puzzle solving. Since there can be no theory-independent way for science to engage with nature, theories and paradigms cannot achieve the sort of fixed objective certainty with which they are sometimes described. The facts never speak for themselves but must speak through the scientist and his or her theories, and even then can be interpreted differently by
16 other scientists. There is no inevitable truth that emerges from such disagreements of interpretation within science, and persuasive work is required in order to enlist the support of recalcitrant members of the scientific community for one’s findings.
I see little value in adopting Kuhn’s theory for my own analysis, and while global warming might be seen as a paradigm for climate science,1 to use the word would confuse more than it would enlighten. The theory of anthropogenic global warming is based upon a diverse, and constantly shifting accumulation of data from a collection of scientific fields including climatology, meteorology, oceanography, geophysics, and geology (see Fleming
1998; Weart 2008), which do not share a common paradigm. The understanding that a warming climate has resulted from an increase of anthropogenic CO2 (along with a host of other factors, the relevance of which is in greater dispute) has only relatively recently and gradually gained acceptance in the climate sciences. This might imply that climate research has now settled into a period of what Kuhn would call “normal science”, in which the dominant paradigm provides the direction and assumptions for further research, but such an approach is hardly useful for my analysis. The existence of controversy must still be accounted for, and to view climate skeptics as representing a competing paradigm that seeks to revolutionize the field of climate science2 would repeat Kuhn’s confusing use of the paradigm concept to cover an array of multiple meanings (as criticized by Masterman
1970), and also force us to confront the nebulous and debatable notion of the
“incommensurability” of Kuhn’s paradigms (see Sankey 1993). In short I feel that describing the science of global warming in terms of a dominant paradigm or competing paradigms carries with it too much of the undesirable theoretical baggage left by Kuhn, and
17 may be associated with the ambiguities of the concept’s continuing usage.
What is important about The Structure of Scientific Revolutions for my own analysis is the transformation it engendered in the sociology of science, the inspiration it provided for the study of the rhetoric of science, and the “crisis of rationality” it unintentionally caused among philosophers of science (Hacking 1983). Kuhn alone cannot be credited for redirecting the sociologists of science who began to explore new terrain in the 1970s,3 but his work was certainly a key part of the intellectual background which allowed a new wave of sociologists, largely from the UK, to challenge the dominance of the Mertonian approach. A key theme of this new approach was a critique of a sociology that concerns itself with the social factors that influence science. Such an approach was attacked on the basis of the distinction it suggests between the realm of the social, and some non-social scientific “core”. Such a distinction was an obstacle to any sociological analysis of the content of scientific knowledge, and the Mertonian approach largely concerned itself with the study of science as an institution, including its norms, rewards, and the relationships between scientists. However, Kuhn’s analysis showed the transient and historically contingent nature of scientific knowledge, and the new sociology of scientific knowledge
(SSK) of the 1970s was based upon the idea that “science [and scientific knowledge] is itself constitutively social” (Woolgar 1988b: 13).
Of course, this raises the question of just what is meant by the word “social,” which is rarely problematized within the literature in which it is invoked. Since SSK can broadly be generalized as constructivist in character, we might also ask what is meant when it is claimed that science is socially constructed. Ian Hacking’s (1999: 7) critique of social
18 construction argues that the claim that “X” is socially constructed can be reformulated simply to claim that “X” is not determined by its nature, but has been “brought into existence or shaped by social events, forces, history, all or which could well have been different”. The emphasis created by the word “social” only becomes useful when we use it to refer to objects or facts that are typically thought to exist independent of society (ibid.:
39-40), and thus such talk has often been used as a radical critique of the idea of immutable scientific facts, or the view that concepts refer to objective reality in a straightforward fashion. Indeed, such a critique has been interpreted as so threatening to the enterprise of natural science that it eventually sparked a complex controversy that has been dubbed the
“science wars” (Ashman and Baringer 2001). If all scientific knowledge can be subjected to sociological explanation (Bloor 1976), where does that leave the explanations of natural scientists? Such sociological explanations are inherently at odds with orthodox scientific accounts of discovery, rationality, and the scientific method.
Hacking’s critique of the constructivist trend in SSK and science studies certainly applies in a broad sense, as it is patently obvious that much of the work in the field strives to unsettle the orthodox view of science as a rational reflection of an objective reality.4
However the constructivist view of science is defined not only by its critique of orthodox notions, but by the alternative it provides to the orthodox view – namely by demonstrating the process through which scientific facts are constructed. Despite the strong reactions such accounts have received from some natural scientists, such a view does not necessarily hinder us from accepting the reality of the world; it only precludes some of the most simplified accounts of what scientists do. As demonstrated in Bruno Latour and Steve
19 Woolgar’s (1979) Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, the first ethnographic work carried out in a laboratory setting,5 scientific facts are not simply descriptions of nature, arrived at by following the rules of logic or the scientific method.
Rather, these in-depth studies of laboratory work show the process by which data is produced, gathered, and the numerous choices and interpretations scientists must make along the way. As some of the results of laboratory work become solidified into facts towards the end of this process, persuasive work is required to convince others of the validity of scientific claims. Thus it is no surprise that scientists often disagree on matters of fact, or might have different ideas on how experiments should be conducted and how the results might be interpreted. This by no means suggests that scientific facts are arbitrary, but that they are the result of a meticulous but contingent process of manufacture, the history of which is typically forgotten once facts become established and accounts of their discovery are written (Latour & Woolgar 1979; Latour 1987).
While Karin Knorr-Cetina (2005: 185-186) has more recently argued that the indeterminacy and contingency inherent in the construction of a scientific fact is far from irrational, and is even a necessary prerequisite for the progressive self-organization that allows science to deal with new problems, it is easy to see the difficulties posed by following the constructive path to its very limits. Indeed, nature is “conspicuous by its absence” (Murphy 1997: 23) in many constructivist accounts of science, all too often leaving us with a one-sided conception of social construction to replace the orthodox one- sided view of scientific realism (ibid.: 21). Is it appropriate to leave nature out of the question of how science establishes facts, or to accord it some minor unspecified role in the
20 human contingencies that channel the social activity known as science? Despite the complexities, variability, and details revealed by a constructivist sociology of science, how can we address the lingering role of nature? Surely in the case of global warming, if the construction of the facts used to support such a theory did not occur in an arbitrary fashion, we must accord nature some role in the process. Admittedly all knowledge, including the hard mathematics excluded by Mannheim can be reformulated as a social product (see
Bloor 1976), but an approach that denies nature or explains it away as social construction may not be the most fruitful one for understanding climate science, particularly when dealing with a question that is as (apparently) simple as whether our planet is warming or not. Before moving on to analyze the global warming controversy, it is important to revisit the question of nature’s role in sociology, and examine some of the ways this long-standing difficulty might be resolved.
Bringing Nature into Sociology
At this stage it is helpful to review in more detail the critique of constructivism offered by Raymond Murphy (1994; 1997; 2004; 2009), which in many ways parallels other arguments made in the debate between realism and constructivism in the field of environmental sociology.6 Murphy acknowledges the advantages that a constructivist view has offered over previous understandings of science, but argues that it has also led sociology down a dangerous road – one where nature becomes irrelevant or is somehow explained away by the social. This was due to the specialization of sociology to the social realm, and its tendency to expand that realm to include all of reality as somehow social.
21 Thus while the Mertonian approach has been criticized for restricting sociology to the analysis of social influences on some kind of non-social scientific core, such as when social forces give rise to false or failed science (Wallis 1979), SSK claimed to encompass all of science under the expanded category of the social. This tendency of sociology to limit itself to the social sphere, thus treating nature as if it was part of that realm or simply did not exist, combined with a fear of natural explanations of the social (such as sociobiology), has pushed sociology into a dangerously irrelevant position for addressing crucial environmental problems (Murphy 1997: 10-15). Constructivist studies naturally favor groups that deny the existence of environmental problems since they “only address how accounts of issues are socially constructed and fail to examine the substance of these issues that would put such groups at a disadvantage, namely, the actual existence or non-existence of these phenomena” (ibid.: 52).7
Yet how do we determine the existence or non-existence of phenomena without discarding the lessons of post-Kuhnian sociology and philosophy of science? Murphy’s solution is beset with ontological ambiguity, even as he accuses constructivists of waffling between the poles of realism and relativism for the sake of convenience (1997: 31-34). For
Murphy, the relationship between nature and society is that of a dialectic (2004) or a
“dance” (2009), as “reality is both a social construction and a construction of nature”
(2004: 19), with society and nature continually influencing and responding to each other
(2009). Nature constrains and impacts society in very real ways, while simultaneously being socially constructed. As for science, it is “a social construction the specificity of which is the discovery of factual phenomena and explanatory principles about nature.
22 Discoveries are social constructions, but they are factual findings of nature’s processes nevertheless” (Murphy 2004: 35). How is a sociologist dealing with scientific controversy to juggle these assertions, and determine which scientific claims are factual? Murphy suggests a good first step is to examine the sources of research funding to see if business interests have, in a given case, led to “inordinate contamination of the autonomy of science” (ibid.: 164). Further steps in such an evaluation are not mentioned, but Murphy’s approach is further explicated in a later article (2004) which states that “where there is controversy about the future actions of nature’s actants [a term borrowed from Latour], the a priori suspension of natural scientific knowledge should be replaced by its critical assessment from a social scientific perspective before integration” (ibid.: 253). What exactly is involved in such a critical assessment is then left unexplored, although Murphy
(2009) has clearly accepted the weight of the “consensus science” of the IPCC over that of
“the contrarians”.
Murphy (2004; 2009) does provide a useful classification of the types of ways in which nature influences society, or what he calls “prompts”. These are: “1) everyday prompts from typical processes of nature; 2) extreme prompts from unusually severe disturbances of nature; and 3) scientific prompts from discoveries resulting from scientists’ imaginative social constructions, which make nature’s recondite dynamics visible”
(Murphy 2004: 254). The case which Murphy then considers is the 1998 ice-storm that disrupted much of north-eastern North America, and clearly falls into the second category of “extreme prompts,” even if vulnerability to the storm was socially constructed (Amish communities were largely unaffected due to their independence from the electrical grid).
23 Such a case differs qualitatively from global warming, which, tied as it might be to severe and sudden natural disasters, is a much more abstract and theoretical concept. Although we might think of it in terms of everyday experience, climate change is a long-term process of averages and probabilities that is hidden from our direct apprehension; with the possible exception of individuals living in areas such as the Arctic who are seen as especially vulnerable and currently experiencing significant effects (Martello 2008). Even if we treat a warming region or planet as accepted fact, it requires additional theoretical steps to link such warming to the causal processes of the AGW hypothesis. This is especially the case for extreme weather events (Murphy’s category 2) such as hurricanes and droughts which have, with much disagreement, often been described as somehow “caused” by global warming. However, such attributions can ultimately never be definitively proven without the ability to compare our world with one unaffected by global warming (Benestad 2006), a form of experimental control climate modelers have had very limited success in achieving.
Assertions of causality related to global warming must draw on indeterminate scientific prompts that can be an enduring source of controversy (Zabarenko 2007), and Murphy offers no way out of this impasse.
While the problem of accounting for nature has been especially acute for environmental sociology, it has not been uniformly neglected by the sociology of science, and considerable attention has been paid to the issue by several sociologists since the 1990s
(see Grundmann & Stehr 2000). Perhaps no one has devoted more of his work to it than
Bruno Latour (especially 1999; 2005), and while Murphy has attempted to define the relationship between nature and society, Latour has ultimately chosen to redefine the social
24 realm to encompass all of the non-human “actants” that were previously neglected by sociology. The route Latour has taken to arrive at this “actor-network-theory” (ANT) has taken him from the leading edge of “social constructivist” laboratory ethnographies (Latour
& Woolgar 1979), to rejecting the “social” modifier of constructivism as no longer having meaning (Latour & Woolgar 1986: 281). Finally he has chosen to redefine sociology as the
“tracing of associations” between “heterogeneous elements” (Latour 2005: 5) whether these be human or non-human.
Latour’s meditation on the “science wars” (1999), a debate in which he was sometimes cited as a spokesperson for the relativist camp, begins by considering the question, “do you believe in reality?” (ibid.: 1). While Latour replies “of course”, it soon becomes clear that he maintains some very unconventional notions concerning what is real.
Like Murphy, he is attempting to carve a path that avoids the polarity offered by the conventional conflict between realism and relativism/constructivism. Latour argues that while “no philosopher would seriously defend a correspondence theory of truth [wherein facts and concepts are said to correspond to real objects or phenomena], it is nevertheless absolutely impossible to be convinced by a purely constructivist argument” (ibid.: 125).
The forced choice between them is a result of the “modernist settlement” that divides the world into independent spheres such as “nature”, “mind”, and “society”, and much of
Latour’s later work is devoted to undoing this scheme or proposing alternatives to such a view. Reluctantly, he also occasionally considers the notion of a dialectic between nature and the practice of science, though in the end Latour wishes to escape from such a model just as he avoids choosing whether entities and facts are real or constructed (ibid.: 295).
25 While his detailed observations of scientists have revealed the meticulous and inherently social process through which facts are “manufactured”, the scientist is never in full command of the process (ibid.: 281). Just as facts concerning nature are brought into existence through the work of science, the facts that emerge are often surprising to the scientist and result from the association of a variety of elements or actants – substances, instruments, humans and countless others, all linked together through trails of associations.
Latour’s varied insights have provided much of the theoretical background for my own analysis, yet he does not provide an unequivocal answer to the question of how we might consider the climate as an actant in the global warming debate. Latour’s actants exist in a deployed reality, but they are not unified as “matters of fact” (Latour 2005: 115). This allows the inclusion of any type of actant, no matter how heterogeneous and without being limited by their supposed ontological status, thereby granting agency to all manner of entities from the molecules of CO2, to the climate scientist, to the Virgin Mary (if she were identified as a relevant entity by other actors). Latour’s ANT also avoids imputing an order to the social world from a “reasonable position”, claiming to “be able to find order much better after having let the actors deploy the full range of controversies in which they are immersed” (ibid.: 23). Thus we would be automatically precluded from constraining nature into a reasonable position external to the global warming controversy – allowing for the divergent views of climate skeptics and the IPCC to coexist. Finally, even if we were to use
ANT to account for the facticity of global warming we would find ourselves challenged by the disunity of that which is called the “climate”. To use Latour’s language, there are simply too many “mediators” between the climate and global warming theory that
26 transform, multiply, and modify the meanings of climate information all the way from data collected at weather stations, to the reports of the IPCC, into the popular press and beyond.
It is impossible to measure the climate directly, as our knowledge of it depends on inferences made by assembling a scattered set of diverse measurements that are plotted into the past and future. While it is less problematic to consider a specific event such as the
1988 US heat wave as an actant, the global climate is a concept requiring such a level of abstraction and indeterminacy that we can never know whether the heat wave of 1988 was actually caused by anthropogenic global warming. It is for these reasons that while Latour’s
ANT might provide us with some resources lacking in traditional sociology for addressing issues related to natural or non-human entities and phenomena, it complicates rather than simplifies the question, “is global warming real or isn’t it?”.8
Although I have spent some time considering Murphy’s and Latour’s arguments, it is important to note that these are not the only two sociologists recently concerned with taking nature seriously as a player in the social realm. ANT itself is a fairly diverse and undogmatic approach with a large number of contributions.9 Andrew Pickering (1995) has also offered a related approach for treating science as the “business of coping with material agency” (ibid.: 6-7). Pickering is obviously influenced by ANT, but he critiques what he sees as Latour’s granting of equivalent or interchangeable status to humans and non- humans (ibid.: 15). He provides a way of considering science as a practice or struggle in which “human and material agency are reciprocally and emergently intertwined” (ibid.:
21). This process is described from the human end as a dialectic of “resistance” and
“accommodation,” whereby scientists’ intentions receive resistance from the material
27 realm, which they then overcome through various types of revision or accommodation.
This dialectic of “reciprocal tuning” occurs both between scientists and the machines they use to interact with nature, as well as between scientists and their concepts, whereby theories both shape and are shaped by the practice of science.
ANT and Pickering’s related approach both offer useful conceptual resources for an analysis of the construction of global warming as it occurs at the stages of primary research conducted by climate scientists.10 However my primary concern is with the controversies which occur further along the trails of associations, whereby the study of thermometers, ice cores, tree rings, and solar variability is synthesized or aggregated by entities such as Al
Gore, the IPCC, and the FoS, and then employed as part of a political and public controversy. At this stage facts become especially contentious, and I find it necessary to draw on the long-standing principle of symmetry which forbids the presupposition of truth or falsity as an explanation of disagreement.
Truth, Falsity, and Symmetry
Most famously formulated as a core tenet of SSK’s “strong programme” (Bloor
1976), symmetry has been expressed in a variety of ways in the sociology of science, referring most fundamentally to the treatment of truth and falsity as accomplishments and not as causes of controversy. For the reasons I outlined by contrasting an orthodox view of scientific fact with the constructivist view, and by demonstrating the difficulty of presupposing the facticity and agency of the climate, it is easier to simply “bracket” questions about the reality of global warming when considering certain (namely discursive)
28 aspects of the climate change controversy.11 Although I am personally persuaded by John
Law’s (2004b) view of multiple, overlapping realities, I might just as easily hold the position of a hard realist as long as I suspend my personal presuppositions of an objective reality of global warming for the purposes of my analysis. This is for the reason that such a view would complicate and obscure more than it would explain, regardless of how counterintuitive my constructivist alternative seems.
If “the scientific method” actually existed as a recipe for carrying out research that arrived at true facts and accurate representations of reality, it would be relatively straightforward to note who had followed it, and thus explain their findings by reference to reality. Claims which disagreed with such facts could then be blamed on flawed methodology, personal bias, or “social factors” such as political influence. However despite vast quantities of literature on the topic in the philosophy of science, it has proven impossible to adequately formulate what the scientific method amounts to in a way that can be consistently and exactly applied;12 at best it is only possible to identify some “general principles” of scientific methodology (Gauch 2003). This should not be confused with the claim that there is no method to science (as indeed science is very methodical), but its methods are multiple and results are not easy to verify.
It is therefore more useful to think of truth and facts as outcomes or products rather than as explanations, especially in cases of controversy where competing facts are marshaled, often with similar appeals to the authority of science. Yet all of this raises the question of whether it is indeed appropriate to associate an actor such as the FoS with science in the first place. Can the insights of the sociology and philosophy of science apply
29 to a group that does not actually conduct scientific research? Are non-scientists engaged in the work of persuading politicians and the public still somehow making use of science, or are they doing something else? To justify my use of this approach, it is necessary to further reflect on the nature of science itself.
Defining Science
I have already noted the difficulties of defining the scientific method, all of which apply to the definition of science itself (which is sometimes described rather simply as the application of the scientific method). In fact, few works in the sociology of science bother to address this issue at all, and simply assume that what is referred to as science is quite apparent, as indeed it seems to be when discussing the goings-on of a research laboratory.
If science is simply the activity and knowledge generated by scientists then the picture still appears quite clear, but it becomes immediately more complicated when an individual’s scientific credibility is in question, or when non-scientists (such as Al Gore) act as immensely successful spokespersons for science. Furthermore, we are confronted with scientists carrying out seemingly scientific activities, but in the service of political, military, or commercial institutions (Shapin 2008). We are thus faced with the problem of drawing boundaries around some essential character called science that appears quite heterogeneous, encompassing a variety of methods, different appraisals of its “hardness” or “softness” depending on which branch we are discussing (for example the standing of the natural versus the social sciences), and the multitude of uses to which science is put. According to
Latour (1999), these difficulties arise from our modern understanding of science as a
30 separate sphere independent from politics or society – hence statements about science’s
“corruption” by politics, as if it could be somehow distinguished in a pure and unadulterated form. One of the greatest lessons of the sociology of science has been how quickly such boundaries crumble when science is observed in practice, and the impossibility of specifying what an asocial science might look like. We are therefore left with a concept that refers to something amorphous, disputed, diverse,13 and pervasive throughout society, yet it is also a concept that is immediately intelligible to anyone who shares a modern view of the world (even if they might have difficulty specifying its definition). Of course, science has no “essence” any more than an economy or a government does, but that does not deprive the concept of a very powerful meaning.
Science is generally used to refer to a distinct practice or form of knowledge which is considered a superior or more reliable way of achieving truth than non-science. For these reasons, and due to my interest in the discourse of a controversy, I find it best to define science primarily as a rhetorical construction.
The work which best describes such an approach is Charles Alan Taylor’s (1996)
Defining Science: A Rhetoric of Demarcation. According to Taylor, there is “some merit to the argument that science, as a group of disciplines or intellectual endeavors, addresses certain topics and makes certain methodological choices that other intellectual endeavors tend not to make”, but he attempts to avoid the reification of science implied by such an argument (ibid.: 16). Of particular interest to Taylor are situations of controversy, where science is deployed rhetorically and “the boundaries of the scientific enterprise are rhetorically articulated” (ibid.: 178). The view that he develops, “holds that the meaning of
31 science, as a set of social practices, is constructed in and through the discourses of scientists as they respond rhetorically to situations in which certain of their social, technical, professional… interests are problematized” (ibid.: 5). This boundary-work is flexible and an ongoing process, becoming most clearly visible when there exists a need to distinguish science from non-science, or to criticize something as pseudo-scientific. While Taylor focuses on the demarcation practices of scientists, he also discusses the use of scientific discourses and credentials by creationists in their controversy over evolution. As we will see, science is also rhetorically demarcated by non-scientists who seek to capitalize on the authority of science in order to further their claims. The multiple meanings of science are also continuously reworked in everyday discourse for various ends, and my own recurring use of the word will itself be a form of demarcation by which I will use to delineate climate scientists and their institutions against the broader background of the public, or against other domains such as politics.14
It is also important to note that not all forms of scientific demarcation are rhetorical, and as Chapter Five will show, institutional structures such as peer-review, the rules of the
IPCC and Freedom of Information legislation can actually shape the landscape of scientific knowledge and determine access to it.
Rhetoric, Discourse, and Reflexivity
While Taylor’s analysis is written largely in the context of post-Kuhnian developments in philosophy and sociology, Defining Science can be grouped into a body of work that has become known as the “rhetoric of science”,15 which sees scientific rhetoric as
32 epistemic or knowledge-creating (Scott 1995) instead of as a means of communication inferior to the forms of logic that supposedly transmit certain truth.16 The use of scientific rhetoric and discourse is a vital part of the process through which scientific claims persuade others of their facticity, or undermine opposing claims. Such discursive strategies are connected directly to the work of the laboratory17 (Latour & Woolgar 1979; Knorr-Cetina
1981), and as the rhetoric of science has shown, are present in even the most technical of scientific texts. In the context of a heated scientific, political and moral controversy, however, they become even more important, and will be the primary focus of Chapter Four.
However, a persistent methodological stumbling block for constructivism, particularly as it is applied to the analysis of texts, it is important to consider the issue of reflexivity and Woolgar and Pawluch’s (1985) related critique of “strictly” constructivist analyses of social problems (as exemplified by Spector & Kitsuse 1977). Woolgar and
Pawluch charged such rigidly constructivist studies with attempting the impossible and undesirable; by attempting to study claims-making in isolation, some social problems scholars were nevertheless making certain assumptions about the world while problematizing others. This is what they called “ontological gerrymandering,” or the process of “making problematic the truth status of certain states of affairs selected for analysis and explanation, while backgrounding or minimizing the possibility that the same problems apply to assumptions upon which the analysis depends” (ibid.: 216). Thus
Woolgar and Pawluch argued that in examining the construction of facts, the researcher inevitably makes constructions of his or her own which are then taken as assumptions, treating some facts as constructed while leaving others unexamined.
33 Woolgar and Pawluch recognized that their critique applied to a variety of constructivist works outside of the sociology of social problems, and indeed it is a variant of the problem of reflexivity that is found throughout newer approaches to the sociology of science. Reflexivity suggests that the approach of a constructivist sociologist can be turned against their own work, so that any resulting sociological claims can be similarly
“deconstructed”. Likewise, the idea that scientific facts are constructed and contextual can be used to critique sociology’s own knowledge claims about the construction of facts. One solution that has been proposed to better address the problem of ontological gerrymandering and reflexivity involves the use of “new literary forms” that are designed to circumvent the conventions of social science, such as the avoidance of detached, empirical discourse, and the utilization of multi-voice texts (Mulkay 1985; 1991; Woolgar
1988a). This attempt to address reflexivity appears to have burned itself out without achieving much in the way of insights about science, and I am more inclined to loosely follow Joel Best’s approach to the problem. Best (1995) argues that analysts inevitably make assumptions, and thus Woolgar and Pawluch’s critique will always have some merit, even for studies which claim to adhere strictly to constructivism. The better answer is for the analyst to acknowledge and defend his or her assumptions, and provide a context for the claims under analysis. Such a contextual constructivism avoids constantly evaluating claims against an objective truth, but recognizes that an analysis of discourse must
18 inevitably make some assumptions to locate those claims in a social context.
34 A Theoretical Summary
Before proceeding to the context of the global warming controversy, it is helpful to reflect on the theoretical picture painted by the previous pages and to situate my analysis within it. My interest is in the construction of scientific facts, specifically as it occurs in the later, discursive stages of the process. While scientific knowledge might originate in the laboratory (or alternately in nature), it must at some point be deployed into multiple textual forms to persuade others of its facticity. Science studies can follow these texts out of the laboratory and through the transformations with which they engage daily social life (Latour
2005: 188). This is particularly true of a contentious and highly public issue such as global warming, which cannot be understood just by looking at the work of scientists. I will therefore not seek my answers up the stream of fact construction in the laboratory, but down (Gieryn 1999: ix) in the public domain. Here, competing claims work to undermine each other and marshal the authority of science in order to support true descriptions of the natural world. It is at this stage that the FoS exists alongside competing claimsmakers such as the IPCC, Al Gore, and a network of online climate blogs.
35
Figure 1: A rough model showing the connections through which scientific climate knowledge is transformed and aggregated. My focus will be towards the right-hand side of the process. As the coming chapters will show, this chart could be populated with other entities, and many of the arrows might actually be double-sided. Also, additional connections could be drawn as the public domain affects earlier stages.
Before turning our attention to this scientific, yet public and political controversy, it is necessary to provide a historical context for the following chapters. I do so with the same understanding as Gilbert and Mulkay (1984) – that such a context is necessarily a work of interpretation and construction, but also a desirable and indispensible starting point that will allow me to make sense of the specific texts and events to which I will then turn.
36
Notes
1 As in Johansen 2006: 1. 2 For an example of this view see Labohm, Rozendaal & Thoenes 2004. 3 For overviews of these developments see Lynch 1993; Mulkay 1979; Knorr-Cetina & Mulkay 1983; Sismondo 2008. 4 Especially Latour 1987; Woolgar 1988; Bloor 1976. 5 Subsequently published laboratory studies include Knorr-Cetina 1981; 1999; Law 1994; Lynch 1985a; M’charek 2005; Mertz & Knorr-Cetina 1997; Traweek 1988; Zenzen & Restivo 1982. 6 See Dunlap & Catton 1994; Grundmann & Stehr 2000; Hannigan 2006: 29-35; Irwin 2001. 7 See also Scott, Richards & Martin 1990. 8 While Latour’s approach allows the analyst to handle multiple contradictory texts without referring to an ever-present truth, it does not mean that we cannot evaluate or compare statements. As Latour (2005; 90-91) argues, while a constructivist view sidesteps the question of truth versus falsity, it still allows us to ask the question, “is a given fact of science well or badly constructed?” 9 See Law 2004a. 10 See also the “idiom of co-production” in Science & Technology Studies (Jasanoff 2004a; 2004b). 11 Murphy (2009: 39) has expressly disagreed with such a position, arguing that discourse should be studied in “the material context of nature’s dynamics”. There is certainly merit to the argument that a “bracketing” of nature can suggest its irrelevance, but the problems raised by attempting to specify the “material context” of AGW remains a significant impediment to the use of such a constructivist approach. 12 Laudan 1983; 1984; Pera 1994; Schuster & Yeo 1986. Also see Mercer 2002 on the use of scientific method discourses. 13 See Hacking 1996. 14 Fully recognizing the impossibility of a clear separation between the two, it is still often useful to differentiate between the work of scientists and governments/politicians. As Mark Brown (citing Latour) points out, “calling everything political depletes the meaning and usefulness of the concept” (M. B. Brown 2009: 186). 15 While much of this field draws on and critiques Aristotelian and other ancient Greek conceptions of rhetoric which were long held to be incompatible with the rational pursuit of scientific truth (Weimer 1977), again it was Kuhn who provided the “invitation” to study the persuasive or rhetorical work inherent in science (Melia 1984; Harris 1997a). While the rhetoric of science as a discipline has been unable to articulate a cohesive alternative to the philosophical tradition it replaces, it has shown the futility of postulating rhetoric as somehow separate from (and opposed to) scientific rationality (see Bazerman 1988; Berge 2007; Blakeslee 2001; Graves 1995; 2005; Harris 1997b; Nelson, Megill & McCloskey 1987; O’Neill 1981; Pera 1994; Pera & Shea 1991; Prelli 1989; Reeves 2002; Simons 1990; Zerbe 2007). 16 To take such a view does not necessitate that one adopts the most radical position, typically identified with Alan Gross (1990; 1991), that seems to privilege a rhetorical understanding of science above all else. As Taylor (1996: 120) points out, much of the technical or laboratory work of scientists can hardly be seen as discursive or rhetorical, and even if we might identify the rhetorical motivations or applications of such practices, this hardly seems the best approach to their study. 17 SSK also once had a somewhat short-lived branch of discourse analysis, as represented by Gilbert & Mulkay 1984; Mulkay, Potter & Yearley 1983; Myers 1990. Other works which more broadly consider the language or semantics of science include Darian 2003; Dörries 2002; Harris 2005; Papin 1992. 18 My approach however, will likely not adhere as closely to claims and the claimsmaking process as Joel Best would like, and I will freely draw on additional context and theory where appropriate.
37 CHAPTER TWO
CONTEXT OF THE GLOBAL WARMING CONTROVERSY
The Conjunction of Global Warming Science and Politics
There is a single dramatic episode typically credited with catapulting global warming into a front-page news story and a pressing political concern. Accounts of it set the scene as “one sweltering June afternoon in 1988” (Bowen 2008: 1) when James Hansen of NASA “took centre stage in Washington DC and announced that he was ‘99%’ certain that global warming was here” (O’Donnell 2000: 109). That such a scientific pronouncement was made on that particular afternoon was no accident, but deliberately arranged by Hansen and Senator Timothy Wirth to maximize its effect (Weart 2008: 150).
North American media were dominated by stories of drought and forest fires, temperatures were soaring across the continent, and the explanation offered by AGW was able to
“piggyback” on these much more immediate concerns (Ungar 1992). As Jerry Williams
(2001: ix-x) notes:
If common sense, scientific reasoning, and political rhetoric can be viewed as separate and distinct spheres of thought, it is curious that all of these arenas turned their attention toward the causes of the record heat at nearly the same time.
It would be mistaken to think that more recent developments in the construction of the AGW problem can simply be traced back to Hansen’s testimony and the 1988 summer heat wave. The theoretical case for global warming had been developing for decades among
38 climate scientists, and throughout the 1980s it had become increasingly interconnected with political processes. The scientific discovery of AGW cannot be attributed to any single person, encompassing instead over a hundred years of contributions and developments1.
From the 1950s onward this history was closely connected to the institutionalization and internationalization of the still fledgling climate sciences, the increasingly global quantification of the weather, the development of climate modeling, and US science policy related to the geopolitics of the Cold War (Bolin 2007: ch. 3-4; Hart & Victor 1993; Miller
2001a). Finally, none of these developments would have been possible without a global concept of climate that is vastly different from the way in which it was understood in ‘pre- modern’ times, or roughly prior to the 18th century (Hulme 2009: 13-15; Stehr 1997; von
Storch & Stehr 1997: 69).
By the start of the 1980s the AGW theory was by no means commonly accepted among climate scientists or in international politics, but the topic of climate change had become the concern of conferences and workshops held by international agencies such as the World Meteorological Association (WMO), United Nations Environmental Programme
(UNEP), the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), and much aided by the organizational efforts of the ICSU’s Bert Bolin. In the early 1980s “the predominant focus of the scientific community had moved away from climate variability and converged on the possibility of warming trends in the mean climate” (Agrawala 1998a: 607), and concern would grow among some governments over what was increasingly seen as a global problem (Edwards 2001: 31-33; Miller 2004). The US in particular had long been the largest supporter of climate science and took a keen interest in the topic, actively
39 participating in international conferences, holding Congressional hearings, and commissioning government agencies to study climate change (Graig 1999: 70-75).
However, efforts to shape US policy on global warming were challenged by divergent assessments of the problem by different agencies and pressure from fossil fuel interests to avoid regulation (Agrawala 1998a: 608-609). Work on what would become the IPCC began in 1987 in large part due to the US’s request for a new “intergovernmental mechanism” that could give an authoritative assessment of the issue (ibid.: 611), and informed by what
Hoffmann (2005) calls a new norm of universal participation that was developed through the recent success of international negotiations over the ozone problem. The emerging body being shaped through the WMO and UNEP was to provide balanced and trusted information and advice on climate change to the various governments that needed it by the summer of 1988, and was designed to allow those governments to participate in its process
(Boehmer-Christiansen 1994: 187-189; Bolin 2007: ch. 5-6).
It is therefore clear that the political developments that were to give shape to the
IPCC began years before Hansen’s US Senate testimony, and that the scientific case for
AGW had been under construction long prior to that. The public too had shown an increasing (though intermittent) concern over environmental problems since the 1960s and had recently begun to understand such problems on a global scale (Graig 1999). The stage had thus been set before Hansen’s dramatic claims propelled fears and political action on
AGW (Ingram, Milward & Ward 1992: 40-45). Five months later the IPCC was formed under the chairmanship of Bert Bolin, and issued its first assessment report in 1990.
The IPCC does not conduct its own climate research but seeks to review, evaluate,
40 and aggregate existing science which is then presented to policymakers in a summary format. It is a vast organization, with hundreds of expert reviewers and authors split among three Working Groups: the first (WG I) assesses current physical science knowledge of the climate, the second (WG II) assesses the consequences of climate change as identified by
WG I, and the third (WG III) assesses options for mitigating climate change. The assessments from these working groups are then summarized for policymakers, but these summaries are subject to detailed review and approval by governments. The negotiations through which the exact wording of the summaries is decided includes government representatives and a number of the report’s lead authors. Efforts are made toward keeping the process inclusive of experts and governments from throughout the world (Agrawala
1998b; Bolin 2007, ch.6; IPCC n.d.), though it can be argued that US and UK-based researchers have been overrepresented (Glover 2006: 104). Therefore while the IPCC is grounded in science, it is also a thoroughly political organization.
Weart (2008: 156) describes the IPCC’s products as “lowest-common-denominator science”, but argues that it is this need to satisfy its government stakeholders that gives the organization’s scientific findings political credibility. Similarly, Agrawala (1998b: 627) describes the process of negotiating IPCC policymaker summaries as resembling a “fox-trot performed by a drunken couple”, with statements being pulled in various directions by participants. The resulting political compromise, however, often expressed through vague and carefully qualified language, becomes more scientifically defensible in its modesty.
Agrawala argues that this essentially conservative character of IPCC political advice allows its “Summaries for Policymakers” to retain much of the organization’s scientific credibility,
41 but at the expense of policy specificity (ibid.: 627). Even so, following the release of the first assessment report in 1990 some scientists and delegations feared that the assessment process was becoming too bureaucratized and political, and the IPCC subsequently distanced itself from its original role as policy advisor and focused on providing an objective assessment of scientific knowledge (Boehmer-Christiansen 1994: 195-196; Miller
2004: 59-61). This has allowed the IPCC to serve as an embodiment of the science of climate change, while other bodies could focus on drafting policy, as the Intergovernmental
Negotiating Committee (INC) did in 1993 when it began work on a global climate treaty.
As the 1990s progressed, the IPCC released a supplementary report in 1992 and another full assessment in 1996, which made many of the original IPCC claims about the human causes of global warming with a greater measure of certainty and alarm. New findings such as those produced from an analysis of ancient ice cores drilled in Greenland created concern over the possibility of much faster and dramatic climate changes than previously predicted, and many eminent climate scientists would come to warn that the climate’s future warming could be more severe than the IPCC’s projections (Rahmstorf et al. 2007; Weart 2008: 173-175). The General Circulation Models (GCMs) that allowed scientists to predict future climate change (see Manabe 1997) increased in detail and sophistication, and were seen as invaluable to the policy process (Edwards 2001; Shackley,
Young, Parkinson & Wynne 1998). Interestingly as van der Sluijs et al. (1998) and Weart
(2008: 165) note, during this time the IPCC’s predicted temperature rise from a doubling of
CO2 in the atmosphere (identified as the most significant cause of global warming) remained remarkably stable out of policy considerations.
42 Public perceptions of the importance of the global warming problem waned from their 1988 peak, partly due to the lack of another similar heat wave (Ungar 1992; 1995;
Williams 2001). Meanwhile the 1990s saw gradual progress towards a global climate treaty, beginning with the ambiguous and nonbinding United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Signed at the Rio de Janeiro “Earth Summit” in 1992, the agreement’s strength was limited by the US’s conservative stance on climate policy (Weart 2008: 161-162). Annual UNFCCC conferences followed, with the 1996 meetings endorsing the recently released IPCC assessment and the US (now under the
Clinton-Gore administration) showing greater support for the process. The next conference of the UNFCCC in 1997 resulted in the Kyoto Protocol to limit the production of greenhouse gases (Breidenich, Magraw, Rowley & Rubin 1998), but details of the deal remained disputed until the 2001 UNFCCC conference. By the time the Protocol finally entered force in 2005 (Fletcher 2007a; 2007b) the US (under the Bush administration) had abandoned the process, and progress towards Kyoto's targets has been mixed among the signatories (Rabe 2007; UNFCCC 2009).
Resistance and Counter-Movements in the United States and Canada
Under the Bush administration, some US climate scientists encountered well- publicized instances of censure or pressure designed to limit the alarm over AGW (Bowen
2008; Gelbspan 2004; Mooney 2005). While this was reflective of the political climate at the time, the US in particular had been the scene of a long effort by various groups to counter the AGW discourse and prevent the economic impacts associated with increased
43 regulation of the atmosphere. Much of this effort has been led by the fossil-fuel related industries which stood to lose the most from new regulations, and while this counter- movement was initially slow to respond to the rise of environmental sentiment (Graig 1999:
119-120) they did react vigorously to the developments of the summer of 1988. Advocacy and lobby groups were established by threatened industries with names such as the
Information Council on the Environment (ICE) and the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) to counter claims that the Earth was warming and emphasize the uncertainty of climate science (Begley 2007; Hoggan & Littlemore 2009). These groups, along with conservative
“think tanks” such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Heritage Foundation
(Jacques, Dunlap & Freeman 2008; McCright & Dunlap 2000; 2003) targeted politicians, the media and the American public (Cushman 1998) with a variety of arguments that kept pace with the looming specter of greenhouse gas regulation of the 1990s. A skeptical science thus emerged to challenge the basic scientific premises of the AGW theory, with experts such as Fred Singer, Sallie Baliunas, and Richard Lindzen contradicting the expertise of the IPCC position. Such scientific counter-claims were often presented alongside arguments about the harmful consequences of a global climate treaty to the economy.
This counter-movement began primarily as an American phenomenon, where it can in part be credited for derailing the country’s participation in the Kyoto Protocol. Yet elsewhere, other organizations and individuals have similarly argued against the scientific basis of AGW and the political efforts to combat it. In Canada, these groups include the
Fraser Institute and Frontier Center for Public Policy (FCPP) think tanks, and the Calgary-
44 based Friends of Science. Due to the significant role of the FoS in this study, it is worthwhile to review the group’s history and composition in more detail, which will also highlight the complexities and contradictions in the broader climate skeptics' counter- movement.
The Friends of Science
According to Latour (2005: 32-34) groups are continuously delineated and defined by their spokespersons, which include the sociologists that study them. This means that there is no single unproblematic way to demarcate groups as carefully-bounded units of analysis, and the FoS offers a clear example of this. We might categorize the FoS as a lobby group, interest or advocacy group, social movement, counter-movement, grassroots organization, non-profit or non-governmental organization, or in any number of other ways.
While the group has registered members, it cannot merely be delineated by its membership, and over the years has had strong associations with non-members such as Barry Cooper, or experts such as Tim Ball or Christopher Monckton, who in many cases are also associated with other groups that maintain a related position on AGW. An attempt to rigidly demarcate the FoS would give the group an illusory coherence, so that it is far more useful to avoid such rigidity and, borrowing from Latour, trace its associations wherever they lead.
The most recent description on the FoS website characterizes the group as “a non- profit organization run by dedicated volunteers comprised mainly of active and retired earth and atmospheric scientists, engineers, and other professionals”, whose activities “offer
45 critical evidence that challenges the premises of Kyoto and present alternative causes of climate change”. The FoS does “not represent any industry group”, and operates on an
“extremely limited budget” which is “derived from membership dues and donations” and is used to support the group's “educational work” (FoS n.d.a). This is not a wholly inaccurate depiction, although it leaves out much information which is useful for my purposes.
First, while the group does portray itself as providing “educational work in the field of science” (ibid.) and lists qualified scientists first among its list of members, the vast majority of its more than 300 current members are not scientists in the strict sense of the word and are not publicly engaged in the group's science communication practices. The group’s scientific legitimacy is represented by the FoS's Scientific Advisory Board, which has included Sallie Baliunas, Ross McKitrick, Chris de Freitas, and Tim Ball. This group of experts has been key to the FoS’s efforts to communicate their stance to the public and
Canadian policy makers, although the group also utilizes other experts such as Christopher
Monckton in the materials it makes public or the activities it sponsors. Much of the day-to- day work is carried out by the group’s executive on a volunteer basis, which is elected annually and has recurrently included Douglas Leahey, Albert Jacobs, Chuck Simpson, and
Eric Loughead.
Secondly, while the FoS often stresses its limited budget and grassroots fundraising base, it maintains numerous connections to the energy industry. Much of this is related to the membership’s roots in the Calgary oil and gas sector, and the group includes many retired or practicing geologists, engineers, and geophysicists. While the FoS freely accepts money from corporations, it claims to rely on individual contributions and to have had
46 difficulty raising money directly from businesses. The group has openly acknowledged a one-time donation from Talisman Energy which was issued by former CEO (and climate skeptic) James Buckee, and used to help fund the production of the 2005 video Climate
Catastrophe: Cancelled (D. Leahey, personal communication, July 13, 2009), but does not specifically acknowledge any other corporate sponsors. Names of individual donors are also not disclosed, and contributions to “educational” FoS projects are routinely funneled through registered charities such as the Calgary Foundation and the FCPP. Furthermore, the
FoS has utilized its funds to employ the services of public-relations firms, which have helped to shape and deliver the group’s message.
However, there is no direct evidence to indicate that the FoS is beholden to or acts as a front for some larger industry player, as suggested in characterizations of it as an
“Astroturf” group (DC 2009a; Hoggan & Littlemore 2009). Indeed, in a way the FoS can quite accurately be characterized as a grassroots organization, although its roots are spread throughout the Calgary energy industry, and it readily accepts funding from this base.
Hoggan and Littlemore (2009: 53) argue that while the group began as a “perhaps sincere” grassroots effort, by accepting funding from corporations they became “an industry-funded political action group”. Therefore both the grassroots and Astroturf depictions of the FoS are somewhat misleading; the group certainly has close ties to the energy industry, and its membership is drawn largely from this demographic (which is a significant segment of
Calgary’s population), but it cannot simply be understood as an arm's-length representative of business interests. While I am not interested in speculating about the motivations of FoS members, I have seen nothing to suggest that they are not united by a personal conviction
47 that the AGW hypothesis is flawed, or are somehow driven by the goal of personally enriching themselves through the work of the FoS. I will explore the question of self- interest in the global warming controversy more fully in the following chapters, but for now must continue to outline the study’s historical context.
The FoS was established in 2002 by a handful of mostly retired geologists and other energy industry professionals who met regularly in the lounge of a Calgary leisure club called the Glencoe Club.2 Their views on climate change and the Kyoto Protocol have been traced to talks given in the late 1990s by Chris de Freitas (D. Leahey, personal communication, July 13, 2009; DC 2009a; Roe 2007), who was initially listed as a scientific advisor on their website (though at the time this list was titled “professional contacts”). Regardless of where the inspiration for the group came from, Albert Jacobs describes the mood amongst its founders as being “very upset with the way our profession, science in general, was getting treated by politicians” (personal communication, December
23, 2009). This was during a time that the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol was a major issue in Canada. The decision thus came to form a “science society” that was “non- political” in order to advise the public, media, and politicians. The creation of a website was seen as vital to this end (found at www.friendsofscience.org), with discussion of making a film following shortly after (A. Jacobs, personal communication, December 23,
2009).
The FoS film Climate Catastrophe: Cancelled was produced in large part with funding for the Climate Change Debate Project that was established at the University of
Calgary in 2004.3 It was released in 2005 (Visser 2005), and claimed strong association
48 with the University of Calgary in its opening sequence and the press conference announcing its release. The University of Calgary would later deny the group had the right to use the institution’s logo, which no longer appears in the video’s introduction (Roe
2007). It was sent to Canadian Members of Parliament, the media, and schools, but the film was not well received as its message was “not politically correct” (A. Jacobs, personal communication, December 23, 2009). The video was part of a variety of means by which the FoS attempted to influence government directly, including sending experts to speak in
Ottawa and employing registered lobbyists. However these experiences proved unsuccessful and the group has now “more or less” given up on influencing politicians, focusing instead communicating with the public4 (D. Leahey, personal communication,
July 13, 2009).
The existence of the FoS coincides with, and can also be seen as a response to an apparent increase in public concern over AGW. Tracking such concern is difficult to quantify with available data, but it appears to have been mounting internationally in the years after 2000 (Leiserowitz 2007). GlobeScan (2006) reported an increase of 17% between 2003 and 2006 in the percentage of surveyed Canadians who viewed climate change as a “very serious” problem. Media attention to the issue of climate change also experienced dramatic increases in the period of 2003 through 2006, with much of the upswing in the fall of 2006 attributable to the release of Al Gore’s massively successful film An Inconvenient Truth (AIT) (Boykoff and Roberts 2007: 6-7; Neuzil 2008: 226).
Other major media stories of the period included coverage of the Stern Review (Stern
2006), in which the economic consequences of AGW were estimated and strong action was
49 urged to prevent it, and the fourth assessment of the IPCC (IPCC 2007) which used the organization’s strongest language to date to describe the AGW problem.
As Al Gore became an internationally-recognized spokesperson on global warming, winning the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize alongside the IPCC, the FoS countered the showing of his film in schools by releasing a second version of Climate Catastrophe: Cancelled
(Visser 2007). The FoS film was intended to be distributed to those same institutions showing AIT, but again the effort met with disappointing results5. However, a radio advertising campaign in Alberta in 2008 succeeded in temporarily increasing monthly traffic to the website to a reported 285,000 hits (Leahey 2008a), dropping to around
200,000 by September (Leahey 2008b). Through most of 2009 the FoS carried out no major activities as it raised funds for a nationwide radio campaign and a speaking tour by
Christopher Monckton, which was carried out in the fall of 2009.
Countering the Counter-Movement
The public components of the global warming debate have increasingly moved online as the internet has developed, and some climate scientists have in recent years decided to engage the skeptics on this terrain as part of developments which will be explored in Chapter Five. The FoS’s activities have also generated some significant criticism over the years, beginning largely in 2006 with a national newspaper exposé
(Montgomery 2006) and the launch of www.DeSmogBlog.com, a website devoted to publicizing campaigns of “misinformation” about climate change, with the FoS at the “top of the list” (Karp & McKeown 2006). Led by James Hoggan, a Vancouver-based public
50 relations specialist, and with a number of associations with the David Suzuki Foundation,
DeSmogBlog posts connections between industry and groups such as the FoS through the work of regular contributors including journalists Richard Littlemore and Kevin Grandia.6
A more recently initiated blog that addresses many of the same concerns as DeSmogBlog and has paid special attention to the FoS is deepclimate.org, founded in 2008 by an anonymous author who signs his posts as DC.7 Counter-claims and attacks against the credibility of individuals and groups are thus regularly launched from both sides of the debate, which remains highly dynamic.
Recent Developments in the Global Warming Debate
The problem of AGW has in recent years been increasingly acknowledged by previously reticent parties such as Exxon Mobil (Mufson 2007; Exxon Mobil n.d.),
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper (De Souza 2007) and former US President
George W. Bush (Baker & Mufson 2007), all of whom had formerly expressed skepticism about the human contribution to climate change before reshaping their rhetoric in 2007.
Yet, despite a year that included what Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki called “the nail in the coffin” for climate skeptics (MacQueen, Kirby & MacDonald 2007), the global warming debate was never really concluded. A Pew Research Center poll (2009) found an increase in skepticism by the American public over the core elements of the AGW argument (that the Earth is dangerously warming due to human influence on the climate) between 2008 and 2009, a shift which James Hoggan (2009) attributed to the efforts of
“front groups and lobbyists for dirty industry”. David Keith, a prominent Calgary-based
51 energy technology and climate researcher who is also engaged in high-level meetings with government and industry, says despite the growing acceptance of AGW in political and business decision-making circles, large portions of the public remain unconvinced. “If you had asked me five years ago I would have said, the debate with skeptics is over… but now in some ways I think the skeptics have had enormous power. I think, the press routinely treats it as a controversy” (D. Keith, personal communication, September 11, 2009).
For its part, the FoS reemerged in the mass media through a well-publicized cross-
Canada speaking tour by prominent British climate skeptic Christopher Monckton in
October 2009. They also launched a campaign of radio advertisements in a number of
Canadian cities, all of which increased visits to their website “by a factor of five”, as well as aiding in fundraising and new memberships (Leahey 2009). But what can safely be called the single-most significant event for climate skeptics around the world was the release of thousands of emails and documents from the highly-placed Climatic Research
Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in November 2009, through what was either a well-executed computer hack, or as many skeptics maintain, an anonymous leak from a concerned insider at the CRU.8 Some climate scientists deemphasized the significance of what has become known as “Climategate”9 (RealClimate 2009) and characterized it as a criminal attack by “forces of unreason” (Santer 2009b), while others pointed to what they saw as legitimate concerns over scientific transparency and dangerously partisan attitudes within climate science (Revkin, Curry & Hulme 2009; von Storch 2009c). Climate skeptics meanwhile, saw much more serious implications in the released files that challenged the very foundations of global warming science (Ball 2009b; Delingpole 2009; FoS n.d.b;
52 Monckton 2009c).
Despite the publicity given to the Climategate story and the timing of the information’s release, it does not appear to have had much impact on the UN negotiations which took place in Copenhagen in December 2009 with the aim of drafting a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. The conference failed to produce a binding treaty as many of the participants had hoped, and while various attributions of blame followed in its aftermath, these were generally directed at differences among the political delegations, and not at the state of climate science (Crooks, Harvey & Ward 2009; Revkin & Broder 2009).
Negotiations on a global climate treaty currently continue, though with an unclear future.
The Context of Recent Global Temperatures
There is one other recent climate story that I wish to discuss which, while it did not generate as much media attention as Climategate or the Copenhagen Conference, does highlight several issues fundamental to climate science and the global warming debate. The question concerns what may appear to be the relatively simple matter of recent trends in the
Earth’s average temperature – specifically in the period since 1998. As noted by Stefan
Rahmstorf in late 2009, the “blogosphere” has recently become saturated with the “meme” or viral idea that the Earth had been cooling since 1998. Indeed, just three days after
Rahmstorf’s post, an article on the BBC News website (Hudson 2009) took up the claim and for three straight days became the site’s “most shared” news story, as links to it propagated across the internet. The claim that the Earth has recently been cooling is indeed a common theme among the climate skeptics’ arguments, and has typically been presented
53 as a refutation of the claim that a steady increase in atmospheric CO2 is the cause of
AGW.10 The difficulty of measuring the planet’s average temperature for the last twelve or so years (a period in which the instrumental records and climate models available to climate science have never been more detailed and sophisticated) demonstrates many of the persistent challenges for climate science and the debate concerning global warming.
The problem is that there is no single authoritative way of characterizing the temperature record since 1998, and that the answer to the question of the trend in this period depends on which data set is used and how it is manipulated. James Hansen argues
(2009), using the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) dataset, that the global temperature has indeed been increasing in this period. Rahmstorf (2009) argues on the same grounds that the observed warming is “100% consistent” with the trend as predicted due to AGW. The dataset which primarily disagrees with the GISS comes from the UK’s
Hadley Center and CRU, and it showed a relative pause in the warming trend since 1998.
Hansen and Rahmstorf attribute this pause to incomplete coverage by the Hadley Center data of the Arctic and Antarctic regions, where they claim warming has been most severe.
The GISS dataset is able to extrapolate temperatures over these regions, which have poor coverage by surface-based instruments. The UK’s Met Office (2009b) recently supported a new analysis that combined the original Hadley Center dataset with various other measurements to result in a temperature calculation that amounts to a new land warming record. Furthermore, even the original Hadley Center dataset falls within the 95% range of temperatures predicted by the GCMs used in the IPCC’s 2007 report (Schmidt 2009b). The
FoS website (n.d.a) on the other hand displays a temperature graph of the troposphere,
54 which is a reconstruction of satellite data from Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) and the
University of Alabama (UAH), and currently plots a slight cooling trend since 2002.
These accounts of global temperatures differ from each other (though all show a long-term warming trend in the 20th century) because of the way temperature records are constructed. Indeed, this is where previous insights from the sociology of science are of great use for understanding the conflicting facts of the global warming debate. Climate change cannot be measured directly, but is a “constructed idea” (Hulme 2009a: 3-4).
However, even though climate knowledge in a social product, “we should not call it nothing but a social product” (Weart 2008: 200) – that is unless we redefine the social as
Latour has done. The scientific understanding of climate is constructed by aggregating information from various instruments, but such instruments do not cover the entire Earth.
Data must be extrapolated for regions without adequate coverage through the use of certain assumptions, and the instrumental record which does exist cannot be used in its raw or
“pure” form – it must be corrected for errors, aggregated, and averaged. Such “data processing” is inherently an uncertain exercise (Pollack 2003: 78-81). Theory and
“intermediate models” make sense of the data (Edwards 2001: 59-61), separating fact from artefact, and allowing scientists to construct the climate “out-there” (Latour & Woolgar
1986: 174-186). In the words of Trevor Pinch (1985), the raw climate data is externalized to become climate knowledge, a process through which the actual instruments and procedures related to them are black-boxed through a series of what Latour (2005) would characterize as transformations. Pickering (1995) would recognize the “tuning” that takes place between climate scientists and their instruments as a general and fundamental
55 characteristic of scientific practice.
Thus while many of the Climategate revelations involve scientists manipulating data, all climate data must be manipulated in order to become useable, and even the instrumental record of the last century and a half is an imperfect and incomplete set of measurements on which our conception of climate might be based. Through these varied and overlapping datasets, numerous courses can be plotted to arrive at divergent outcomes such as those shown above. The methods of science shape these courses but cannot determine the outcomes. As Kim Cobb (2009) writes in response to the Climategate outcry:
[Climate] scientists are not technicians, we are not following a cookbook or a yellow-brick-road. Rather, we make a myriad of decisions every day about our results, based on our interpretations, which in turn are based on (in this case) years of experience.
The decisions made in climate science and the outcomes that result can then be squared off against one another to see which represents the truth about our climate. Cobb trusts that the progress of science is self-correcting, eventually sorting out the flaws and resulting in increased confidence in the surviving conclusions. In the meantime however, the global warming debate continues. Despite the wishes of both sides, no “death blow” has been delivered, especially in the public arena. Black-boxed facts and measurements are being pried opened and reexamined in light of Climategate subsequent criticisms, but such moves towards increased transparency and public access to scientific data (Gomez & Jordans
2010; Met Office 2009a) may also have the effect of making even more facts open to dispute.11
56 With our attention now focused on the leading edge of the debate, it is time to consider the role of expertise and trust. As we will see, the management of expertise is crucial for leading participants in the debate, and who counts as an expert on the topic of global warming is a question that is open to a variety of constructions.
Notes
1 See Fleming 1998; Hulme 2009a; Weart 2008. 2 While a television broadcast of The Fifth Estate that featured the FoS (Karp & McKeown 2006) cited a November 2002 Ottawa press conference called Kyoto’s Fatal Flaws Revealed (sponsored by Talisman Energy, Imperial Oil, and several other businesses) as a “coming out party” for the FoS, the group has denied connection to the event and cannot be linked directly to the conference. As an indirect link, however, Tim Ball was one of two FoS “professional contacts” who spoke at the event, and did have travel expenses paid by the group (Adler 2007). The conference appears to have been organized by the public-relations company APCO Worldwide and its employee Tom Harris, who would go on to play an important role in the FoS production Climate Catastrophe: Cancelled (DC 2009a). 3 The connection between the University of Calgary and the FoS was through Barry Cooper, a professor in the university’s Department of Political Science. Cooper set up and controlled a Science Education Fund to fund what was ostensibly research into the climate change debate, but which ended up being used to produce the FoS video, fund radio ads, cover website costs, pay registered lobbyists for the FoS, and employ Cooper’s wife and daughter as research assistants (University of Calgary Audit Services 2008). Money for the fund was in part channeled through the Calgary Foundation, which had the ability as a charity to issue tax-receipts (unlike the FoS). Cooper has emphasized that the funding was “not exclusively from the oil and gas industry” (Montgomery 2006) but the actual donors (other than Talisman Energy), remain anonymous. After receiving pressure from several sources, the University of Calgary completed an audit of the Science Education Fund in 2008. The findings from the audit were largely inconclusive, but in 2007 the University of Calgary shut down the Science Education Fund and has taken steps to distance itself from the FoS. Barry Cooper has also apparently distanced himself from the group after being embroiled in the University of Calgary audit process. 4 While the FoS was initially hopeful that the 2006 federal election victory by the Conservative Party (whose leader Stephen Harper had once called the Kyoto Protocol a “socialist scheme” [CBC News 2007]) would signal a change in politics, the FoS was disappointed by the party’s lukewarm embrace of Kyoto after arriving in power, which Douglas Leahey attributes to the political need to appeal to the public (personal communication, July 13, 2009). With the current Canadian government still openly accepting the AGW problem, the purpose of the FoS remains to pressure politicians, although they now hope to do so indirectly through the public. 5 A climate change conference organized largely by the FoS and Barry Cooper that had been arranged for September 2007 in Ottawa also had to be cancelled when the U of C withdrew its support. 6 Grandia lodged a complaint in 2008 with Elections Canada alleging that the FoS radio ads in 2006 constituted unregistered political advertising (De Souza 2008a), though the complaint was rejected later in the year and no charges were brought against the FoS (De Souza 2008b). 7 As of the end of 2009, DC has also been responsible for the majority of the content in the detailed FoS entry found in the SourceWatch database (SourceWatch 2009a) – a wiki-format collaborative encyclopedia designed to provide background on groups “that try to manipulate public opinion” (SourceWatch 2009b). As documented on SourceWatch (2009a), DC played an important role in pressing the U of C concerning its relationship with the FoS, thus contributing to its internal audit. He also filed his own complaint to Elections
57
Canada in 2008 concerning the 2006 FoS radio ads, and has worked to uncover FoS links to oil industry, lobbying, and public relations companies. 8 The source of the information remains a mystery to this date. 9 The term is preferred by climate skeptics, while AGW advocates prefer alternatives such “the CRU hack”. 10 See Ball & Harris 2007; Carter 2006. 11 See Sarewitz 2004.
58 CHAPTER THREE
CONTESTED CREDIBILITY AND THE PERFORMANCE OF EXPERTISE IN THE
GLOBAL WARMING CONTROVERSY
While the global warming controversy includes many moral and political arguments, these are typically justified through an appeal to scientific expertise, which is treated as the most credible source of truth. However, particularly when considering the public dimensions of the debate, such expertise is not simply conferred on the basis of scientific credentials. Rather, expertise can be constructed in various ways that highlight the credibility and trustworthiness of the expert, and a convincing performance is a critical part of this process.
While I realize that it may not be possible for any reader to view all of the individuals I am about to discuss to be credible experts (considering their contradictory positions), I will refer to them as experts not to acknowledge that they have somehow crossed a threshold that allows them to be respected as such, but merely on the basis that the status of expert is one to which they seem to aspire, and to recognize that they are all perceived as experts to some extent. I will first consider a case in which expertise is justified on the basis of what might be considered conventional scientific credentials, which will demonstrate both the value of these qualifications, as well as the flexibility with which such credibility can be constructed in public. Secondly, after noting that many of the most prominent experts in the global warming controversy do not attempt to argue their expertise
59 on the basis of climate science credentials, and that many of the prominent experts are not even scientists, I will turn to the largely unexplored performative aspect of public expertise, and its role in the negotiation of trust. An analysis of three such experts will show that this trust can be developed in different ways, and is a vital part of the public understanding of science.
Scientific Expertise in Environmental Controversies
It is hardly controversial to claim that environmental issues are largely understood to be in the domain of science (Bocking 2004: 3; Irwin 1995: 78-79). Problems such as
AGW can be dealt with in a number of ways, but to first identify or diagnose the problem requires (at least in the modern world) an appeal to science. The existing social science literature on controversies recurrently shows the role of science, as it interacts alongside and is intertwined with moral and political considerations (Engelhardt & Caplan 1987;
Mazur 1981; Nelkin 1979). Often science is mustered by two opposing sides in a controversy, and thus instead of resolving an issue may actually become just another rhetorical tool in a battle over what are also political and moral disagreements. In the process, the public’s trust in scientific knowledge can be shaken through the revelation of an uncertain, interpretive, and contentious science. The public’s assumptions about the objectivity of science that empower it as “the neutral arbiter of truth” are undermined by such controversy (Nelkin 1995: 453). “Uncertainty is viewed as inadequacy, interpretation as mere opinion, lack of consensus as evidence that science cannot yet justify any action.
The spectacle of different experts interpreting the same thing differently contradicts
60 assumptions about their objectivity” (Bocking 2004: 30). When science enters into political issues, many of its supposed norms and myths such as disinterestedness and rational objectivity are tarnished by association with political interests and values (Bocking 2004:
30-33; Nelkin 1995: 452-453).
Still, the discourse of science retains its power both in defining our world and shaping government policy. The role of experts is crucial for both of these purposes, and as
Sheila Jasanoff (1990: 9-12) notes, skeptical attitudes towards science and scientists seem to be able to coexist alongside a public confidence in policy-relevant science and expert knowledge. While the 1960s saw the birth of environmentalism and the death of blind optimism in science and technology, science maintains its authority in environmental controversies due in no small part to the continuance of an idealized vision of science among the public (Ozawa 1996), and the public’s ongoing experience of science-based innovation. Contradictions between the ideal and the actual conduct of science do occur, but an expert’s appeal to science remains one of the most persuasive forms of arguments available in a wide range of arenas – from the courtroom (Brewer 2006; Lynch 2004) to the public presentation.
Yet a focused study of expertise itself has been lacking until recently. Selinger and
Crease (2006) note that philosophers have typically approached the topic indirectly through fields such as “authority” and “power”. Relevant discussions of scientific expertise can be found in the social science literature dealing with popular science and what is known as the
“public understanding of science”.1 However, in such accounts expertise is often treated secondarily to a focus on scientific knowledge and how it operates in the public realm.
61 Harry Collins and Robert Evans have recently tackled the topic of expertise with a dedicated sociological effort. They argue that while SSK challenged a naïve “top-down” acceptance of scientists’ claims to truth, this has raised what they consider “the pressing intellectual problem of the age”: “[i]f it is no longer clear that scientists and technologists have special access to the truth, why should their advice be specially valued?” (2006: 40).
To address this question Collins and Evans call for a “third wave of science studies” (the first two are delineated as periods before and after Kuhn’s work) in order to develop a
“normative theory of expertise” that can serve to inform the answer to the question of who, by virtue of their expertise, should contribute to the process of making decisions. Their contribution to this objective is Rethinking Expertise (2007), a work of remarkable ambition considering the classification scheme it proposes and the practical purpose for which it is designed. Collins and Evans are expressly not concerned with how expertise is attributed, since one can be recognized as an expert by others without actually possessing the relevant expertise (ibid.: 3). Rather, they propose a “Periodical Table of Expertises” that provides us with a new way of thinking and talking about experts. This scheme greatly expands on the conventional view of expertise, which they show to encompass various distinct forms that can be treated separately.
Were I to adopt the classifications developed in Rethinking Expertise, I would find my focus here to be on what is referred to as “meta-expertise” (ibid.: ch. 2), including the ability to judge other experts through evaluating “meta-criteria” such as their credentials, experience, and track record. However, as we will see, evaluations of expertise made by the public more generally fit the type of meta-expertise that Collins and Evans call “ubiquitous
62 discrimination” – a more basic form of judgment that depends very much on “whether the author of a scientific claim appears to have the appropriate scientific demeanor and/or the appropriate location within the social networks of scientists and/or not too much in the way of a political and financial interest in the claim” (ibid.: 45). Collins and Evans argue that this form of evaluation is possible because it is a sort of regular social judgment that all members of the public are capable of making – more “a matter of who to believe rather than what to believe” (ibid.: 139). Their argument is in part, that social scientists have a role to play in helping the public cultivate better means of scientific discrimination.
Despite their numerous useful observations, I have no interest in aligning myself with the program of Collins and Evans or in utilizing their classification scheme. In contrast, I accept Jasanoff’s (2003: 394) invitation (written in criticism of the ‘third wave’) to “take the boundaries [between experts and others in society] as entry points for inquiry into the relations between science and power, to ask how they come about, and what functions they serve in channeling both knowledge and politics”. Certainly such an approach might help us formulate some normative statements concerning expertise, but it refrains from making certain distinctions in advance. For example, rather than assuming a distinction between scientific and political issues, I am interested in how that distinction is achieved and the nature of that supposed boundary. Also, I fully recognize the ambiguity inherent in the concept of the public, which serves as a sort of social background for this study, against which more clearly defined actors such as scientific experts can be delineated. How that delineation takes place will be of primary importance.
As the entry point for this analysis, I have chosen to begin with a discussion of Tim
63 Ball. As a leading FoS “scientific advisor,” and with associations to numerous other groups and projects, he is a well-placed example of a certain sort of climate skeptic – the accredited scientific expert. A controversy over his credentials is a good case for demonstrating some of the issues involved in evaluating this sort of expertise; we will see that the construction of expertise in the public domain is not free of personal accountability, but that in this case at least, it is also a flexible and resilient process.
Dr. Tim Ball – Climatologist
Tim Ball is a hard man to miss if one pays some attention to climate skeptics, particularly in Canada. He has been featured in The Great Global Warming Swindle
(Durkin 2007), the FoS’s Climate Catastrophe: Cancelled (Visser 2005), and has been prominently criticized in CBC’s The Denial Machine, where he was described as “the leading [climate] critic in Canada” (Karp & McKeown 2006). Ball’s status as a climatologist is one of his most valuable assets, as demonstrated by his introduction on the cross-Canada radio broadcast, Adler Online as, a “real climatologist” who was on air to finally put the issue in a perspective that a long list of non-climatologist guests had been unable to. An excerpt from Charles Adler’s (2007) interview with Ball suggests many of the benefits claimed by Ball’s expertise, and covers many recurring themes found in other interviews featuring Ball:
Adler: How does it make you feel that so much of the conversation these days about climate involves people who know, very little about what they’re talking about, people who have not studied the climate all their lives. They’ve read pamphlets and theories and they’ve surfed the web and they’ve gotten into the blogs, and they’ve
64 gotten all emotional about it, but they don’t really know much about climatology. How does it make you feel as a climatologist to sit there and watch that happen.
Ball: It’s extremely frustrating and um- and in fact what- what makes it even more frustrating Charles is that, whenever I go on a program immediately the first question is, what are you credentials to talk about this, and then second who’s funding you. Those questions are never ever asked of the other people. [I mean] Gore can come on nobody ever says to him well- you know what are your credentials to talk about this, so, it- it’s even more annoying. So, when I talk to audiences, you know Mark Twain said everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it, I paraphrase that and say everybody talks about the weather but very few know what they’re talking about.
It should be noted that a degree in climatology is quite rare among climate scientists in general, including many of the authors who prepared the IPCC WG I assessments.
Climate scientists often hold degrees which a layperson might assume have little to do with climate, such as geography or oceanography. A Ph.D in climatology however, automatically suggests expertise in matters of climate, especially if (as in the case of this interview) one does not ask further questions about the expert’s academic standing.
Therefore, Tim Ball the climatologist can claim to “know what [he’s] talking about”, in contrast to someone like Al Gore who cannot present similar credentials (see also
Montgomery 2006). Gore thus makes an easy target for Ball to compare himself against, but as we will see later this is not simply a matter of convenience. Gore is in many ways the embodiment of the AGW argument and remains a natural point of attack for skeptics, even though the recent scandals have shifted more of the skeptics’ arguments against the IPCC.
It should also be noted that while Ball expresses annoyance at the unfair standards to which climate skeptics are held in regards to their credentials, there are a number of prominent skeptics such as Christopher Monckton or Nigel Lawson who are able to attract
65 significant attention without a climate science background (though they, like Gore regularly face criticism along these same lines). Ball’s observation that he is often questioned on the basis of his funding is borne out as one of the primary lines of attack by his critics,2 and he is promptly asked by Adler to address the issue. Much of the next several minutes of the interview are thus spent debunking the “smear” that Ball is in the pay of oil companies, and emphasizing the easy money (“a hundred thousand a year at least”) that Ball could gain by jumping on the Gore “bandwagon”. Instead, Ball forgoes the rewards of the mainstream and, in the words of Adler, chooses an “almost pauper-like existence” as a climate skeptic
(Adler 2007).
Tim Ball is a rare and valuable sort of expert among the skeptics – as a committed and capable spokesperson for the issue, and an accredited climatologist, he has been an asset to a variety of groups and has made a vast number of public appearances. In 2007 his profile as Chairman of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (now apparently defunct) would claim Ball to have “given over 600 public talks over the last decade on science and the environment” (Internet Archive Wayback Machine 2007). He has also authored numerous articles and letters published in Canadian newspapers,3 in which he is typically identified as an environmental consultant, former climatology professor, or both. He has been part of the FoS’s Scientific Advisory Board since the beginning, and “helped set up” the group (Adler 2007). Ball is also a Senior Fellow at the FCPP and has co-authored a report for the Fraser Institute in criticism of climate modeling (Green, Ball & Schroeder
2004).
Ball frequently makes several claims in regards to the climate: that the Earth’s
66 climate “changes all the time” (Beck 2007) and has been warmer in the past for natural reasons, but that this variability has been covered-up in the “hockey-stick graph” which acts as a basis for IPCC claims (Ball 2004; Visser 2007). Also, Ball claims that the role of water-vapor and the sun are undervalued in the inherently flawed climate models of the
IPCC (Durkin 2007), and that the ongoing focus on the role of CO2 in the climate is mistaken (Ball 2005). These scientific claims are also often accompanied by a criticism of the ongoing policy efforts to address AGW such as the Kyoto Protocol, and more recently the Copenhagen Conference. Ball has identified such efforts as driven by the “enviro- lobby” (Ball 2005), and even linked the 2009 Copenhagen Conference with efforts to create a “one world government” and a “fascist takeover of the world” (Jones 2009b).
Ball can be described as “an affable and entertaining speaker” (Hoggan &
Littlemore 2009: 49) – qualities which have doubtlessly aided his communications with the public. However he is also often presented in a way that highlights his qualifications as a climatologist, thus granting his criticisms of the false science of AGW more credibility. It is thus instructive to examine what occurred in April of 2006, when Ball’s scientific credentials were contested through a letter printed in The Calgary Herald. Ball had published an op-ed piece in the paper on April 19 (Ball 2006) in which he criticized Tim
Flannery, the author of the popular book The Weather Makers. He argued that Flannery had no relevant credentials in the climate field, and rebuked some of the claims associated with his work. Ball received criticism of his own in a letter printed in the newspaper four days later, written by environmental science professor Dan Johnson (2006). Johnson took issue with the op-ed’s claim that Ball "was the first climatology PhD in Canada and worked as a
67 professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg for 28 years”. He claimed instead that Ball was a junior lecturer for much of that time, had spent just eight years as a professor, had never published a paper relevant to climate, held a Ph.D in geography, and also listed three Canadian Ph.D climatologists who had preceded him.
Ball requested an apology from Johnson and the Calgary Herald, and while neither apologized, the Herald did issue a correction to Johnson’s letter on August 20th that conveyed Ball’s claim to have published more than thirty climate and atmosphere-related papers. This was not enough to avoid a $325,000 lawsuit by Ball against both the Herald and Johnson filed on September 1, 2006, arguing that Johnson’s statements constituted defamation. However both Johnson and the newspaper chose to defend the publication of the letter, with Johnson receiving legal support from James Hoggan and DeSmogBlog.com.
The separate Statements of Defence (Littlemore 2006a) filed to the court by Johnson and the Herald in October and December of 2006 were in some ways more critical of Ball than
Johnson’s original letter; they closely documented Ball’s academic career, his lack of peer- reviewed academic research on the topic of AGW, and the Herald’s statement took the further step of declaring that Ball “is viewed as a paid promoter of the agenda of the oil and gas industry rather than as a practicing scientist” (Parlee McLaws 2006: 12). In June of
2007 Ball dropped the lawsuit, and Richard Littlemore (2009) would later claim that as a result of the episode his credibility had been blown to the point that even the “climate denial industry” no longer wants to be associated with him.
Tim Ball’s credentials are regularly given as a public justification of his expertise
(or used to criticize his lack thereof). It is therefore instructive to see what the consequences
68 of Ball’s failed lawsuit have been, though it should be noted that the Herald has never published an article concerning the episode, and the information about it is available primarily through DeSmogBlog.com. One noticeable result is that since Johnson’s letter,
Ball has avoided listing the number of years he has served as a climatology professor in his publications. His profile on the FoS website has been changed from 2006, when it listed him as the first Climatology Ph.D in Canada with 32 years as Professor of Climatology
(Internet Archive Wayback Machine 2006). Today he is described as “faculty member at the University of Winnipeg from 1971 to 1996, during which time he was an Assistant
Professor, Associate Professor and Professor, specializing in climatology” (FoS n.d.c). It does not take long to find links to DeSemogBlog or SourceWatch which mention the lawsuit by entering “Tim Ball” as a search term on Google. However, one receives a much greater number of links that offer Ball’s climate-related claims without criticisms of his expertise.4 Ball has continued to be vocal in the aftermath of recent scandals, though he has not made any appearances to mainstream television audiences since 2007 (as in Beck 2007 and Durkin 2007). Instead, it is boasted that he made some forty radio appearances in a week following Climategate (Leahey 2009), and could be found on popular American broadcasts such as Coast to Coast AM (Noory 2009) and The Alex Jones Show (Jones
2009b). One can find videos of various recent interviews with Ball on YouTube.com, with the most popular being a segment of Alex Jones’ (2009a) film Fall of the Republic.5 Most recently he has made a bizarrely covert appearance on Jesse Ventura’s Conspiracy Theory series as a “climate scientist who has been at the top of his field since the 1970s” but must conceal his identity for fear of death, “because he defied the global warming forces” (see
69 Littlemore 2010). Despite the video’s dramatic claim that Ball is in hiding in order to protect himself and his family, he continues to make public appearances as a climate skeptic and is regularly introduced by way of his qualifications as a climatologist.
The case of Tim Ball serves to illuminate some of the issues regarding credibility as a public expert in climate science. Clearly, qualifications and experience are important attributes, as demonstrated by the references to Ball’s climate science background whenever he is introduced as an expert, and his willingness to sue to protect this credibility from attack. The case also demonstrates the flexibility with which expertise is constructed in the public domain, and the limits to this flexibility (specifically in the newspaper and online mediums). Expertise can be constructed in various ways, although within (inexact) limits. This supports Lynch’s (2004) and Potter’s (1996: 115) view of the ‘expert’ as a category in which one’s membership cannot simply be assumed, but instead must be persuasively built up, and even then has the ever-present possibility of being disputed. We see, as in the courtroom, that the “discursive movement of self-identification, qualification and disavowal, and other-attribution and challenge, simultaneously resolve the configuration of the category and place the candidate member within it” (Lynch 2004: 178).
Claims to expertise can result in counter-claims that are consequential, particularly when an expert cannot adequately defend his or her qualifications, but to be discredited entirely as an expert in public is a different matter. There are simply a multitude of media platforms on which one’s expertise can be constructed, and while the internet provides additional means of evaluating expertise through “fact-checking” an individual’s credentials or claims, much of the public simply does not have the time, desire, or ability to follow such a procedure,
70 and determines the trustworthiness of an expert claims another way.
There is another possible interpretation of the case of Tim Ball which speaks to some of the more general characteristics of climate skeptic counter-movement. This interpretation would take Ball’s problematic expertise as an indicator that climate skeptics simply have a difficult time finding reputable climate scientists to act as spokespersons for their cause, and must settle for individuals such as Ball who exaggerate their credibility in order to be taken seriously. Such a view is not entirely unjustified, and it seems quite clear that the climate scientists who do not accept the basic AGW hypothesis are outnumbered by those who do, though attempts to more precisely delineate the proportions of scientific opinion have been subjected to their own controversies, which I pay closer attention to in the next chapter. However, it should be noted that there are some climate scientists commonly identified as skeptics who are certainly more respectable than Tim Ball, perhaps none more so than Richard Lindzen. David Keith, for one, credits Lindzen as a skeptic who
“actually really knows what he’s talking about”, but argues there’s hardly anyone else like him (personal communication, September 11, 2009). Lindzen, an accomplished atmospheric physicist and contributor to IPCC reports, disagrees with the rise in temperatures projected to be due to an increase in atmospheric CO2. Aside from Lindzen, there are numerous other experts with somewhat less impressive scientific credentials, who are often easier to criticize on the basis of lack of relevant peer-reviewed publications, and many of whom can be argued to have some (often tenuous) link to the energy industry.
However there are also reputable climate scientists who do not fit comfortably into either of the two camps. Individuals such as Hans von Storch and Roger Pielke Sr. accept the core
71 elements of the AGW hypothesis, but have been critical of many of the claims associated with it. Finally, it is also important to note just how little of the public debate over AGW is carried out by reputable climate scientists, regardless of which side we are considering.
Indeed it is striking how in some cases a lack of relevant credentials hardly seems to matter in this controversy. The issue of how expertise can be constructed without reference to the conventional sorts of qualifications is one I will take up next.
The Public Performance of Climate Expertise
If one spends enough time observing the roster of leading voices engaged in the public aspects of the global warming controversy, it appears that very few of them would pass the first two of Hoggan and Littlemore’s (2009: 231) conditions to be qualified as climate experts – having relevant credentials and peer-reviewed publications on the topic.
At a recent high-profile debate in Canada (Goldstein 2009), the four participants included
Nigel Lawson, Bjørn Lomborg, George Monbiot, and Elizabeth May – none of whom qualify as climate scientists, but three of whom are internationally recognized climate experts or claimsmakers (their expertise has also regularly been questioned). It is possible that the organizers of the debate intentionally avoided including climate scientists, but this was not an unusual case. In Canada, it is safe to say that the two leading voices in the AGW controversy are Al Gore and David Suzuki, neither of whom is a climate scientist. When the FoS organized a speaking tour for the fall of 2009, they chose to sponsor Christopher
Monckton, another “self-styled” climate expert without the credentials of a climate scientist. Finally there is the host of online climate blogs that have more recently expanded
72 the dimensions of the public debate. Some of these are maintained by leading climate scientists, but the majority are not, and as Alexa traffic statistics (Alexa n.d.) suggest, the blogs of the “amateurs” have a much larger audience.
It would be wrong to argue that we should abandon the focus on expertise when considering such individuals, who might be better considered under the broader category of
“claimsmakers”. They simply occupy too much of the public debate, are treated as experts by large numbers of the public, and must still demonstrate a command of the science in order to be credible. I avoid classifying them as “lay experts” since this would delineate what is often a blurred line between “lay” and “expert”, and thus call them experts not as an affirmation of their expertise, but simply to acknowledge that this is how they are perceived by some. It is wishful thinking on the part of many established climate scientists that this particular controversy could be restricted to a limited number of voices in respected peer- reviewed journals, while in the meantime some of this very literature is being dissected and undermined by bloggers with real consequences – a point to which I will return in the third chapter. As offensive as the notion that such “amateurs” can compete on the same level as accredited climate scientists in the controversy might be, it is a fact that much of the public seems perfectly willing to ignore Hoggan and Littlemore’s criteria for evaluating expertise, and make their evaluations along other lines. This fact is incredibly important, since there is simply no chance of achieving the sort of massive changes that those alarmed by AGW are calling for as long as a large proportion of the population does not accept the existence of a problem.
I argue that what has been missing from this discussion so far is a greater emphasis
73 on the performative aspects of public expertise, and the negotiation of trust between the public and experts. Stephen Hilgartner has previously examined struggles over the credibility of science in such a performative sense.6 In Science on Stage (2000) Hilgartner draws on Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical perspective to analyze documents containing scientific advice concerning health and diet. Hilgartner thus extends the dramatic metaphor from Goffman’s original interest in considering face-to-face interaction, and applies it to a study of written texts. He describes how “[t]o win the confidence of their audiences,
[scientific] advisory bodies actively display their competence and credibility. They present themselves as knowledgeable and trustworthy. They comport themselves in ways that exhibit their integrity and good judgment” (ibid.: 8).
Though Hilgartner shows such an analysis of written documents to be possible, I feel that the dramatic metaphor is best suited for the types of interactions for which it was originally intended, and that other approaches to discourse and rhetoric are probably more applicable to the study of written texts. However, it is impossible to miss the dramatic dimension of a living expert upon a stage, leading their audience along a narrative designed to conclude with an argument about reality’s state of affairs. In such cases the metaphor of performance is hardly a metaphor. Certainly one can discover many performative techniques in a written report, but the skills required to write a persuasive paper are quite different from those used to stage a compelling performance in the flesh – as evidenced by the numerous well-published academics who have such trouble with the latter. What differs is not only the possibilities and constraints offered by the medium in which such scientific claims are made (written versus oral), but also the nature of the audience – since what
74 might work to persuade one’s peers in the pages of a journal will fall flat on the ears of the public, and vice versa.
Again I would like to dismiss the notion that scientific claims made beyond the pages of respected journals are somehow “not science” and “just rhetoric”, since the notion that rhetoric is absent from the pages of Science is just as false as the idea that science is somehow absent from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The view that popularized science is just a simplified or distorted version of “genuine science” serves to legitimate the authority of “genuine science”, and is itself a simplification of the processes by which scientific knowledge spreads (Hilgartner 1990). The border between academic and public forms of science communication can be quite permeable (Danette 2004; Weingart 1998), particularly in situations of controversy (Brossard 2009; Simon 2001). It is thus better to think of the sorts of public performances that I am considering as a different form, or use of science (Cloître & Shinn 1985; Zehr 2000), than the more institutionalized manifestations which have hereto received the bulk of sociological attention. When science is utilized within public performance, associations and chains of reference can still be extended from the performer’s claims back to the products of the laboratory, but the information is invariably transformed into another form. The nature of the stage places constraints on but also opens possibilities for the content of the performance. “Impression management” is key, and the audience must ultimately find the performance believable in order for it to be successful.
I do not want to follow Goffman too closely, or push the dramaturgical metaphor too far. For example I will avoid distinguishing “frontstage” from “backstage” as Goffman
75 (1959), Hilgartner (2000), and even Giddens (1990: 86) have done, in order to avoid the judgments necessary to populate an expert’s “backstage” with various attributes which I might think that they have worked to conceal. My focus will be simply on the “frontstage”
– the performance of scientific expertise. Such a performance is necessarily rhetorical in the sense that it works to be persuasive, and a key means by which this is done is through the establishment and negotiation of trust. The key question to ask of the following cases is: how do these experts work to establish trust and credibility?
Trust is an often-invoked but inconsistently utilized concept in sociology and related disciplines. As Möllering (2006: 5) notes, trust is an idea that people can relate to from common experience, and concerns over trust regularly appear in public discourse.
Academically however, trust can be used as a “black-boxed, catch-all concept to fill major holes in a theory” (ibid.: 4), but it is striking how many attempts have been made to define some core element or idea behind the numerous and heterogeneous uses of the term.7 My own use of trust does not fully embrace any of these definitions, though it certainly draws on some of Möllering’s (2006) and Giddens’ (1990) treatments of the concept.
I see no need, as Möllering has done, to find a way to unite the various abstract conceptions and applications of trust. Instead my focus is much more specific, and concerns how trust is related to public expertise and scientific knowledge. In this sense trust can still be seen as “ontological security” (Giddens 1990; 1991), or subsumed under Möllering’s
(2006: 111) definition as “suspending irreducible social vulnerability and uncertainty as if they were favorably resolved”, thus maintaining a state of positive expectation towards others. However it also has a more clearly bounded meaning: as far as scientific knowledge
76 is concerned, I argue that trust is a very useful way of thinking about how such knowledge claims are spread, transformed, and accepted (albeit often only conditionally). Certainly much is made about the transparency of science’s methods, the replicability and falsifiability of its findings (Popper 1963), and the trails of references that fortify scientific publications from attack (Latour 1987), but trust acts as a convenient shortcut around the more cumbersome ways of evaluating knowledge claims. The question of ‘what do we know’ is today, as it has always been, intimately connected with the question of ‘who do we trust’.
Other work has previously accorded trust a central role in relations between science and the public (Gregory & Miller 1998; Wynne 1991; 1996), but trust also plays a role in virtually all other social relations, including those within science’s borders. Indeed, the sociology of science has shown that trust has been crucial since the beginnings of modern science, when the question of how knowledge produced by experiment could be made authoritative was answered through the witnessing of demonstrations by trusted gentlemen
(Shapin & Schaffer 1985). As the peer-review publication process became the standard by which scientific claims were granted credibility (though such credibility is always open to challenge) there was a shift towards a more detailed accounting of methodology and results
(Bazerman 1988) under the assumption that by fully describing the relevant processes other scientists could “check the findings” themselves. The development of modern science thus sought to replace trust in authority with a sort of “intellectual individualism” (Shapin 1996:
72). However as several studies have shown, replicating a scientific experiment is a far more complicated matter than simply putting into practice the contents of a methodology
77 chapter (Collins 1974; 1981; Collins & Pinch 1993). Instead, a host of unmentioned variables must be controlled and “tacit knowledge” implemented, leaving plenty of room for controversy when the outcome of replication differs from the original. All discussion of replication and falsification aside, it is clear that the vast majority of scientific knowledge is not subjected to this sort of rigorous testing (Mulkay 1979: 50-59). Most scientific publications are quietly ignored, and others are accepted or cited on the basis of much less comprehensive means of evaluation. It is here that trust is a key component in the spread of scientific knowledge claims (Yearley 2000), as the credibility of an author, a publication, or a methodology can be sufficient for findings to gain a measure of acceptance. Naturally, if these findings are truly extraordinary (as in the case of cold fusion), there can be no presentation credible enough in order to prevent rigorous testing by others, but as long as science is following the expected course, there is much that is accepted on the basis of trust.8
A number of theorists have noted that trust is not simply achieved between individuals, but is also negotiated between individuals and institutions (see Möllering 2006:
70-75). Giddens (1990: 83) argues that “the nature of modern institutions is deeply bound up with the mechanisms of trust in abstract systems, especially trust in expert systems”.
Individual experts can be thought of as “access points” to these more abstract institutions, providing highly consequential “facework” through displays of trustworthiness and integrity. In the meantime much of the work of institutions such as science is faceless and beyond the knowledge of the layperson, but can be accepted with a measure of trust and confidence (ibid.: 84-88). Naomi Oreskes (2010) has argued that without some degree of
78 trust in experts, the public would simply be paralyzed in modern society. Brian Wynne
(1996) has emphasized that trust in individuals and institutions is never unconditional, but is subject to continuous renegotiation as relationships evolve.9 As Jane Gregory and Steve
Miller (1998: 101-103) note, the public’s trust in science is not usually a problem, since the world of science is just too vast and incomprehensible for the public to scrutinize closely.
But when this trust is tested and science is perceived to have “gone wrong” in an important way, the tensions between science and the public can be observed playing out through the mass media.
Certainly the public’s trust in science is an ambivalent and uneasy one, in part due to the difficulty of pinning down just what science is among all of its heterogeneous and nebulous parts. The other important factor is the numerous times that science has been perceived to have “gone wrong” since the 1960s, as exemplified by some of the unexpected and deleterious consequences of technological change, which in some ways at least, have contributed to the public’s distrust of experts (Brannigan & Goldenberg 1985). Still, despite various academic discussions about increasing the participation of the public in science and policy-making (Gonçalves 2006; Irwin 1995), the traditional role of scientific expertise remains a seemingly invaluable resource in many controversies, particularly those concerning the environment. Environmental groups are put in the difficult position of having to criticize as well as draw on the authority of science in the battle for credibility
(Yearley 1996), as experts from both sides attempt to achieve the ever-elusive ideal of objectivity (Gergen 1994; Sarewitz 2004).
What does all of this mean for the preceding discussion of Tim Ball? It is clear that
79 the display of appropriate credentials is an important means by which such experts can attempt to harness the public’s trust in the (broadly defined) institution of science, even as they criticize more narrowly defined scientific institutions such as the IPCC and Climate
Research Unit. Ball can claim, by virtue of his status and expertise, to know certain scientifically-approved truths, and be entitled to make certain claims. It was Johnson’s attack on his claimed expertise that threatened Ball’s status as someone who “knows what he’s talking about” and spurred Ball to defend his expertise. However we should not forget about Ball’s less tangible impression-based attributes – namely his skill as an entertaining performer who “stitches together folksy anecdotes with a succession of charts, graphs and pictures” and can easily be described as a “warm, likable character, [with] no reason to believe he is not sincere in his concern for science and public policy” (Montgomery 2006).
These more performative aspects of public expertise are perhaps better illustrated by considering three individuals who have achieved considerable attention as climate change experts without laying claim to much in the way of scientific credentials – specifically Al
Gore, David Suzuki, and Christopher Monckton.
Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth and the Nature of David Suzuki
At least since 2007, there has been no one as closely associated with the AGW problem as Al Gore. The hit documentary AIT (Guggenheim 2006) helped propel the issue to a new pinnacle of public attention, and worked to transform Gore’s identity from a failed candidate for the office of U.S. President, to a tireless campaigner championing the truth of global warming. What is truly remarkable in light of the preceding is that Gore was able to
80 accomplish this not only without any qualifications in climate science, but also with his background as a politician – a profession not particularly known for the trust it inspires among the public. Yet according to a pair of American polls conducted in 2008 and 2010
(Leiserowitz, Maibach & Roser-Renouf 2009; 2010) Gore has repeatedly been listed as a relatively trusted source of information about climate change. While the survey ranked him behind “scientists” and “environmental organizations”, he appeared more trusted on the issue than any other politician on the list, and is ranked far ahead of the least-trusted source of climate change information - “corporations”.
Al Gore and AIT have been subjected to frequent and repeated attacks by climate skeptics over charges of scientific inaccuracy (Monckton 2007b), hypocrisy (Gunter 2008), and conflict of interest (P. J. Watson 2009). Scientists have been somewhat divided on
Gore’s message, sometimes finding fault with particular claims in the film, but still praising the overall message (Broad 2007). I do not want to focus on the more critical responses to
AIT except to note that these are a consequence of the high profile Gore and the film have been able to achieve. Gore has been singled out not only because he is relatively easy to criticize, but also because he has persuaded so many, and his message has become so widespread. AIT won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2007, helped Gore win the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, and has been widely shown in schools. It is therefore worthwhile to consider how Gore has managed to achieve such success as a public expert on global warming.
It is important to note that AIT, like all of the films I have previously mentioned, is not simply a recording made of an individual’s performance, but a product that has been
81 carefully assembled from a vast number of parts through the process of filmmaking. In this sense it both follows many of the conventions of documentary film, but it also has some unconventional elements – chiefly its returning focus to Al Gore’s global warming slide- show, which in many ways makes AIT feel more like a speech than a documentary (Bergin
2009: 150-152). This slide-show is combined with other, shorter narratives to construct a case for AGW, and the moral imperative to address it. However the film is also interspersed with segments in which Gore, speaking in a much more personal tone, recounts his own life and his relationship to global warming. These stories aid the viewer in identifying (Cohen
2001) with Gore. They are designed to allow the audience to peer into Gore’s “backstage” and see him as he appears when he is not performing, showing him as a child, a student, an activist, and a father. Gore tells us stories that demonstrate how he values the environment, and is deeply committed to addressing global warming. But of course, these are simply performances designed to give the impression that Al Gore is not an act, and that the man upon the stage is an honest version of who he truly is. If the audience accepts Gore’s stories, they have no reason not to trust him, because he lays the contents of his life out for them to see and clearly explains his noble motivation. As Jeff Bergin (2009: 153) notes, this has the effect of diminishing Gore’s self as a politician. He does not deny his political past, and indeed showcases his decades-long political engagement with global warming as evidence of his dedication, but focuses first and foremost on his humanist self. The audience hears Gore say “I was in politics for a long time”, but it is strongly suggested that he has since become something else. Al Gore in the AIT-era can better be described as a
“guru” or a climate change “superstar” (Vogelaar 2008: 134), and it is made clear at the
82 outset of the film that he is a very popular and respected for what he does. He is introduced in the first few minutes with shots of audiences standing and cheering, or paying close attention to him, as he travels the world giving his presentation, and greeting his fans. The audience can thus identify with the audiences in the film – wherein Gore is already widely trusted and appreciated.
Gore’s performance is without a doubt aided by his long political experience, and indeed one would expect an experienced American politician to be skilled at communicating with the public (the same cannot be said for experienced climate scientists).
Gore is skilled not only at constructing rhetoric, but also in its delivery – his tone, manner, and timing, and the way he carries himself both on the stage and (supposedly) off of it. All of this has the result of impressing the sort of sincerity and authority that inspires trust in a performer. Gore is very comfortable talking about global warming because he supposedly knows a lot about it. He is also very personable, engaging the audience as much as he addresses them. Accordingly, his performance inspires trust.
However, Gore does not simply ask the audience to trust him. Instead, he makes the truth visible as he confidently describes it. The audience is shown the science of AGW made visible through a number of enormous graphs, including a “hockey-stick” reconstruction of historic temperatures, and the iconic “Keeling Curve”, which tracks the increase in atmospheric CO2 since 1958. The audience is also shown various other supposedly scientific models, maps, and records which vividly illustrate the evidence for
AGW. The use of scientific visuals is its own field of science studies10 which I can only acknowledge, as to deviate into an analysis of the visual representations of AGW is simply
83 beyond the scope of this work. Clearly, however, graphs can be thought of as rhetorical tools in the public performance of science. They invite the audience to see the data themselves and draw the appropriate conclusions. Supposedly these visuals are objective scientific measurements,11 but they are presented in simplified form and often without context. This Bergin (2009: 161) identifies as one of the film’s “central truth-building techniques: to rely on science but remain distanced from the scientists who contributed to it”. With very few exceptions the audience is not shown who produced the science and how, but the product of the science is made visible and unambiguous.
Together, these various representations showcase a macroscopic vision of the abstract and theoretical dimension of climate change, but they are used alongside more local, material evidence that allows the audience to actually witness AGW (Vogelaar 2008).
This occurs both during the slide show as well as some of the intermittent segments, where self-evident signs of warming such as melting glaciers are shown. Gore also connects us to less direct effects of AGW by showing the spread of pine beetles and ecological damage, photos of flood and drought, the terror of Hurricane Katrina, and other signs of nature
“going crazy”. All manner of senseless disasters are thereby explicable through AGW, which Gore can relate to the lived experiences of people. There may be science which underlies these connections, but these visible consequences of AGW are also treated as basically self-evident.
There are several things that AIT can teach us about the effective use of science in public. First, Gore uses scientific evidence, but with much flexibility and in “layman’s terms”. He does not allow his performance to be bogged down with references to particular
84 scientists and publications, but hits the audience with a series of visible facts which he confidently connects together. The science of AGW acts as a sort of backdrop against which more concrete experiences of global warming can be presented, connecting facts to social consequences, and providing Gore with an ultimately moral argument. But it is trust which either makes AIT persuasive, or ultimately does not. The audience is invited to get to know Al Gore, and recognize that he is someone to be trusted with the truth of global warming. The science Gore presents is as much about allowing the audience to ‘see for themselves’ as it is to show that Gore has seen it all. He has studied the graphs, talked with the scientists, and gone to Antarctica to see the ice cores with his own eyes, and he is able to channel all of this knowledge into a larger truth. If the audience is not impressed by his performance, if they think that Gore is disingenuous or misinformed, they can find plenty of evidence to reinforce this view on the internet. But Gore’s film did persuade many, and characterizes the start of an era in which AGW became a largely acknowledged fact. Alison
Vogelaar’s 2008 rhetorical analysis of the film confidently declared that this era would last through the time of our “children’s children” – if they survived climate change (ibid.: 1).
Well, it now appears that the AIT-inspired era lasted just a few short years, and that the truth about global warming in 2010 appears more complicated than it did in 2007. I will discuss the implications of these recent developments in the following chapter, but for now it is important to note that AIT offers just one powerful example of how global warming science operates in the public debate.
David Suzuki may not be as internationally recognizable as Al Gore, but within
Canada he is the leading champion of the environmental movement and the best-known
85 public communicator of science. Suzuki has had a long career first as a geneticist, then as a television and radio broadcaster. He has also written dozens of books for a public audience, dedicated energy to various forms of activism, and has received a long list of awards for different aspects of his work (Suzuki n.d.). Recurrently since the early 1990s, Suzuki has provided evidence of AGW and advocated changes to address it. The David Suzuki
Foundation, an environmental organization started by Suzuki and a number of others in
1991, became the host of Al Gore’s Climate Project in Canada in 2009, bringing together the efforts of both organizations to spread awareness of the threat of AGW.12
Like Gore, Suzuki is an effective communicator, and has a long history of making scientific and environmental issues accessible and relevant to the public. He has the voice of a skilled radio broadcaster, and what can be described as a warm and personable charm.
Suzuki is also a scientist – a fact typically emphasized in his various bios, which often do not mention what specific scientific credentials Suzuki holds. Thus, he is able to draw on the authority and credibility of science in a way that Gore cannot (though Suzuki never claims to be a climate scientist). However, Suzuki also has a long history of championing various, primarily environmental causes. This supposedly selfless dedication to making the world a better place helps to inspire the public’s trust. Suzuki is known as a voice for nature and an identifier of humanity’s problems.
As this brief sketch shows, Suzuki’s expertise on AGW can in many ways be understood through the points raised in the preceding discussion. While he has established personal attributes that promote his credibility (his scientific background and activism for noble causes), Suzuki is also an accomplished performer. It is no coincidence that he is
86 both Canada’s most experienced public communicator of science, and a leading expert on
AGW. He has also been actively and provocatively embroiled in the controversy around
AGW, and in a joint-appearance with Gore on Canadian public radio in November 2009
(Ghomeshi 2009), Suzuki singled out the FoS as an “oil-industry supported group posing as a science group”, that was perpetrating an “intergenerational crime” through the group’s then-ongoing radio advertising campaign.
Together, Gore and Suzuki represent two high-profile public voices advocating for measures to address AGW. Their work is necessarily and inherently performative, but in order to stage persuasive performances Gore and Suzuki must also demonstrate their expertise on the topic. While neither lays claim to climate science credentials, they do display their competent grasp of the science in order for their truth claims and moral arguments to be credible. Both Gore and Suzuki rely on negotiating trust with the public as a central part of their expertise. This is done both by building on the public’s trust in the institution of science, as well through impressing on their audience their trustworthy character. For Gore, this is achieved in a particularly visible way through the personal journey he shares with the audience in AIT, while Suzuki has the advantage of a long- established reputation as a voice for the environment and a campaigner for a better world.
To demonstrate one more approach to the performance of expertise in the AGW controversy, I will now consider the case of a leading skeptic – Christopher Monckton.
Christopher Monckton – the “Anti-Gore”
Beginning in 2006 a new voice entered the global warming debate, and despite a
87 lack of scientific credentials he has achieved considerable recognition as a “global warming expert” (Heartland Institute n.d.) particularly among climate skeptics. Christopher
Monckton, typically identified as Lord Christopher Monckton, the Third Viscount
Monckton of Brenchley, is among many other things, a former journalist, a British hereditary peer with a number of titles, and inventor of the “eternity puzzle”. His chiefly touted qualification as an expert on global warming is his time served as a “policy advisor” for Margaret Thatcher (alternately, he is also commonly identified as a “former science advisor”), and his correction of a table in the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, which “earned him the status of Nobel Peace Laureate. His Nobel prize pin, made of gold recovered from a physics experiment, was presented to him by the Emeritus Professor of
Physics at the University of Rochester, New York” (Science & Public Policy Institute n.d.).
These claims, along with his membership in the British House of Lords, are criticized as
“unfounded self-promotion” and “outrageous exaggeration” by Hoggan and Littlemore
(2009: 113), but the truth of the matter almost seems irrelevant. Clearly Monckton enjoys some flexibility in how his expertise is presented, but this is not his greatest asset.
Monckton never claims to be a climate scientist, and while he does claim part of the IPCC’s
Nobel win, he also regards the prize as “a joke” (Sheehan 2010) and has used much stronger language to describe the IPCC. Lord Monckton the global warming expert did not achieve his rapid rise to prominence in the controversy on the weight of his credentials, but on what can be described as his more performative attributes. While this appears to frustrate his critics, who repeatedly point to his lack of appropriate qualifications, it has not stopped Monckton from engaging the science of AGW in a way that many have found
88 persuasive.
Monckton’s less frequent identification as “the Anti-Gore” is in part a recognition of his prominence among skeptics, as well as due to his dogged criticism of Al Gore and
AIT. Monckton regularly points out errors in the film (Monckton 2007b) and has attacked
Gore on various other grounds. He was the key figure behind a British court challenge against the widespread showing of AIT in British schools (Beck 2008), which resulted in the identification of nine errors in the film, and a judge’s ruling that the film must be accompanied by guidance showing the “the other side of the argument” (BBC News 2007).
Skeptics have typically portrayed the ruling as a debunking of AIT, while those supporting the film have noted that the judge found the movie to be largely accurate. Monckton has also repeatedly called for a public debate with Gore, and regularly makes much of the fact that Gore refuses to engage with him or other climate skeptics.
Monckton is a prolific writer, regularly publishing articles through the Science &
Public Policy Institute (SPPI), an American think tank for which he serves as an expert.
However his greatest skill is as a public speaker, and it is his confident and dramatic performances, combined with the great deal of energy he has dedicated to the skeptics’ cause, that appear to have been responsible for catapulting him into the spotlight of the controversy. While Monckton is by no means unflappable, as demonstrated by the disruption of a webcast by a group of activists he called “crazed Hitler Youth” (Demelle
2009), he does have remarkable composure and a vigorous combative streak. Monckton’s radio debate with Richard Littlemore in 2008 was touted as a victory by climate skeptics
(Taylor 2008), and he has recently engaged in a series of debates during a winter 2010 tour
89 of Australia. As interesting as it might be, the public debate is a form of performance quite different from any of those considered so far, and I will avoid discussing this medium in detail. Rather, my focus in this section is on Monckton’s fall 2009 presentations – which were in many ways similar in format to Al Gore’s AIT slide-show, although utilizing different performative and rhetorical techniques.
The FoS sponsored a ten day cross-Canada tour by Monckton beginning in Toronto on September 29, 2009.13 When asked about why he was chosen as a speaker, Douglas
Leahey drew attention to Monckton’s “compelling presence”, and described him as “a bit more of a dramatic personality than you associate with a scientist. He’s more along the lines of a journalist. But he has the arguments, he’s very brilliant on mathematics, and knows what he’s talking about” (personal communication, January 14, 2010). Albert Jacobs described Monckton as a “sharp mind”, with few matches as a presenter. While “sometimes a bit over-the top… scientifically he is correct. He is up to date, he has all of the slides, and he knows everybody, and everybody knows him.” (personal communication, December 23,
2009). These statements suggest that Monckton is a recognized figure and highly valued for his performative flair, but that he is also considered a scientifically capable presenter with a convincing grasp of the facts, despite his lack of credentials.
Monckton’s fall 2009 presentations (Monckton 2009a) share the title and many of the slides shown in the SPPI release Apocalypse? No! (Monckton 2008a), which can be credited for initially drawing Monckton to the attention of the FoS (A. Jacobs, personal communication, December 23, 2009; D. Leahey, personal communication, January 14,
2010). But Monckton’s slide-show has received ongoing revision over the years, and each
90 of his performances is unique. The rhetoric Monckton uses appears to change depending on his audience, and the Calgary presentation I attended on October 1, 2009 was given before a rather agreeable crowd.14 The event was hosted by the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, which would counter criticism over their choice of speaker by pointing out that they had also hosted a presentation by Al Gore in 2008 (City TV 2009; DC 2009b). However, the
Chamber’s representative played a gracious host to Monckton, and following considerable applause at the end of the presentation, thanked him for his display of the truth. The room was largely full with slightly less than two hundred attendees, including four members of the provincial legislature as well as Ralph Klein – the former Premier of the province.
Local television stations and newspapers (Teel 2009) covered the event.
In observing Monckton, it is easy to see that he does indeed have a powerful presence, and makes for an entertaining presenter. With his erect posture, elaborate vocabulary and confident speech, he is every inch a British Lord. It should be noted that although Monckton is not a member of the House of Lords,15 he does not correct those who introduce him as such, and has indeed previously identified himself as “a member of the
Upper House of the United Kingdom legislature” (Monckton 2006). The crowned portcullis which is a symbol of the British legislature was featured throughout his fall 2009 presentations – sometimes comically pasted over the mouths of AGW-advocates. It is curious why Monckton’s Lordship would be at all relevant in the construction of his expertise on the topic of global warming, but it appears to provide him with a degree of gentlemanly credibility, and wraps him in the mystique of nobility – though his detractors typically use it to identify him by the less-respectable label of “aristocrat”. Monckton does
91 also showcase some of his other credentials in the early part of the presentation, noting that he worked as an advisor for Margaret Thatcher (indeed he claimed to be one of the first to advise her on the topic of global warming), but relative to Gore, he spends little time talking about his personal journey in regards to the issue of global warming, other than to mention that his convictions developed out of personal interest while he was recuperating from surgery (see Adams 2007).
Perhaps the key difference between the presentation and AIT is Monckton’s focus on critiquing his opponents who support the AGW hypothesis (or as he prefers to call them,
“the bed-wetters”). While AIT does feature a critique of industry-backed climate misinformation, including a scene of Gore acting as an investigator uncovering links to “the oil and gas lobby”, the dominant theme of Monckton’s presentation is the exposure of the
“lies” of global warming and the “liars” behind them. It is only in the second half that
Monckton moves on to present “the truth”, but even then with recurrent references to the flawed positions of the IPCC (which Monckton typically identifies as the UN, thus allowing him to make closer associations between AGW and a “one world government”).
To introduce the “lies”, the audience is shown quotes by AGW advocates such as: “[u]nless we announce disasters, no one will listen”. This statement is attributed to John Houghton, an early IPCC editor, and is the most damning quote in Monckton’s “[w]e’re all gonna lie” segment (this title is an imagined quotation of the “bed-wetters”) – coming as it does from such a key figure in the IPCC’s history. This quote has for years been prominently displayed in the texts of climate skeptics, including the FoS website. Houghton has recently complained about its use, and it was revealed to be a fabrication that had become a sort of
92 self-perpetuating fact among climate skeptics.16 Some of Monckton’s other claims may be more resilient under scrutiny, but the Houghton quote demonstrates some issues concerning the flexibility of chains-of-reference in such public presentations of science – a theme to which I will return shortly. However, the quotes are just one piece of evidence in
Monckton’s rapid-fire “information overload” style of presentation, and the audience is subsequently hit with a series of other alleged lies, first from AIT, then with various lying graphs and tables used by the IPCC. At the end of the segment, with the AGW hypothesis supposedly in tatters and the credibility of its proponents undermined, Monckton moves on to performing the truth.
Like Gore, Monckton seeks to make the truth visible in his presentation, although he does not utilize Gore’s technique of photography and film to witness the direct effects of the climate. Instead, he focuses on a distinctly scientific presentation of the truth utilizing an array of graphs, formulas, and tables. These present a series of climate facts, such as the solar explanation of temperature variation, the cooling of the oceans, and the negative feedback on temperature through cloud albedo, all of which are illustrated through reliable direct measurements and the logic of mathematical equations (as opposed to the UN’s unreliable models). The “clincher” is a recent paper by Richard Lindzen (Lindzen & Choi
2009) that paints a dramatic new picture of the climate’s sensitivity (or lack thereof) to increasing CO2. Monckton claims that this new paper changes everything, and after reviewing the findings, announces “and that is the end of the scare”.
With Al Gore and the IPCC’s lies uncovered and the true science presented,
Monckton finishes with a political and moral argument. AGW is a hoax cooked up by those
93 who “call themselves green… because they’re too yellow… to admit they’re really reds”.
Monckton then turns from his slides and engages the audience more personally and directly, to reveal what he has recently learned about the campaign to regulate carbon through the Copenhagen treaty (which Monckton claims to have read a full two months prior to the Copenhagen Conference). He implores the audience to pressure their government not to sign it, since such a scheme will cost trillions of dollars, and sign away
Canada’s sovereignty to a new “centralist dictatorship” or “one world government”.17 With its foundations in rock-hard scientific truths built upon the shattered lies of his opponents, it is this final moral argument which is the most important part of Monckton's message.
Reflections on the Public Performance of Expertise
We have seen that, much to the (imagined) disappointment of Hoggan and
Littlemore (2009), the public does not seem to put much weight in these authors' entirely rational means of evaluating expertise in the global warming controversy. Clearly, conventional qualifications such as degrees and relevant publications do count for something, but an underappreciated factor is the successful performance of expertise. Such performances work to establish the credibility of the performer, and this can be achieved through various ways, including by demonstrating the trustworthy character of the expert, or by showcasing his or her competence as a spokesperson for the science. In the case of
Christopher Monckton, this credibility is primarily established through the performative demolition of his opposition. Once the audience has been shown that those championing the AGW argument cannot be trusted, the stage is cleared for Monckton to present his own
94 truth. However in all of the previous cases it is ultimately an appeal to science that allows the experts to cement their claim to truth, and these scientific claims allow certain moral and political arguments to follow.
It should be recognized that public presentations of science such as those described above take a different form than they do on paper, with an emphasis on what can be visually represented. The audience must be able to see the science, in a way that is clear to the layperson. Often, the sort of information that would allow a careful tracing of references is missing or incomplete, so that what is shown is a decontextualized science. This is in part a limitation of the medium, with its fleeting rush of visuals (LaFollette 1982: 187), as well as a more general feature of science’s popularization.
The preceding cases have also demonstrated some of the general features of these kinds of public speaking performances. Various skills and attributes including speech and manner contribute to the impression of credibility, in ways that are specific to mediums involving a degree of “facework”. This supports Steven Shapin’s (2008) argument for the continuing importance of “personal virtues” and trust in establishing the authority of science. Rather than the modern waning of what Max Weber called “charismatic authority” in favor of more impersonal, technical, and scientific ways of knowing, Shapin argues that it is the normative uncertainty of modernity that compels us to rely on these “supposedly premodern resources”. Trust and charisma are key factors guiding the public’s determinations of “who [the] truth-speakers are” (ibid.: 3-5).
Both the construction of expertise and the presentation of scientific facts enjoy greater flexibility in the public realm than they do in the established institutions of science,
95 but the two are inter-related and I argue that science is at work in both, albeit in different forms. This conception might make scientists uncomfortable, as popular science does not conform to the standards of academia, but the public has demanded access to science, and they want it in a form that they understand. In these cases perhaps the most important factor determining the public’s acceptance of scientific fact is trust – both in the ability of the institutions of science to produce truth, and the credibility of specific experts to present it.
In deciding who to trust, particularly within the context of controversy, the public can then decide what to accept.
In the following chapter I will examine various rhetorical attempts to define the global warming controversy (or lack thereof). Some of these will be drawn from the performances and experts considered in the previous pages, but I will broaden my scope to consider the many forms of text that are part of the debate. The performative element therefore will not be as critical a factor as it has been here, as I will include a greater number of written texts. As we will see, the construction of credibility remains vital in all these forms, but such credibility is always potentially problematic and can be challenged in various ways. The ideal of science as a neutral arbiter of truth will be recurrently deployed rhetorically by actors in the controversy, who struggle to define those they oppose as existing beyond the boundaries of science. Yet, despite these attempts to limit the debate and restrict science to certain legitimate forms, the controversy now rages stronger than ever before, and in a highly polarized fashion.
96
Notes
1 See Brossard 2009; Gieryn & Figert 1990; Goodell 1977; Gregory & Miller 1998; Hilgartner 1990; Irwin 1995; Irwin & Wynne 1996; Whitley 1985. 2 See Hoggan & Littlemore 2009: 54; Karp & McKeown 2006; Littlemore 2007; Montgomery 2006. 3 A Canadian Newsstand search in January 2010 turned up 86 climate-related hits authored by Ball in the period from 2001 to 2010, although some of these are reproductions in separate newspapers. 4 When searched on February 2, 2010. 5 Which had over 1.2 million views on YouTube as of February 2010. 6 An alternate view of science as drama is found in Bucci 1998: ch. 4. 7 See Barbalet 2009; Khodyakov 2007; Lascaux 2008; Lewis & Weigert 1985; Möllering 2006. 8 As an example of the role of trust within climate science, we can turn to a recent controversy involving Phil Jones, who co-authored a paper in 1990 (Jones et al.) that claimed to find the lack of a significant “urban heat island effect”, thereby debunking an argument used by skeptics to attribute an increase in surface temperature readings to the results of urbanization. As a result of pressure from “amateur climate-data analyst” Doug Keenan, it has now been revealed that a central claim in the paper – that the weather stations sampled had “few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times” – cannot be verified or refuted because the relevant data have been lost, and Jones now admits that “the stations probably did move”. Jones claims that he “did not know that the weather stations’ locations were questionable” at the time of the paper’s publication (Heffernan 2010), and so essentially accepted the validity of the data provided by a co- author on the basis of trust. While this information has come to light because of the centrality of Jones’ work to a highly controversial topic, there are surely countless other cases within climate science where such claims have been accepted on the basis of trust, and the assumptions on which they are based have never been carefully examined (that is not to say these claims would be found equally suspect if they were examined, and I expect the majority would not). Finally it should be noted that although Keenan’s criticism of Jones did not come from within the institutions of climate science, such dissection is generally beyond the means of the public, who must instead rely on their own evaluations of trustworthiness. 9 Also see Irwin & Michael 2003: 72-75. 10 See Burri & Dumit 2007; Gilbert & Mulkay 1984: ch.7; Lynch 1985b; Lynch & Woolgar 1990; Pauwels 2006. 11 See Porter 1992 on the role of quantification and objectivity as ways of overcoming distrust. 12 The Climate Project has also trained Richard Littlemore, and the David Suzuki Foundation has several other ties to DeSmogBlog. 13 There were five other stops in Western and Central Canada. Funding for the tour was provided by undisclosed donors through the FCPP (a Winnipeg-based think-tank and charity) on the understanding that these donations would be used for FoS projects. Only certain types of projects are eligible for this sort of funding through the FCPP, namely those considered “educational” (as opposed to “advocacy”) – and so the Monckton tour clearly qualified as an educational project. While the FoS organized the tour, Monckton’s stops were hosted by other organizations, such as The Fraser Institute in Vancouver, and the FCPP in Winnipeg. The public-relations contract for the FoS in this period could not be identified because of reluctance to be directly associated with the FoS (D. Leahey, personal communication, January 14, 2010). The tour was seen as a success for the FoS due to the media attention Monckton’s statements received from various local and national broadcasters, as well as some of the secondary attention directed towards the group. After completing the Canadian portion of the tour, Monckton traveled to the US, where the four-minute conclusion of his presentation in Minnesota (Monckton 2009b) went “viral” on YouTube, with 1.5 million views within a week of being posted. 14 Three meek hands were raised when Monckton asked who in the audience felt that global warming was a
97
global crisis. 15 As a hereditary peer Monckton is eligible for a seat in the House of Lords, but this would require election, and his last attempt resulted in no votes. 16 See Connor 2010, although Stott 2010 argues that the quote is similar in spirit to something Houghton actually did say. 17 This was the portion of Monckton’s presentation in Minnesota that would become a “viral video” on the internet some two weeks later (Monckton 2009b), although in that presentation he emphasizes the impending communist redistribution of wealth and hails America as “the beacon of freedom to the world” that is about to have her sovereignty and democracy stripped away.
98 CHAPTER FOUR
THE RHETORIC OF CLOSURE
The different processes by which controversies are ultimately resolved have been subjected to some prior attention (Engelhardt & Caplan 1987), but the recent history of the global warming debate is characterized by numerous attempts to achieve or declare closure, which have met with varied success. Such efforts have ultimately been opposed by those wishing to keep the debate open (primarily the climate skeptics), and judging by the current state of the controversy, closure in the public domain is nowhere in sight. The IPCC was created to act as the ultimate authority on the science of global warming, and its reports have been cited as the final word on the issue by many, but this authority has also been questioned. Numerous other statements from scientific bodies have been issued to support the IPCC in an attempt to achieve closure by consensus, but the appearance of consensus can be broken by the appearance of dissent. Out of policy considerations, those advocating for the reality of AGW and its regulation have argued the main scientific questions closed, or at least settled enough to act on, but such claims allow several possibilities for counter- attack. These dynamics are best understood as forms of rhetorical practice which seek to argue the controversy closed, but can be opposed by other arguments that resist such claims. While climate skeptics have often been on the defensive, arguing against the bold pronouncements of the reality of AGW, they have also recurrently made their own declarations of closure, particularly in reference to recent scandals. As I will demonstrate,
99 the rhetoric of closure has various forms, and is at times employed in very similar ways by both climate skeptics and AGW advocates. While the political need for closure on this issue is understandable, the rhetoric of closure employed in the AGW controversy is extremely problematic, as it paints the world in starkly contrasting extremes that can easily be contradicted by a more nuanced reality.
The argument which is most exemplary of the rhetoric of closure is the often quoted but rarely attributed phrase, “the science is settled”. Ironically, this particular quote has most frequently been used by skeptics to satirize their opponents in an attempt to keep the debate open, but variations of it can be found amongst the claims of both climate skeptics and AGW advocates. Such rhetoric argues for the closure of the controversy, or more simply, acts as a declaration of closure (though it often appears in a more qualified or less certain form than that ridiculed by climate skeptics). Indeed, the inherent uncertainty of climate science has proven to be an important challenge for AGW advocates, who must argue for closure despite incomplete knowledge.
As long as counter-claims persist, it is difficult to argue closure, but such a situation can be addressed through a rhetorical demarcation which locates one’s opponents outside the boundaries of legitimate disagreement. This form of argument claims that those on the opposing end are not actually part of the same debate, and that agreement (and thus closure) does exist among those whose opinion is legitimate. This is typically achieved by arguing that one’s opponents exist outside the borders of science, through lack of qualifications, or through the attribution of interests or the corrupting forces of politics. The regularity by which the participants in the two extremes of the debate have engaged in such rhetoric
100 demonstrates the resilience of the controversy, despite these claims of closure. The rhetoric of closure also suggests the persistence of a certain public understanding of science, in which true scientific facts exist in the absence of meaningful disagreement.
The IPCC can be viewed as a mechanism designed to ultimately bring closure to the
AGW controversy, yet the conservatively-worded science which it reviews, and the conservative nature of the political negotiations that result in its “Summaries for
Policymakers” (SPMs), have made it resistant to generating bold rhetoric. The rhetoric of closure can more explicitly be heard from those at arm’s length of the IPCC, including journalists and politicians, though large numbers of scientists have also supported statements and petitions to establish the existence of a consensus. However, such claims of consensus have proven to be fodder for the arguments of climate skeptics, who have responded with petitions of their own to demonstrate the existence of disagreement, and have parroted their opponents’ rhetoric as a means of ridicule.
The IPCC as a Mechanism of Closure in the Global Warming Controversy
The IPCC is a body created with the purpose of producing a text that could present a unified, authoritative statement concerning the state of climate science, which could then serve to inform policy. It was never intended to “settle” the science in a way that precluded further study, but to present a snapshot of the state of climate science every few years in a form that is useful for policymakers. Despite the uncertainties that pervade these assessments, their power has been as documents which represent a consensus view of scientists. Consensus in this sense can be thought of as closure; even if significant areas of
101 the science remain unsettled, what is agreed is presented in a form that should be difficult to argue with, since it supposedly represents the result of an open process including the relevant scientists, and points to certain agreed-upon conclusions (as outlined in the
“Summaries for Policymakers”, or SPMs).
The IPCC can in some ways be traced to a series of meetings involving UNEP, the
WMO, and ICSU in Villach, Austria, in the early 1980s. The 1985 meeting resulted in a consensus statement from the scientists involved, claiming that the release of greenhouse gases was responsible for increasing temperatures, and arguing for policies to be explored to address this global warming (WMO 1986). This also reflected the view of the then-
Director of UNEP, Mostafa Tolba, who felt that the state of the science was such that further assessments were unnecessary and the time had come for policy. Tolba, who had just completed successfully negotiating the Vienna Convention on Ozone, actively campaigned for a similar convention on greenhouse gases in the wake of the 1985 Villach statement, and encouraged the US to take action. However, Tolba misjudged the political climate, and there simply did not exist the sort of agreement among governments to consider the regulations implied by the 1985 Villach statement. Instead what followed, largely at the behest of the US (which resisted Tolba’s attempts to control the issue), was a series of negotiations through the late 1980s that would establish a new intergovernmental body to provide scientific assessments of global warming – the IPCC (Agrawala 1998a;
Glover 2006: 118-119).
If we consider the IPCC as a mechanism of closure, it seems odd that its assessments have been much more vague and qualified than the Villach statement and other
102 “policy-proactive” documents from the 1980s (Agrawala 1998b: 627). Yet, even as its first assessment report was being finalized, the IPCC was already involved in shaping the looming policy process. Agrawala (ibid.) attributes this to the greater scientific defensibility of the IPCC’s claims, as well as its political credibility, and it reinforces the idea that uncertainty need not act as an obstacle to policy. As Shackley and Wynne (1996: 280) argue, the flexibility that statements of uncertainty provide has allowed climate science to maintain its credibility, as well as providing a standard discourse through which this uncertainty can be characterized. Thus it is possible for the IPCC to act as a mechanism of closure, by producing reports that represent a single, comprehensive, and authoritative voice on climate science, even if the language spoken by it is less-than-certain. While some cited the IPCC’s findings through the 1990s in fairly dramatic terms, such pronouncements of closure were largely absent until the “definitive” (McCarthy 2007) Fourth Assessment
Report (AR4) in 2007.
The IPCC's AR4 used the body's strongest language to date to summarize its findings, and the first component of the assessment to be made public was the Summary for
Policymakers from WGI (IPCC Working Group I 2007). It was released on February 2,
2007, and declared that global warming was now “unequivocal”, with greater than 90 percent certainty that humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions were the leading cause. The numerous media accounts of the event went further however, noting that while “the report came swaddled in the cautious language of science... that couldn't smother the sense that a historic moment was unfolding” (Burkeman 2007). The report “swept away the last doubts surrounding global warming” (Harvey 2007), and was described as "another nail in the
103 coffin of the climate change deniers and represent[ing] the most authoritative picture to date, showing that the debate over the science of climate change is well and truly over"
(Adam 2007). The IPCC had thus, “finally ended all serious debate over climate change.
There can be no more denial” (Globe and Mail 2007). While the SPM itself had used the
IPCC’s typically measured language, some officials and representatives were much more forthright, with UNEP’s executive director Achim Steiner declaring that, "February 2 2007 may be remembered as the day the question mark was removed from whether people are to blame for climate change" (Adam 2007), thus marking “the end-point of the debate”
(McCarthy 2007). An IPCC lead author was quoted as saying, “[p]olicy makers paid us to do good science, and now we have very high scientific confidence in this work – this is real, this is real, this is real” (Rosenthal & Revkin 2007).
Of course, the IPCC’s AR4 never did end the debate, and the counter-movement of skeptics persisted in speaking out on the internet as well as some mainstream media sources
– particularly those closer to the conservative end of the political spectrum. For others however, AGW became a settled fact, and the IPCC is still regularly cited in calls for action as the authoritative voice on the issue. The IPCC’s AR4 is portrayed in various ways by those advocating action; at times it is “a consensus of hundreds of scientists” (Pascual &
Talbott 2008), while Al Gore has described it as a “unanimous” view of “virtually the entire global scientific community”, representing a consensus “stronger than anything in science with the possible exception of gravity” (Gore 2007). Often the IPCC is not explicitly identified as a consensus, but simply as the product of a large number of contributing experts (typically 2,500). Al Gore and David Suzuki can also point to the
104 dozens of statements from various academies of science that have declared AGW a threat, and lent support to the IPCC’s position (Ghomeshi 2009).1 Various scientist-signed statements and petitions have been released over the years – as early as 1997 US President
Clinton could point to a list of 2,600 such signatories to announce that “[t]he overwhelming balance of evidence and scientific opinion is that [global warming] is no longer a theory, but now a fact”, and would lead to disasters if greenhouse gas emissions were left unchecked (Clayton 1997). Naomi Oreskes’ (2004) survey of peer-reviewed publications has also often been rhetorically employed as proof of closure, as having found a total of zero articles in its sample that disagreed with the position of “the consensus” (Gore 2007;
Guggenheim 2006).
While neither the IPCC nor any of these other authoritative texts can claim to encompass the entirety of scientific opinion on global warming, they do portray an overwhelming level of agreement within what is defined as legitimate science. Implicit in such statements is the acknowledgement that scientists do not always agree on matters of fact, but if such a one-sided balance of opinion exists, than the science of AGW cannot be questioned any more than the existence of gravity. What exactly it is that scientists agree on is left vague by the various ways in which the consensus is described, but it is always given as some variant of the basic AGW hypothesis (that the planet is warming due to human influence), and typically combined with a call to action. However as I will now discuss in reference to the tactics of climate skeptics, this rhetoric of closure is very susceptible to counter-argument. Claims of the non-existence of debate can be challenged by the existence of any dissenting viewpoint, provided it is seen as legitimate, thus leading to the
105 distrust of those who declare the issue to be closed. Also, declarations of closure can easily be portrayed as an authoritarian imposition of closure, in violation of the ethos of science.
As the history of the controversy shows, it has thus been far easier for climate skeptics to keep the debate open, than it has been for their opponents to argue it closed.
Climate Skeptics and the Rhetoric of Closure
While I have thus far characterized the global warming controversy as one in which
AGW advocates attempt to achieve closure while climate skeptics work to keep the debate open, the rhetoric of closure is a form of argument found at both ends of the controversy. In the wake of Climategate for example, skeptics could claim to have delivered the “death blow to climate science” (Ball 2009b; Hoggan 2010), as the hoax of global warming was finally exposed. However such bold rhetoric preceded Climategate, during which time Tim
Ball still portrayed AGW a fraud based on “no evidence whatsoever” (Ball 2009a). At
Christopher Monckton’s fall 2009 presentation in Calgary, AGW advocates were portrayed as “running scared” of the recent Lindzen paper (Lindzen & Choi 2009), which marked the end of their lies. Such claims of closure and their opponents’ weakness can make climate skeptics sound delusional in the face of the dominance of what has hereto been the mainstream view, but while it is impossible to know whether Monckton actually believed that the Lindzen paper was going to “change everything”, such rhetoric is likely not used with the same expectation of closure that the declarations of AGW advocates seemed to carry in 2007. Instead, it is a rhetorical technique that paints the debate in terms where the climate skeptics have the advantage, and with “no evidence” to support the AGW
106 hypothesis it becomes “only a matter of time before its bubble bursts” (Evans 2009).
However, climate skeptics must still tangle with a powerful opposition from AGW advocates and what has been constructed as “the climate consensus”. It is for this reason that the rhetoric of climate skeptics has typically been that of defensive counter-claims that have challenged their opponents’ attempts at closure.
Challenging the Climate Consensus
Climate skeptics have pursued several rhetorical strategies to challenge claims of a consensus around AGW. One of these is to acknowledge that a consensus does exist, but to downplay its significance.2 This argument is typically worded as some variation of the claim that science is not “done by consensus” (Monckton 2009a: 3), and is typically followed by some explanation of just what science is or how it is done. The range of definitions which follow such claims3 is a testament to the difficulty of defining science, and can involve its relation to the scientific method, theory, replication, falsification, measurement, fact, reality, rationality, open debate or various other elements combined into some sort of a definition.4 This type of argument is part of the demarcation of science, to which I will return in greater detail later in this chapter. It essentially seeks to neutralize consensus claims as unscientific, and climate skeptics have repeatedly pointed out that many settled scientific facts, such as the Earth being round or its orbit around the Sun, were initially made in opposition to the prevailing consensus of the day. Tim Ball especially likes to point to the existence a scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was cooling
(Ball 2007).5 What Merton (1973) identified as the norm of “organized skepticism” within
107 the ethos of science, remains powerful ground by which to argue that climate skeptics have taken a more scientific stance than their opponents. While Merton (ibid.: 277-278) described this norm as one which compels science to question the accepted knowledge of other institutions such as religion, this skepticism can just as easily be turned within science itself. It is therefore quite possible to argue that scientists have a duty to question whatever authority and consensus exists within science, but this argument can also be strengthened if the IPCC is not considered to be scientific at all, but a political body that is “designed for propaganda” (Ball 2010b).
Another strategy is to simply deny the existence of a consensus on global warming altogether. This is made easier by the weak foundations of many of the AGW advocates’ consensus claims, particularly the most dramatic ones. The IPCC’s assessment reports are not consensus documents, although the principally important SPMs do, as I have described, reflect a “lowest-common denominator” consensus, reached through negotiations including some of the assessment report’s lead authors and government representatives. The notion that 2,500 experts somehow approved the contents of an entire assessment report, or were even qualified to do so (considering the highly specialized nature of much of the science contained within), simply cannot be defended. To be fair, such a claim has never been made by the IPCC in its publications, but it has been propagated by media accounts of the organization and by AGW advocates such as Al Gore. The IPCC is a remarkably open organization utilizing an extensive form of scientific peer-review, which does acknowledge and document disagreements within climate science. Judging only by the relatively small number of its participating authors who have spoken out in opposition to its conclusions
108 (specifically as worded in the SPMs), it does appear to generally represent the views of its contributors in the broadest possible sense. However, the level of agreement which exists among its participants in relation to various specific claims can only be inferred, and so the
IPCC is more accurately considered as a mechanism by which a scientific consensus can be rhetorically constructed, rather than as a testament to a consensus view akin to the various global warming petitions. Of course, if we take a more nuanced and realistic view of consensus among climate scientists as referring to a “generally agreed range of probable outcomes” that accepts disagreement on details (Edwards & Schneider 2001: 244), the
IPCC position would indeed qualify as a consensus, but this is hardly what is suggested when the press announces that, “2,500 experts agree… climate change will include more severe weather, less water” (Internet Broadcasting Systems & Associated Press 2007), and it is this sort of “alarmist” portrayal of the IPCC consensus to which the climate skeptics respond.
Another tactic through which climate skeptics have challenged the existence of consensus, particularly as defined by petitions and consensus statements representing the views of thousands of scientists, is to create petitions of their own. In a way, this is a numbers game that has as its objective the ability to construct statements such as:
The claim that the debate about the severity and cause of global warming is "settled science" has taken a beating with the release of the names of 31,072 American scientists who reject the assertion that global warming has reached a crisis stage and is caused by human activity. “No such consensus or settled science exists”… (Bast 2008)
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Several such petitions and lists have been created since the early 1990s, at times receiving criticism for including some unqualified or unverifiable signatories (Grandia 2009; Musser
2001). One of the more questionable lists was published in 2007 by the Hudson Institute, titled 500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares
(Avery 2007). This list was published without the permission of the named scientists, many of whom subsequently felt that their work was being misrepresented and asked to be removed from it (Littlemore 2008). It appears that the drive to construct statements with the greatest possible number of supporters has led to some of the sloppy methods used by climate skeptics. However, there are several such lists that climate skeptics can choose from to argue against the AGW consensus, and there truly are some climate scientists who have signed such petitions. Climate skeptics do not use these lists to construct a consensus of their own, but merely to challenge the claims that a consensus exists at all, and in that sense they have the more modest task of simply disputing the controversy’s closure.
The most frequently-cited attempt to quantify the AGW consensus is Naomi
Oreskes’ (2004) single-page essay in Science, which surveyed 982 peer-reviewed abstracts and found none that “disagreed with the consensus position”. The use of peer-review as a demarcation of science that excludes climate skeptics is a topic I will take up again, but at this point I will simply note that Oreskes’ claim of such an overwhelming consensus has elicited numerous counter-claims. Christopher Monckton devoted his (2007a) Consensus”?
What “Consensus”? SPPI paper to refuting Oreskes' analysis, by citing evidence which disagrees with her claim, either by measuring the consensus differently or by attempting to
110 replicate Oreskes' method. While Monckton acknowledges that most climate scientists published in the journals surveyed by Oreskes are in agreement with what she defines as the consensus position (ibid.: 9), he disagrees with the unanimity of the consensus she presents and argues that what does exist cannot be called a consensus. The FoS website, in response to Oreskes, has since 2006 included a bibliography of peer-reviewed articles (FoS n.d.d) which, “question the current state of Global Warming science”. Such a list is perhaps better thought of as questioning the unanimity of scientific opinion that the Oreskes study has come to symbolize, particularly by way of those who cite her work (specifically Al
Gore) as conclusive evidence of the absence of disagreement. Subsequent studies that have attempted to quantify the range of perspectives among climate scientists in other ways
(Doran & Zimmerman 2009; Bray & von Storch 2007; 2008) have found high (though not unanimous) levels of agreement on the fundamentals of the AGW hypothesis, but greater uncertainty and ranges of opinion concerning the more detailed aspects of climate science.
What the above demonstrates is the challenge of pinning down what consensus means in climate science, let alone determining a way to measure it. As Gilbert and Mulkay
(1984, ch. 6) argue, any definitive measurement of scientific consensus is ultimately impossible, and consensus accounts are highly variable and linked to a particular
“interpretive situation” (ibid.: 140). In considering the problem of AGW, what specific claims are supported by the consensus? What group is defined as the relevant population for the consensus, and how is eligibility for this population determined? What level of agreement is necessary among its members for consensus to be achieved? Unfortunately the rhetoric of closure tends to gloss over these questions, and construct a one-sided picture of
111 unanimity that, in the hands of climate skeptics, becomes easily parodied and caricatured.6
As noted earlier, “the science is settled” is thus a phrase commonly attributed to AGW advocates by climate skeptics. As Gavin Schmidt (2009a) argues, climate scientists never use such language because they know full well that science does not have a binary set of settled and unsettled facts, and the statement is “associated almost 100% with contrarian comments on climate and is usually a paraphrase of what ’some scientists’ are supposed to have said”.7 I would disagree with Schmidt, and argue that this phrase is more often portrayed as something Al Gore or another politician is supposed to have said,8 both because “alarmist” politicians make easier targets than scientists, and also because they are more likely to actually use such language. Indeed, throughout the previous pages are many examples of such claims arguing for the closure of the controversy, and while many have done so with more nuance than “the science is settled”, some have not (Seabrook 2007), and not all of these claims can be blamed on poorly-informed journalists simplifying the complexities of climate science. The political need to “drive a nail in the coffin” of the global warming debate has infused representations of the science with a rhetoric of closure and certainty that has proved a challenging match for what is an inherently uncertain body of knowledge. In the next section I will more closely examine the role of uncertainty in the global warming controversy, and discuss both how uncertainties are dealt with by those seeking closure, as well as being exploited through counter-claims resisting closure.
Uncertainty in Science-for-Policy
In Uncertain Science... Uncertain World, Henry Pollack (2003) uses global
112 warming among his examples of uncertain bodies of knowledge that have puzzled many attempting to make sense of the world through science. Pollack attributes this puzzlement to the way science is taught all the way from primary school up until university graduate programs – as a collection of facts rather than as a process of inquiry (ibid.: 17-21; also T.
L. Brown 2009: 268). In his experience, new graduate students require re-training and an education in uncertainty in order to ask the appropriate questions necessary that allow them to become designers and evaluators of research. Popularized science faces much the same problem as introductory forms of science instruction, since presentations of science in the mass media have a tendency to avoid the carefully qualified language of the sort found in peer-reviewed journals, instead portraying science as a generator of certainty, with its methods largely invisible (Collins 1987; Fahnestock 1986). Finally, scientists themselves put considerable work into reducing or eliminating uncertainties from their published claims. To the greatest extent that is defensible, they present their findings as corresponding to a factual state of affairs (Star 1985; Latour 1987; Latour & Woolgar 1979), largely excluding descriptions of their own interpretive work from these published accounts
(Gilbert & Mulkay 1984). In many ways, the “Scientific Revolution” involved an abandonment of deductive certainty and the introduction of probabilistic ways of knowing
(Shapin 1996), yet an image of science persists as a generator of truth achieved through an impersonal, mechanical method.
Uncertain science can be seen as an undesirable state of affairs, in the sense that it violates some of the expectations of the public, and can constrain the ability of scientists to provide clear policy advice.9 When science falls short of expectations of truth and clear
113 guidance, generating instead a range of uncertainty and conflicting viewpoints, the closure of political controversies by way of science becomes problematic. Closure must then be defined differently than the establishment of firmly settled facts such as those found in textbook science, instead resembling a range of generally agreed findings such as those found in the IPCC reports. This sort of closure, which attempts to forge a sufficient level of certainty and agreement while maintaining the existence of significant uncertainties, is difficult for policymakers and inherently prone to the counter-claims of a determined opposition. Indeed Oreskes (2010) has recently attributed the success of climate skeptics to the exploitation of the public’s unrealistic view of science as a generator of certainty. In her view, history shows clearly that “science does not provide certainty. It does not provide proof. What it provides us with is the consensus of experts, based on the organized accumulation and scrutiny of evidence” (ibid.). The consensus that Oreskes so famously quantified can be considered evidence of AGW’s reality, but for others to accept it as such requires both the recognition that such a consensus does indeed exist, and the understanding that that consensus is essentially how science decides such matters. Both of these conditions, as I have shown, can be, and have been questioned.
Closure Despite Uncertainty
In a joint appearance with David Suzuki on the CBC radio network just prior to the
Climategate scandal in 2009 (Ghomeshi 2009), Al Gore was read a letter that described the
“alarmist” position of AGW advocates as posing, “a danger to the spirit of scientific discovery”. He was then asked by the host Jian Ghomeshi, if there was “room for debate”
114 on the issue of AGW. Gore’s response was as follows:
Well, the culture of science is very different from popular culture and the culture of politics. Scientists treasure uncertainty and seek to re- resolve it, but the… to the extent that there is any debate it is really very much at the margins trying to pin down details, when the… the substance of the large question is really resolved. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made up of the three thousand of the best scientists in the world in the respective disciplines relevant to this question, have studied this intensively for twenty years, they’ve put out four unanimous reports, the last of which described the evidence as quote, unequivocal, endquote. This has been known and established beyond dispute for quite a long time.
In Suzuki’s subsequent response to a related question, he cited the IPCC and national academies of science as the top experts who have reached agreement, and finished by declaring “it is not a debate. There might be little picky points about certain issues… any more than evolution is a debate among biologists” (ibid.).
Gore’s point about the culture of science seems a very appropriate observation here.
Scientists are able to accommodate uncertainty in a way that poses a challenge for politics and the public. In these spheres, a line is expected to be drawn around what is settled fact, particularly in controversies concerning environmental problems. As the sociology of science has shown, establishing solid scientific facts is challenging enough in “normal” science, but AGW poses additional difficulties in its reliance on inherently uncertain measurements and model-generated knowledge. While attempts to address AGW are commonly portrayed as efforts to achieve highly-valued climate stability (Hulme 2009a:
26-27), weather and climate are inherently variable and unstable with or without human intervention. Detailed statistical analyses of climate records and a model of a climate without human intervention are required to detect the human “fingerprint” of global
115 warming in the historical record (Edwards 2001: 33). I have previously described the existence of multiple divergent data sets which represent the historical temperature record, and how there is considerable uncertainty concerning what the “true” record looks like.10
Determining the anthropogenically-caused variation in this record requires comparison with an estimated climate lacking in human influence. In addition to including the uncertainties of the historical record, such a model also includes various uncertainties related to model specificity, such as whether all of the relevant variables are included and properly defined
(Demeritt 2001). Some of the variables which affect climate, such as cloud formation, are not very well understood and difficult to model, as they take place below the resolution of
General Circulation Models (GCMs).11 It is difficult to quantify these uncertainties, since model predictions can only be compared to one another or various runs made of the same model under different conditions,12 as Shackley et al. (1998: 175) explain:
The scientist may accept that the model is a representation of an uncertain reality but this is not reflected at all in the model equations: the GCM is the numerical (always approximate) solution of a complex but purely deterministic set of nonlinear partial differential equations over a defined spatiotemporal grid, and no attempt is made to introduce any quantification of uncertainty into its construction. The admission of uncertainty often only enters the scene when the model is later utilised in a predictive sense, normally by considering a range of different, but again deterministic, simulation ‘scenarios’ that reflect the modeluser’s lack of precise knowledge about the model parameters and its inputs. However, the propagation of uncertainty within the nonlinear GCM, and its effect on the model predictions, is not quantified by any systematic, statistical analysis…
While Shackley et al. do go on to mention some exceptions to the above, many forms of uncertainty within model-generated climate science are simply impossible to quantify with
116 any degree of precision (Edwards 1999). Some of these problems are even more pronounced when GCMs are used to generate projections of a future climate – currently an important part of the scientific understanding of climate change. Such models, besides including the complexities of various natural processes, must also project changes in anthropogenic climate impacts that are determined by uncertain projections of population, land use, and economic activity. Various scenarios are calculated for these different possible futures, but the probability of any of them coming to pass is ultimately unknowable. Uncertainties are thus inherent in climate science, and many are irreducible by further research (Bocking 2004: 125). Jeroen van der Sluijs (2006) argues that further research often reveals greater complexity and new uncertainties, and uncertainty assessment always involves some interpretation or “subjective judgement” (ibid.: 67).
Stephen Zehr’s (2000) review of media coverage of climate change shows that uncertainty has long been a salient part of accounts of the issue in the mass media (at least up until the end of his data in 1995). In part this was due to the journalistic tendency to
“balance” the views of AGW-advocates with their opponents (see Boykoff & Boykoff
2004), but it also reflects the inherent uncertainties of climate science. These uncertainties however, were managed in media accounts so that science remained the authoritative provider of climate knowledge, which would ultimately reduce uncertainty through further research (Zehr 2000). Uncertainty could thus be invoked either to justify further study, or to forestall regulation until sufficient certainty was achieved. As an often-quoted memo to the
US Republican Party by pollster and consultant Frank Luntz leaked in 2003 stated:
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Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field. (Luntz Research Companies 2002: 137)
The memo also gives some other useful advice, such as to replace references to “global warming” with “climate change”, to recruit greater numbers of “sympathetic” experts
(preferably scientists, whom Luntz notes are more trusted than politicians), and to cultivate the American public’s “confidence in the ability of science and technology to solve the nation’s ills”, while simultaneously warning the public not to “rush to judgment before all the facts are in” (ibid.). The memo demonstrates the rhetorical value of uncertainty as a means of delaying or avoiding political action, and the importance of challenging what was seen as a growing consensus through the recruitment of trustable experts. Uncertainty is a sign that “all the facts” are not yet in, and experts in disagreement demonstrate a lack of consensus. Such arguments are a potent means by which the reality of AGW has been questioned, though not disproven. These are only intended to forestall action (which is portrayed as expensive and injurious) until certainty is achieved, and foster the impression that science can ultimately reach such certainty. Like many of the arguments of climate skeptics, this political approach builds on the public’s trust and confidence in science in order to undermine the facticity of other scientific claims made by AGW advocates.
Skeptical politicians (with a few exceptions, such as US Senator Inhofe) thus generally
118 avoid making bold declarations about the unreality of AGW, and are more likely to invoke careful language such as the above to oppose regulation. Climate skeptics also sometimes stress the uncertainty of climate science in order to urge caution (FoS n.d.e; Lindzen 2004), but their more extreme arguments do confidently declare AGW to be a “deliberate fraud”
(Ball 2009b) that is not supported by any real science whatsoever.
One of the key ways through which AGW advocates deal with uncertainty is to accept its existence and manage it (see Campbell 1985). This is the approach of the IPCC, and many AGW advocates who favor more qualified scientific statements. IPCC reports themselves have avoided making any claims that are fundamental to the AGW hypothesis with complete certainty, so that while AR4’s assertion that the recent warming has been
“unequivocal” was the body’s strongest language to date, the probability that such warming as anthropogenic was given at more than 90%. This percentage is the result of the negotiations that resulted in the final wording of the SPM, and is not justified through the use of any rigorous quantification procedure. Instead, it serves as the authoritative account of uncertainty, and allows for enough interpretive flexibility in order to both retain scientific credibility and satisfy the demands of policymakers (Shackley & Wynne 1996).
Judith Curry (who occupies some of the difficult middle ground between climate skeptics and AGW advocates) has recently criticized such statements, and argued that the IPCC fails to include a sufficient analysis of uncertainty (Guterl 2010). Whatever the percentage likelihood that is attributed to any specific claim, it can be and is argued that incomplete knowledge should not be used as an excuse to preclude precautionary steps (Pollack 2003:
214; The Economist 2010). On the balance of available evidence, even if this balance
119 cannot be precisely quantified, action should be taken to prevent potentially catastrophic consequences (as per the precautionary principle [Giddens 2009: 57-61]). But what does such a balance of evidence really mean? And what sorts of actions should be taken? There still appears to be a great deal of uncertainty regarding what a future climate will look like, particularly at the regional level where climate models are most uncertain. Is this reason for inaction, or all the more reason to act as vigorously as possible?
I do not intend to answer these questions, only to point out that the uncertainty of climate science poses real challenges for the rhetoric of closure, but that such challenges can ultimately be overcome in constructing policy.13 In the public realm, a level of uncertainty can co-exist within the rhetoric of closure, so while some of the newspaper coverage of the IPCC’s AR4 exaggerated the certainty with which the report attributed global warming to anthropogenic causes (Harvey 2007), many other accounts did include the “greater than 90%” or “very likely” qualification used by the IPCC, while also declaring the debate effectively closed (Globe & Mail 2007; McCarthy 2007). Thus while climate uncertainty can be used to question the facticity of AGW by climate skeptics, such uncertainty can also be managed by AGW advocates in a way that still allows for the rhetoric of closure.
The Rhetoric of Closure via Demarcation
One key way by which the rhetoric of closure deals with the existence of disagreement is through a demarcation that excludes opposing views from the boundaries of legitimate debate. Thus, instead of arguing that opposing views are overwhelmed by a
120 superior body of evidence and can therefore be discounted as a minority opinion, demarcation excludes a claimsmaker’s opponents from the debate altogether. Such a technique constructs consensus by discounting disagreement as illegitimate, and is regularly seen in the discourses of both AGW advocates and climate skeptics (although the two sides draw the boundaries of legitimate science in different ways). My view of the rhetoric of demarcation shares Charles Alan Taylor’s concern with, “the use of discourse to define, redefine, even to deconstruct, the implicit boundaries of those social practices we consider scientific” (1996: 15).14 This type of demarcation is regularly practiced by both scientists and the public, with very real consequences for the credibility or perceived legitimacy of the claims and practices under consideration.
One of the key means by which science can be rhetorically demarcated is through the invocation of peer-review. As we will see in the next chapter, peer-review is far more than just a rhetorical weapon to be used in controversies, but is also a means of boundary- work that maintains science’s credibility and actually shapes the landscape of scientific knowledge. However, AGW advocates occasionally find it is useful to claim, as Suzuki does, that “[t]here has been no peer-reviewed scientific study that has called into question the conclusions of the IPCC, which represents the consensus of the international scientific community” (Suzuki & Moola 2009). In such a statement the point of demarcation is the test or border of peer-review; those studies that have crossed the border are assumed to be scientifically legitimate, and since none that challenge the AGW hypothesis have, there is claimed to exist a unanimous scientific consensus on the matter. Skeptics can counter these sorts of arguments by pointing to various peer-reviewed papers which question elements of
121 the AGW hypothesis (FoS n.d.d). Indeed some such papers have been published, particularly since 2004, though, as I will discuss in the following chapter, there are still some questions concerning what constitutes legitimate peer-review.
The IPCC is also frequently cited as a boundary of legitimate science in the rhetoric of AGW advocates, because it ostensibly represents the views of the top experts and surveys the entirety of the relevant literature. Climate skeptics can counter this argument with some rhetorical boundary-work of their own, by pointing out the IPCC is not actually science, but politics (Georgia 2001), pseudo-science (Driessen 2009), or propaganda (Ball
2010b). The problem here, which is specific to science-for-policy, arises out of the unique situation which demanded the IPCC in the first place. That situation called for a scientific advisory body to address a pressing international political issue, although the scientific status of that body has certainly been complicated further by the involvement of government delegations in the negotiations surrounding the drafting of the IPCC’s SPMs.
The result has been a “boundary organization” (Guston 2001) that is meant to encompass all of the legitimate scientific opinion, but which was created for a political purpose and is thus especially sensitive to claims of politicization. If the IPCC can be rhetorically swept aside as a single, united mass of propaganda by climate skeptics, then the void can be filled by a climate scientist such as Tim Ball, trumpeting his “extensive” credentials (Ball 2007), or Christopher Monckton, acting as a spokesperson for the supposedly real science of
Richard Lindzen. If instead of the IPCC, AGW advocates focus on the claims of individual scientists that dispute the climate skeptics, then we have what appears to be a debate, and this is precisely what the rhetoric of closure seeks to avoid. Al Gore thus refuses to debate
122 climate skeptics such as Christopher Monckton and Bjørn Lomborg (Hall 2009; Johnson
2009), because to do so would be an acknowledgement and legitimation of debate facts, and a visible performance of the existence of disagreement.
Climate skeptics also find ways to rhetorically demarcate science for themselves, often to the exclusion of their opponents. The Friends of Science is a name which clearly suggests that the opposing viewpoint (or specifically, the Friends of the Earth) is unscientific. As Albert Jacobs explained, the FoS was a group designed to be “about the science”, and is non-political and free from “any commercial influence” (personal communication, December 23, 2009). Also, as I have previously described, the FoS made the most of its now-severed relationship with the University of Calgary, using the
University’s name as a source of credibility. Climate skeptics often justify their view with some reference to the scientific method, which defines their science, but apparently not their opponents. Jacobs (2007) points out, that “the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), being a political organisation, does not work according to the Scientific
Method”. Monckton mentions the scientific method near the beginning of his fall 2009 presentations (Monckton 2009a: 6-7), which he explains was first formulated by Abu Ali al-Husain ibn Abdallah ibn Sina, and is exemplified by T.H. Huxley’s commitment to skepticism. Tim Ball (2007), strangely enough, has cited Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of
Scientific Revolutions as defining the scientific method. Also, there are frequent arguments by climate skeptics for the demarcation of science by way of the standards of hypothesis testing, replication, and falsification, which the AGW hypothesis (and also the practice of
123 climate modeling) are claimed not to meet (Ball 2009a), particularly in the wake of
Climategate (BBC News 2010).
The final means of demarcation in the rhetoric of closure that I wish to discuss can be achieved through the attribution of interest. As a common rhetorical technique with near-universal applicability, it involves attributing a stake to a claimsmaker in order to indicate that they have something to gain from a particular claim, and are thus not disinterested in the issue (Potter 1996: ch. 5).15 Effectively, such rhetoric seeks to transform a claimsmaker into a stakeholder, and in the public understanding of science such a critique has even greater weight due to suppositions about science’s objectivity, or what Merton called the norm of disinterestedness. While Merton is almost never invoked to defend this view, there exists a common understanding that good science is value-free, and that political and commercial interests have a potentially corrupting influence on science, from which its autonomy must be protected.16 Climate science is no exception to this view, and the public debate over AGW frequently takes the form of both ends discounting the other by attributing self-interest to one’s opponents.
For AGW advocates, this approach has been fairly consistent, and involves attributing the counter-movement of climate skeptics to financial backing from those industries which stand to lose from atmospheric regulation. The history of climate skepticism provides ample evidence to support this view, as found on blogs such as deepclimate.org and DeSmogBlog.com. It is indisputable that organized campaigns have been launched by commercial interests to challenge the science of the AGW hypothesis, and such efforts particularly defined the counter-movement throughout the 1990s.
124 However, this form of demarcation searches for any link that can explain away the view of any climate skeptic as somehow associated with commercial interests. Granted, such links are often possible to find, but this approach has also led to the increasingly absurd view that all questioning of AGW is part of, or duped by, a concerted public-relations effort by certain industries. As I will further argue in the following chapter, the current nature of the climate skeptic counter-movement cannot be entirely explained by funding from supportive industries, and it seems quite obvious that the majority of its participants are not motivated by infusions of secret cash.
Climate skeptics also regularly attribute interest to their opponents. They can bemoan their own feeble financial situation, highlight their disinterestedness or independence, and point to the wealth of money available to the other side. Among their claims are that scientists are under pressure to receive research grants, which influence them to endorse the AGW hypothesis, as fears of global warming fund further research
(Brignell 2007). Other claims include that the UN is interested in installing new communist world government (Monckton 2009a), and that Al Gore (Pilkington 2009), Maurice Strong
(Littlemore 2010), and Rajendra Pachauri (Climate Realists n.d.) are all personally invested in and stand to benefit from the regulation of greenhouse gases, thus explaining their actions. Climate skeptics do not always agree on how to explain the position of AGW advocates, but there are several possibilities easily at hand, and as measures to address
AGW have become increasingly monetized (whether through research grants or the trading of carbon credits), some of these explanations sound increasingly plausible. While it is unclear just how much funding climate skeptics still receive from concerned industries, it
125 now appears that the amount pales in comparison to what is being spent on efforts to address global warming.
Both climate skeptics and AGW advocates have shown concern over the perception of undue interests affecting their credibility. As Tim Ball (Adler 2007) has complained, climate skeptics appear to be held to a different standard in regard to funding. This is a result of what might be characterized as the typical framing of the climate skeptic counter- movement as driven by industry interests, and critiques of climate skeptics routinely focus on or question their funding. Tim Ball thus stringently denies being paid by oil companies
(ibid.), or when pressed, he claims to make a point not to know who funds his appearances
(Littlemore 2006b). Christopher Monckton takes a similar approach, sometimes claiming to be unaware of who pays his expenses (Fahys 2010), and also additionally arguing it to be unimportant (Monckton 2008b). Spokespersons for the FoS have admitted to receiving corporate funding, although they also minimize its importance.17 The group’s website (FoS n.d.a) merely states that its “extremely limited… operational funds are derived from membership dues and donations”. David Suzuki has similarly downplayed the David
Suzuki Foundation’s acceptance of corporate donations and emphasized the role of individual donors, but he has been criticized for accepting money from the oil and gas industry while accusing climate skeptics of doing the same (Ben-Ami 2007).18 The IPCC is also sensitive to what might be perceived as the corruption of its science by financial interests, and thus makes clear that its authors work on a voluntary basis and are only compensated for travel expenses (IPCC 2010).
Interest-based explanations of behavior do have a long history in sociology, as well
126 as psychology, economics, and political science. My intent here is not to argue that actors are not driven by interests, or that conflicts of interest in politics or science are not undesirable, but what I hope to point out is that in the global warming controversy, interest- based explanations are ubiquitous due to their versatility and common-sense appeal.
Ultimately, some interest can always be invoked in an attempt to discredit an opposing claimsmaker, especially concerning such a politically-charged topic – with powerful institutions supporting both ends of the debate, and massive financial implications of whatever action or inaction is taken by governments. However in order to have a rhetorical impact, the attribution of interest is ideally made from a position of disinterestedness, or from the standpoint of “real” science, and thus all sides take steps to address or preempt criticisms of their stance as somehow being derived from or corrupted by interest. Science which is driven by interest is not science, but this claim can only be supported if some science is implied to be objective, disinterested, or value-free. A refreshing exception to such rhetoric occurred during a radio interview in late 2009, when University of Calgary climate scientist David Keith was asked to address the claim, made by a climate skeptic, that he was motivated by self-interest. His response was as follows:
It’s a common claim by uh- folks like Bill Bell, people who are sort of denying the core science of climate change that the reason that people like me are saying that there is a problem is to defend our own jobs, or self-interest that we have through institutions that say that there is a serious climate problem. So let me let you all in a big, big secret, here it comes. Scientists are just like everybody else. They’re totally motivated by self-interest. Scientists are motivated by money and fame and all the stuff that goes with it just like all other human beings. Absolutely true, guilty as charged. Now let’s think about what that means for the sort of argument that Bill Bell is making. (McElligott 2009)
127 Keith then goes on to discuss John Christy, who is a “famous” climate skeptic with clear self-interest in supporting the skeptic “camp”, yet even Christy’s satellite dataset contradicts the claim of recent cooling made by Bill Bell. Keith thus manages to both argue that self-interest is a good indicator of motivation and pervasive on all sides, but that there is evidence for global warming from a source who is not self-interested to make such a claim. In a subsequent elaboration of this argument that was later printed in a local newspaper, Keith (2009) also explains that it is in the self-interest of scientists to find flaws in the work of others, and that the public should trust the science of AGW precisely because it has survived such self-interested skepticism (with no legitimate atmospheric scientist that Keith is aware of disputing the core of the AGW hypothesis). Keith’s argument is somewhat unique, but it demonstrates the challenge of negotiating the public’s trust in science without the presumption of disinterestedness. Instead of seeking credibility in a flawed and inherently vulnerable demarcation of objective science, such a view establishes credibility by comparing the content of a claim with the self-interest of the claimsmaker. In Keith’s view, science can be trusted precisely because scientists are self- interested to challenge each others’ facts, so that any scientific claim that has survived this process must be trusted as solid. However this argument depends both on the acceptance of solid scientific evidence for AGW, and the attribution of skepticism as the prime motivator for the behavior of scientists. Climate skeptics can instead claim that the primary interest of scientists behind the AGW “scare” is to avoid “rock[ing] the boat” of research funding
(Brignell 2007).
128 Implications of the Rhetoric of Closure
While the rhetoric of closure can take many forms, they all share a common purpose: to rhetorically constrain or eliminate the existence of debate. In the controversy over the science of AGW, such rhetoric first appeared in the 1980s, but it lacked the credibility to be successful and thus prompted the creation of the IPCC. The IPCC has largely been successful in achieving sufficient closure concerning the science in order to guide policy efforts, and the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen Conference can be attributed to divergent national interests (Crooks, Harvey & Ward 2009; Revkin & Broder 2009), rather than a lack of scientific agreement. In the public domain of the controversy, the
IPCC's position has also been a useful means of achieving closure, and has often been cited, along with other evidence such as the Oreskes (2004) study, to demonstrate the scientific consensus. Climate skeptics however, have various rhetorical strategies for disputing the rhetoric of closure used by AGW advocates, whether by minimizing the importance or existence of consensus, or by redrawing the boundaries of legitimate science to exclude
“the alarmists” and thus achieve their own form of closure. As AGW advocates utilize their own techniques of boundary-work against the climate skeptics, there has resulted competing and contrasting definitions of just what constitutes legitimate science.
The rhetoric of closure tends to polarize the participants of the controversy and place them within exclusive categories that reinforce the more naïve public understandings of science. It seeks unity among scientific voices, and thus perpetuates the mythologized ideal of scientists discovering clear and consistent truths. Uncertainty in climate science is thus managed through the creation of an authoritative account of uncertainty, and
129 disagreement on issues fundamental to “the consensus” is handled by excluding those who disagree from the boundaries of legitimate debate. There is little room in the rhetoric of closure for competing interpretations or conflicting truths in science; instead the discourse most easily lends itself to a dichotomy of “truth” versus “lies”, “fact” versus “propaganda”, and “science” versus “politics”. Such understandings support the simplistic and highly flawed conventional conception of modernity, with a domain of pure objective science separated from the rest of society, and ignore decades of study in the sociology and philosophy of science (Sarewitz 2004).
While climate skeptics do practice this sort of demarcation themselves, often excluding the whole body of climate science which they oppose as illegitimate or political, their position over the years has largely been that of defensively resisting the controversy’s closure with counter-claims against the dominant discourse. More recently the skeptics have portrayed themselves as finally having the advantage, with their opponents on the run, but previously they occupied more of an underdog role, actively resisting what was seen as the authoritarian imposition of closure, and claiming to expose their truth from the fringes of the debate. This has allowed them to claim a victimized status against the powerful institutions and individuals allegedly attempting to control the world, as evidenced by the numerous calls of climate skeptics not to end the debate, that the science is not settled, and that their “real” science is being suppressed. Still, both ends of the debate are largely talking past each other, or simply ignoring their opponents. If one’s opponents are illegitimate, if their truths are actually self-motivated lies, what possibility can there be for constructive dialogue? At most what can be hoped for by way of engagement with an
130 opposition that is considered illegitimate is the exposure of the other side’s falsity. Both ends of the debate maintain their truth, and that truth seems largely non-negotiable.
Some AGW advocates have realized, particularly in the wake of Climategate, that simply excluding and ignoring climate skeptics may not be a productive approach. These developments will be further addressed in the following chapter. Even before Climategate, some scientists seemed uncomfortable with the exclusive nature of the rhetoric of closure, and while the FoS has long complained about the refusal of AGW advocates to engage them in debate (thus proving the scientific bankruptcy of the AGW hypothesis) (D. Leahey, personal communication, July 13, 2009), David Keith has for one been open to this sort of dialogue (personal communication, September 11, 2009), and recently challenged the FoS on their claim of being sidelined from the discussion (Keith 2010). The FoS now appear to be organizing a public debate between David Keith and Tim Ball (Leahey 2010), which may take place in the coming months.
From the standpoint of AGW advocates, it might seem counter-productive to offer the views of someone like Tim Ball the legitimacy of a public forum alongside a mainstream climate scientist, but the old rhetoric of closure has not proven very effective in the public domain. Climate skeptics simply have too many means of getting their message out to the public, and too many ways of countering the solidity of the claims of AGW advocates. It does seem that the rhetoric of closure will continue to define much of the discourse of the controversy, but the public has grown increasingly skeptical of “the consensus” and seems less likely to accept the claims of the IPCC in its current form.
Particularly in the wake of Climategate and subsequent scandals, with the public’s trust in
131 the institutions of climate science shaken, and questions about the openness and transparency of climate data lingering, hiding behind the border of scientific legitimacy appears to be an increasingly ineffective approach. These shifting boundaries of climate science and the increasing role and importance of public involvement will be the topic of the following chapter. What remains to be seen in reference to the rhetoric of closure discussed herein, is whether the discourses of this controversy can move beyond some of the more problematic definitions of science and truth, and better represent the complexities of this particular issue.19
Notes
1 For a list of such statements see Wikipedia 2010. 2 Another form of this argument is to entertain speculation of a consensus, and conclude it to be unimportant even if it can be assumed to exist 3 Found through a quick Google search of “science is not consensus”. 4 It is true that many of those constructing such definitions on the internet are not scientists, but as I have previously described, science has also historically had a very difficult time defining itself. 5 It should be noted that while fears of global cooling were popular in the 1970s, there is no evidence that they were ever backed by scientific consensus. 6 This being what Ibarra & Kitsuse (1993: 51) call the “comic style” of discourse. 7 Wikipedia did previously maintain an entry on the phrase “the science is settled”, which portrayed it as a “rhetorical tool” with “no known examples of its use outside the skeptic press” (Wikipedia 2009), but this entry was removed following a debate among Wikipedia editors in 2007, several of whom argued the claim to be simply another version of the “straw man” argument (Wikipedia 2007). Although I would agree that “the science is settled” is certainly a caricature of the AGW position, the now-defunct Wikipedia (2009) article (still available in archived form) also included a list of statements by AGW advocates that had “similar implications” to “the science is settled”. 8 See Michaels, Singer & Douglass 2004. 9 Athough as Campbell (1985) points out, uncertainty is not always an obstacle to policy. 10 This particularly applies to the period preceding human measurement, which must be reconstructed from proxy records that exhibit even greater uncertainty. 11 Typically, GCMs represent the globe as a grid, with boxes that may be hundreds of kilometers in length and width, and any processes that occur within these boxes are represented in a simplified or “parameterized” manner (Edwards 2001). 12 GCMs can be tested by being used to reconstruct historical climate records, but this is a process with its own serious challenges (Demeritt 2001: 324-327). 13 Various novel methods for policymaking in a context of uncertainty have been explored by Jerome
132
Ravetz, Silvio Funtowicz, and Jeroen van der Sluijs. 14 For other treatments of science as boundary-work see Barnes, Bloor & Henry 1996: ch. 6; Gieryn 1983; 1999; Holmquest 1990. 15 See also “the counterrhetoric of insincerity” in Ibarra & Kitsuse 1993: 46. 16 Steven Yearley (2000) points out some of the problems associated with this view, especially since the increase of commercial interests underlying contemporary science have made the image of the disinterested scientist especially implausible, and challenged the public’s trust in scientists. 17 Douglas Leahey (personal communication July 13, 2009) claims that at first the group tried to do without such donations, but was forced to accept them in order to “get [their] message out”. According to Leahey, industry funding represented about a third of the total for the first three or four years of the group’s existence, and he is not aware of any more recent corporate contributions (ibid.). 18 The David Suzuki Foundation’s website stresses that it will not accept donations that could cause a conflict of interest, or the appearance of one (David Suzuki Foundation n.d.). 19 David Demeritt (2001: 328-329) warned that by attempting to maintain a clear rhetorical demarcation between science and politics, and by enshrining the IPCC with undue certainty and objectivity, climate policy was being built on a weak foundation that risked collapse and intensified acrimony. In the wake of the events since Climategate, it can be argued such a collapse has now occurred at least in part.
133 CHAPTER FIVE
THE INTERNET, CLIMATEGATE, AND SHIFTING BOUNDARIES IN CLIMATE
SCIENCE
In November 2009, the global warming debate was flung wide open, with the public release of once-private emails written by climate scientists connected to the University of
East Anglia’s (UEA) Climate Research Unit (CRU). An unknown individual uploaded a file called FOIA2009.zip to RealClimate on November 17th, in what appears to have been an unsuccessful hacking attempt intended to subvert the climate blog’s message of AGW advocacy. The file was then uploaded to a Russian FTP server, and links to it were posted on other climate blogs through their comments sections. Contained within the file was a carefully selected set of emails and data, some stretching back to 1996, acquired from the
CRU’s servers. As skeptical bloggers poured through the files, attempting to ascertain their value and legitimacy, the story began to gain the attention of the mainstream media, and by
November 20th, what would become known as Climategate was making headlines around the world (Goodwin 2010; McIntyre 2010b).
The revelations contained within these emails were cited by climate skeptics as proof of an AGW fraud that had long been suspected (Ball 2009b). While I strongly disagree with the claim that these emails constituted the “smoking gun” of “the greatest deception in history” (ibid.), there is no denying that something very dramatic had happened. A story that first appeared on climate blogs had quickly spread into the
134 worldwide mainstream media, and the counter-movement of climate skeptics was instantly invigorated, leaving AGW advocates divided and defensive (Pearce 2010a). In short order, a series of other “scandals” and “gates” were uncovered, official investigations were launched, and discussions were raised over how climate science might be reformed, and the public’s trust regained.1
I consider these events as part of a broader trend which had been occurring for several years preceding Climategate, but that rapidly came to the world’s attention in late
2009, and within a few short months had threatened to dramatically redraw the boundaries of climate science. The role of the internet has been key to these developments, particularly in the hands of climate skeptics, who have used it as an alternate means of distributing news and engaging with the public, and as a means of science communication that circumvents the conventional institutions of peer-review and the IPCC. However, these alternate channels have also become increasingly interconnected in recent years with pre- existing knowledge structures, and the mainstream media has increasingly paid attention to bloggers and websites. The IPCC meanwhile has felt the consequences of internet postings by non-scientists, and climate scientists have been increasingly discussing their work in online public forums. This chapter will trace the history of these developments, in part by drawing on the contents of the now-public Climategate emails. I will describe these recent shifts in the boundaries of climate science, and explore what the implications for the future might be.
135 Scientific Knowledge and the Internet
Since its rapid spread in the mid-1990s, the internet has dramatically reshaped the global warming controversy as well as scientific communication in general, extending links between online members of the public and what was previously a more insulated and tightly bounded world of science. These changes can be viewed as a positive development through a normative lens which favors increased openness, access, and communication, thus challenging traditional forms of authority. However, the internet has also allowed for the rise of new forms of authority, empowering new categories of experts and other public figures, reshaping public discourse, and simultaneously opening such discourse to new possibilities. The old forms of science communication have largely managed to coexist with the new forms of online media – albeit somewhat uneasily, and with an uncertain future.
I find it useful to consider the internet in terms of Bruno Latour’s (1990) discussion of the changes brought about by the printing press, drawing on the Elizabeth Eisenstein’s
(1973) influential historical work. Comparisons between the rise of the internet and the invention of the printing press have become somewhat cliché, but that does not deprive them of their applicability, as it is impossible to deny the rapid transformation in knowledge that both technologies engendered. Latour’s (1990) analysis was written at a time when he favored an agonistic conception of science (see Latour 1987), in which authors compete by mobilizing “allies” or resources that fortify their claims into facts, and square off against opposing claims that are attempting to do the same. Such allies can include other authors and their texts, or elements of the non-human natural world itself.
136 These are transformed and organized by the work of science, and mobilized through chains of reference to appear in the form of (for example) a research paper. Popularized science is generally not buttressed with chains of reference and allies to the same degree as more academic or “technical” texts (Latour 1987: 52), but when facts are in dispute it is useful to think of scientific controversies in Latourian terms. Competing claims attempt to solidify themselves into fact by drawing on multiple, powerful resources, which can typically be found in a journal article’s methodology section or list of references. They also engage each other on combative terms, questioning the solidity of an opponent’s references, undermining their methodologies, and providing alternate accounts. Such scientific conflicts have traditionally taken place in the pages of peer-reviewed journals, but the global warming controversy has increasingly pushed these scientific disputes onto the internet.
Central to Latour’s (1990) reading of Eisenstein’s (1973; 2005) history of the printing press is the notion of the “immutable mobile”. The printing press “makes both mobilization and immutability possible at the same time” (Latour 1990: 31), by allowing large numbers of identical copies of a text to be spread far and wide (whereas previously mobility was limited by the number of scribes, and copies became adulterated or modified through the work of these human agents). Eisenstein’s (2005) argument is that the proliferation of texts resulting from the printing press allowed for a previously impossible
“feedback” (ibid.: 84), made possible by the new permanence given to records and other texts. This permanence was a precondition for scientific “progress” (ibid.: 97), as large numbers of texts could now be collected, compared with each other, and built upon. The
137 Scientific Revolution, in this view, cannot be explained by the actions and ideas of brilliant scientists following a new scientific method, but was made possible by the profusion of texts: first various reprints and translations of old classics, and later the pioneering texts of the new natural philosophers. The new collections and libraries that resulted soon exceeded the resources which had been available to the ancient Alexandrians (ibid.: 231).
[B]efore the advent of print every possible intellectual feat had been achieved – organized skepticism, scientific method, refutation, data collection, theory making… But each achievement stayed local and temporary just because there was no way to move their results elsewhere and to bring in those of others without new corruptions or errors being introduced. (Latour 1990: 34)
The technology of print quickly allowed old knowledge to be collected, compared, and surpassed. It also allowed for the sorts of agonistic relations which characterize modern scientific controversies, whereby opponents engage in a sort of “proof race” (Latour 1990:
35), mustering resources against each other in competing texts, until one side is unable to match an opponent’s facts (though in reality, such victories are rarely decisive).
The internet has certainly increased the mobility of texts, with near-instantaneous and often open access to both traditional print sources as well as new, prolific forms of
(hyper) text. Immutability has also increased through various forms of data storage, and while some information becomes lost over the years due to the transitory and temporary nature of much of the network, the ease with which digital information can be copied means that much of the “old internet” still exists in archived form. The internet is also defined by the new forms of information, media, or text which it allows. While it can capture and reproduce the old print, audio, and video technologies, these are transformed
138 and joined by new forms that allow for much greater interactivity. Thus, hypertext (HTTP) gave rise to the multitude of links that join web sites to each other, and connect pieces of text within web sites. Hypertext thus extends the possibilities for chains of reference, allowing convenient and immediate access to whatever online resources an author chooses to use to fortify his or her text. The user can navigate these links in a way that is suited to his or her personal quest for information, easily combining and comparing various sources, and also feeding back into those sources through technologies such as the comments sections found on most blogs. The speed with which information or content can be produced and proliferated on the internet has opened up new opportunities for self- publishing (such as websites and blogs), and collaborative repositories of knowledge
(Wikis) (Bruns 2008). It has also allowed individuals and groups to mobilize resources in ways that have come to affect the world beyond cyberspace.
The Global Warming Controversy on the Internet
It is interesting to note that the internet began as communications tool for university researchers, and thus has, since its earliest forms, been applied to the production and spread of scientific knowledge. While email, HTTP, and other innovations were all designed to aid scientists in communicating with one another, as the internet became increasingly open to the public in the mid-1990s these technologies were quickly adopted by a range of other users for various purposes. The early users of the internet were also in large part defined by an anti-authoritarian spirit which resisted centralization, and embraced a “hacker ethic” of open access to information. This placed them at odds with their U.S. military sponsors, who
139 had supported a key early incarnation of the internet (ARPANET) as a decentralized military communication network. Decentralized communications were designed to be less vulnerable to attack, but the military was not comfortable with these early users’ ideals of openness and freedom (Giese 2003). While the internet is no longer beholden to the U.S. military, a similar “culture clash” can still be seen today in conflicts between those advocating open access to information (including internet piracy), and the (largely commercial) forces which have attempted to restrict access to proprietary forms of information (ibid.). However the technology of internet is inherently favorable to openness, and users continually find ways to circumvent attempts at control. The institutions of science must now grapple with similar issues of openness and control, particularly if they are to make the most of the technology that the internet offers.
The internet has certainly been an important tool in the development of climate science since the early 1990s, and the IPCC can no doubt credit email for easing its internal communications. However, as access to the internet expanded among the public, it became another arena in which the global warming controversy could be openly carried out.
Websites thus allowed the industry-organized campaigns against AGW regulation such as the GCC to engage with the public directly in the mid to late-1990s, presenting their policy critiques to the growing internet audience. The internet also opened up new possibilities for the mobilization of social movements, which included both those of environmentalists and the counter-movement of climate skeptics. The David Suzuki Foundation has thus been spreading information on climate change through its website since 1998, and the FoS website was launched as a vehicle for its message in 2002. Both organizations have used
140 these internet platforms to advocate their positions, recruit and communicate with members, and attract donors. During this period the global warming controversy on the internet also played out in chatrooms, newsgroups, and discussion boards. Many groups and institutions maintained websites advocating their positions, but the public presence of climate scientists was marginal other than as experts on these sites or participants in online discussion forums. In the mid-2000s the nature of online participation in the controversy would change significantly, and begin to have a noticeable influence on the more traditional means of science communication and publication. However, before describing these developments I find it important to describe the sort of boundary-work which was a pressing concern for both AGW advocates and climate skeptics in these earlier years, as both attempted to negotiate their credibility in regard to science’s traditional gatekeeping institution of peer-review.
Peer-Review as a Contested Boundary in the Global Warming Controversy
The peer-review process has its beginnings early in the history of scientific journals2 as a means of both regulating against inadequate science, and according authority and credibility to those claims which passed its tests. As Jasanoff (1990) notes, such regulation was desirable because of the way it fostered professionalism in the sciences.
[P]eer review reaffirms the proposition that only scientists are qualified to judge the validity of work done by their professional peers. Effective self-policing thus enhances the autonomy and social prestige of science, while holding scientists accountable only to standards considered reasonable by their coprofessionals. (ibid.: 64)
141 I have discussed peer-review in the previous chapter as an important means of demarcation by which climate skeptics have been excluded from legitimate scientific debate, or alternately, as a legitimating process through which climate skeptics have claimed access to the inner domain of scientific legitimacy. In this section I will discuss this process in more detail, and connect it with what has become an increasingly relevant supplement and alternative to peer-review: the use of climate blogs as a means of scientific communication.
To describe a paper as peer-reviewed is a powerful rhetorical technique, provided one’s audience acknowledges the legitimating function of peer-review (irrespective of whether or not they actually understand how the process works), and finds the specific claim of peer-review to be credible. The problem is not only the assumption that peer- review confers legitimacy, but the lack of agreement on what constitutes legitimate peer- review. In the global warming debate, both issues have been especially important and contentious. As I have previously described, AGW advocates have cited the Oreskes (2004) study as evidence that the peer-review test constitutes a dividing line that neatly separates their real scientific evidence from the “junk” of climate skeptics. Climate skeptics have responded by drawing up lists of peer-reviewed publications that are claimed to support their view, and invoking specific peer-reviewed studies (such as Lindzen & Choi 2009) as their own legitimate evidence. Even though, as I will argue, the relevance of traditional peer-review in climate science has been weakened by alternate channels of communication, it remains a powerful boundary not just by way of the near-sacred rhetorical force it holds in justifying arguments (Furedi 2010), but also in the way it continues to shape the landscape of scientific knowledge.
142 While there have been recent scandals involving the IPCC AR4’s use of non peer- reviewed or “gray” literature, these have primarily involved the work of Working Group II and III (Laframboise 2010), which have arguably fewer traditional peer-reviewed science publications to draw on. While Working Group I (WGI) does have standards for the use of such sources, the majority of the IPCC’s sources (in particular for WGI – the physical science assessment) are drawn from peer-reviewed scientific journals (RealClimate 2010).
IPCC authors have a mandate to rely on peer-reviewed sources where possible (Edwards &
Schneider 2001: 235), and thus the constitution of the body of knowledge that the IPCC was created to assess is actually delineated by prior applications of the peer-review process.
Furthermore, the IPCC uses its own highly extensive form of peer-review as a means of quality control, openness, and as a basis of credibility. “Peer” comments are submitted from a range of participants in the process as early drafts of the assessments are distributed among members of the IPCC, although how such comments are addressed leaves much to the discretion of chapter authors (ibid.), as indeed, a high degree of editorial latitude is a common characteristic of peer-review systems in general (Chubin & Hackett 1990: 92-94).
The upshot of all of this is that peer-review, whether practiced by journals or the IPCC, is an important means through which climate science is constructed, and not just a means of rhetorical demarcation.
Generally speaking, climate skeptics have historically faced challenges penetrating the peer-review process, and have occasionally attributed this resistance to an insular system of like-minded AGW advocates seeking to exclude or censor their views (S. Watson
2009). Such claims have some supporting evidence in the leaked Climategate emails (ibid.),
143 and skeptics also frequently cite the Wegman report into the “hockey stick” graph as evidence the existence of an insular “clique” of climate scientists who exclude opposing views (Hughes 2006; Wegman, Scott & Said 2006). If we accept the argument that peer- review has been used to exclude climate skeptics from publication because their views on
AGW do not match those of the reviewers and editors of climate science journals, then the large presence of skeptics on the internet can be seen as a means of overcoming this
“asymmetry” in power (Hughes 2006), by providing an alternative and more accessible means of publication. However, the situation is not quite as straight-forward. First, as I will later argue, internet publication offers opportunities that traditional peer-reviewed journals do not, for AGW advocates as well as climate skeptics (and also all those in-between).
Secondly, climate skeptics have often continued to place a high value on peer-review as a source of credibility, and make much of the fact when their supporting evidence is indeed peer-reviewed (FoS n.d.d). It is here that we run into the contentious question of what constitutes legitimate peer-review, as demonstrated by the journal Energy & Environment, which has published numerous articles cited by climate skeptics as having been peer- reviewed, but the status and value of its peer-review system is debatable. EBSCO
Publishing does list Energy & Environment as a peer-reviewed academic journal (EBSCO
2010), but critics point to the journal’s weak or unclear standards, and the explicit political stance of its editor Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, who has long been critical of the IPCC, and uses the journal in order to provide marginalized climate skeptics with a platform
(Kaulbars 2009; Thacker 2005).
Simply maintaining a system of peer-review (which Energy & Environment does to
144 some extent) is thus not sufficient for a journal’s publications to be seen as credible. The perceived credibility (or alternately, the “impact factor”) of journals varies greatly, and reputations take time to build. It is therefore beneficial to achieve publication in a journal that already has sufficient credibility, and in two well-documented cases, climate skeptics have done just that. The details of these interconnected cases will be instructive for elaborating on many of the topics covered in the preceding discussion, and the hockey-stick controversy in particular serves to link contention over the boundary of peer-review with new internet-based forms of publication – namely the rise of climate blogs.
The Publication of Soon & Baliunas 2003
In 2002, Climate Research editor Chris de Freitas accepted an article by Willie
Soon and Sallie Baliunas titled “Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past
1000 years”, which the journal then published in January 2003 (Soon & Baliunas 2003).
Soon, Baliunas, and de Freitas have all featured prominently in the history of the climate skeptic counter-movement,3 but all three have also maintained respectable academic careers. Soon and Baliunas are astrophysicists who entered the global warming debate by arguing that global climatic variability is largely caused by solar variability. Their article in
Climate Research reviewed a large number of previous studies of proxy records in an attempt to reconstruct historical temperatures during the past thousand years. Their conclusion was that the temperature record of the 20th century is “not unusually warm or extreme” (Soon & Baliunas 2003: 104) when compared to historical proxies, this being a
1 45 direct refutation of high-profile conclusions previously reached by a team led by Michael
Mann (Mann, Bradley & Hughes 1998; 1999). Mann’s team’s work had loaned support to the IPCC’s claim in its 2001 Third Assessment Report (TAR) (for which Mann was also a lead author) that, as worded in the SPM, “the rate and duration of warming of the 20th century has been much greater than in any of the previous nine centuries” (IPCC Working
Group I 2001). Mann’s team had reconstructed historical temperatures from various proxy records (the most important of which were the rings of old trees), and combined these with more recent instrumental records to create what has become known as the “hockey-stick” graph – featuring a relatively flat historical “shaft” and a sharply peaking 20th century
“blade”. Versions of this iconic graph would feature prominently in the IPCC’s TAR and numerous other publications. Climate skeptics would spend much of the following years focusing on the graph, and claiming its defeat as a refutation of AGW.
146
Figure 2: The “hockey-stick” graph as featured in the SPM of the IPCC’s TAR in 2001 (IPCC Working Group I 2001).
I have no interest in rehearsing the details of the hockey-stick controversy, which encompasses various actors and events over the years, and has received significant coverage elsewhere.4 For now I will simply state that since the release of the IPCC’s TAR,
Michael Mann has become a lightning-rod for criticism, and his methodology has continually been a source of dispute. While some AGW advocates have pointed out that
Mann’s work is not a cornerstone of the AGW hypothesis, climate skeptics have repeatedly attacked it as a “cover-up” of natural temperature variability, and claimed that if recent temperatures were unremarkable by historical standards, then they fall well within the range of natural variation and thus have not been driven by CO2. Soon and Baliunas’
147 (2003) article has often been used to provide evidence for this argument, though, as we will see, other studies would follow with similar implications.
While Soon and Baliunas (ibid.) never did much to persuade mainstream climate scientists that the AGW hypothesis was flawed, their article’s publication did have a significant effect, largely due to the peer-reviewed nature of the journal in which it appeared. As a result of the Climategate disclosure, it is possible to see some of the consequences in once-private email exchanges involving Mann and members of what climate skeptics call “the Team” – a roughly allied group of climate scientists including
Phil Jones at the Climate Research Unit. The controversy took time to develop, and in
March 2003 when Jones learned about the Soon and Baliunas (ibid.) publication, he first sent out an email to Mann and other colleagues suggesting it might be best ignored. Mann agreed that it would be best not to draw attention to the article, but both Jones and Mann soon decided via email that something would have to be done in order to deny climate skeptics their new peer-reviewed argument. In one frequently quoted email from March 11,
2003, Mann writes:
The Soon & Baliunas paper couldn't have cleared a 'legitimate' peer review process anywhere. That leaves only one possibility--that the peer-review process at Climate Research has been hijacked by a few skeptics on the editorial board… This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the "peer-reviewed literature". Obviously, they found a solution to that--take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering "Climate Research" as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board... (Mann 2003a)
148 Climate skeptics have cited parts of these emails as evidence of the corruption of climate science’s peer-review system, through the systematic exclusion of voices that disagree with the AGW hypothesis (Ball 2010a; Delingpole 2009). However, while numerous emails of complaint were sent from concerned scientists to the Climate Research editorial staff, Mann and his colleagues had quickly decided over email that the best way to address Soon and Baliunas was to publish a joint rebuttal, which Mann took a lead in drafting for the journal EOS. Meanwhile, Climate Research’s publisher created the position of Editor-in-Chief in order to address growing criticism of the Soon and Baliunas (2003) publication, and the questions over the journal’s review process. Hans von Storch (a long- serving editor at the journal) was appointed to the position. When von Storch read a preprint of Mann et al.’s EOS rebuttal (Mann et al. 2003), he decided that the Soon and
Baliunas (2003) article was methodologically flawed and should not have been published as it was (Monastersky 2003). However, the article had legitimately passed through the journal’s peer-review process, which allowed any of its editors to receive submissions directly, select reviewers, and then accept or decline publication. Von Storch attempted to reform the process, by granting the Editor-in-Chief the power to supervise the peer-review process, and channeling all future submissions through his position before being passed on to an individual editor.5 The journal’s publisher, Otto Kinne, declined to publish von
Storch’s announcement of these changes (von Storch 2003) until he had agreement from the other editors, some of whom6 still supported the Soon and Baliunas article
(Monastersky 2003). Von Storch resigned and distanced himself from the journal, with
149 three other editors also subsequently resigning over the controversy (Goodess 2003; von
Storch 2009b).
Through this period, the Soon and Baliunas article, which had also now been published in extended form in Energy & Environment (Soon, Baliunas, Idso, Idso, &
Legates 2003), had become politically valuable in the broader global warming controversy.
It was publicized by think tanks, cited by the U.S. White House, and U.S. Senator Inhofe
(Monastersky 2003; Regalado 2003; Revkin 2003). Critics of the article would point to the rebuttal in EOS (Mann et al. 2003), written by the leaders in paleoclimatology, who found
Soon and Baliunas’ (2003) methods flawed, conclusions unwarranted, and their own work misrepresented. Questions were also raised concerning Soon and Baliunas’ funding
(Goodess 2003; Revkin 2003). The article thus became somewhat of a political football, but the controversy surrounding its publication would fade until the release of the Climategate emails, and in 2004 the story was already being eclipsed by a new controversy, which pitted a pair of largely unknown climate skeptics against Mann et al.’s hockey-stick graph.
Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit
Steve McIntyre is the most important individual in the story which links peer- review with the internet and the development of climate blogs, and ultimately concludes (at least as presented in this chapter) with the aftermath of Climategate. His own story has been told several times in the mainstream media coverage of Climategate, where he has been portrayed as an independent outsider who, through dogged determination, shook up the institutions of climate science that tried so hard to exclude him (Cosh 2009; Foot 2009;
150 Ormsby 2009; Pearce 2010b). There is no evidence to suggest that McIntyre had any role in the theft or leak of the Climategate emails, but the contents of those files suddenly brought
McIntyre’s long-standing conflict with climate scientists to public attention. Fred Pearce’s
(2010b) Climategate investigation for The Guardian argues the disclosure would never have happened without McIntyre, whose work,
…created the siege mentality among the scientists, set them on a path of opposition to freedom of information, and by drawing in scores of data liberationists inside and outside the science community, almost certainly inspired whoever stole and released the emails.
What the contents of the Climategate emails clearly reveal is the perceived seriousness of
McIntyre’s challenge to a small but influential group of climate scientists (including Mann and Jones). These scientists responded in a variety of ways to McIntyre’s work, and their attempts to restrict his and other like-minded “data liberationists’” access to their data are some of the most damaging allegations of Climategate.
McIntyre is indeed an outsider to climate science, but he demonstrates the power of a determined individual with access to a computer and some statistical knowledge to challenge its boundaries. According to his accounts of the experience, McIntyre’s suspicions began either in 2002 (Regalado 2005) or 2003 (Cosh 2009), when he first saw the hockey-stick graph. It reminded him of some of the questionable projections and results he had seen in his career as a Canadian mining executive, and as a “hobby” he decided to see if he could replicate it. He requested the necessary data from Mann, whose initially helpful but ill-prepared response suggested that such a replication had never been attempted
151 before, and the sort of “due diligence” with which McIntyre was familiar in the corporate world was not standard practice for Mann’s climate science (Cosh 2009). McIntyre then teamed up with Ross McKitrick, a Canadian economist he met in a climate skeptic internet discussion group (Regalado 2005), who was more experienced with both the climate skeptic counter-movement and the procedures of academic publishing. Not long after (due to an expedited review process), they published their critique of the Mann, Bradley, and
Hughes (1998) temperature reconstruction in Energy & Environment (McIntyre &
McKitrick 2003), utilizing data acquired from Mann and his colleagues to identify methodological problems.7
Despite the reputation of Energy & Environment as a “skeptics’ journal”, with which Mann and his colleagues had become familiar through the Soon and Baliunas controversy, Mann took the article quite seriously, drafting a response which labeled its publication as an “injustice” (Mann 2003b) (though this language would later be toned- down in the group’s published response [Mann, Bradley & Hughes 2003]). The level of acknowledgement that Mann and his colleagues gave the publication was probably due to the political uses to which the article was being put in the U.S. global warming debate, as it was promptly promoted by U.S. think tanks (DC 2010a; Regalado 2005; Vergano 2003), and McIntyre and McKitrick were at the time visibly rising to prominence among climate skeptics.
It was roughly in this period that McIntyre and McKitrick, as well as Mann and his colleagues, began increasingly to turn to the internet, in a process that would develop into the “dueling blogs” of Climate Audit and RealClimate. The now-defunct climate2003.com
152 website (Internet Archive Wayback Machine n.d.) was started within a month of the publication of McIntyre and McKitrick’s (2003) first article as a companion to their critique, featuring their data sources and computational methodology. As the controversy continued, it was updated with additional information and used to address the Mann team’s counter-criticisms. That website remained active until 2007, but as of 2005 was left largely un-updated and directed users to McIntyre’s new blog at climateaudit.org, which was launched that year. Meanwhile, Mann became a leading contributor to the realclimate.org blog, which was launched in late 2004. The team of contributors to the RealClimate differed considerably from the paleoclimatology colleagues with whom Mann had previously published responses to Soon, Baliunas, McIntyre, and McKitrick. Their stated goal was to educate “the interested public and journalists” and “rebut or debunk rather fanciful claims”, in a manner quicker than that offered by the publication speed of peer- review or popular science journals (RealClimate 2004). While these traditional print sources such as journals and magazines often addressed such controversies after the media and public’s attention had shifted, “[j]ournalists with deadlines and scant knowledge of the field” could now come to RealClimate to find actual working climate scientists’ position on the context for “papers that are being pushed by some of the partisan think-tanks or other interested parties” (ibid.). Naturally, RealClimate’s contributors were framed as disinterested experts who restricted their discussions to purely scientific topics (ibid.).
RealClimate was not the first climate blog – Roger Pielke Jr.’s Prometheus site
(Prometheus n.d.) for one was launched months earlier in the spring of 2004. In subsequent years these early blogs would be joined by a large number of others, including some
153 published by scientists but mostly from “amateur” authors. For now, however, I will maintain the focus on RealClimate and Climate Audit, which have to this day continued to serve as major nodes in the online networks of climate skeptics and AGW advocates. Both blogs’ authors were able to rapidly comment on a variety of topics, including current mainstream media stories or the latest scientific publications, and in time both sites also included archives of various climate datasets and codes.8 As found on most climate blogs, they also allowed readers the ability to comment on postings, and these comment threads sometimes digressed into additional discussions.9 These two blogs in particular were also active participants in the hockey-stick controversy, which was then gaining steam in peer- reviewed journals and traditional print media.
In early 2005, the peer-reviewed mainstream academic journal Geophysical
Research Letters published a new critique of the Mann, Bradley, and Hughes paleoclimate reconstruction (1998) by McIntyre and McKitrick. The critique was adapted from a submission to Nature, which had been rejected following a controversial peer-review, much of which has been published in the form of email exchanges at Climate Audit (Climate
Audit n.d.; McIntyre 2010a). While there was some discussion between Mann and his colleagues about taking action against the editors at Geophysical Research Letters who had allowed the publication,10 much of the debate which followed took place online, and the journal never experienced a shake-up similar to that which had occurred at Climate
Research. While climate2003.com and Climate Audit were used to promote and supplement McIntyre and McKitrick’s (2005) publication, responses to it were posted on
RealClimate (Schmidt 2005), and these in turn were countered in Climate Audit. This duel
154 would receive front-page attention in the Wall Street Journal (Regalado 2005), attracting more visitors to both sites. Following 2005, McIntyre would bypass publishing in peer- reviewed journals, using Climate Audit as a platform for criticism of the work of Mann and his colleagues. While RealClimate avoided directly referencing Climate Audit posts, Mann privately urged his colleagues to use RealClimate as a resource, “at your disposal to combat any disinformation put forward by the McIntyres of the world” (Mann 2006). The tone of these combative blog posts was often civil, with both sides largely avoiding personal or ad hominem attacks, but stronger language could be found in the comments sections, and increasingly, on other blogs.
The hockey-stick controversy was also actively taking place offline, with Mann testifying before the U.S. Congress, and investigations carried out into the matter by a
National Research Council panel (National Research Council 2006) and an ad-hoc committee of statisticians (Wegman, Scott & Said 2006). Other peer-reviewed studies were published that were critical of the Mann team’s methodology, or which found greater historical temperature variability from similar proxy indicators. Thus while it became possible to talk of the “decay of the hockey stick” without mentioning the work of Soon and Baliunas (2003) or McIntyre and McKitrick (2003; 2005) (von Storch & Zorita 2007), both papers were included in the IPCC’s AR4 section on paleoclimate, albeit somewhat dismissively (Jansen et al. 2007, ch. 6.6). Compared to TAR however, AR4 did downgrade the significance of the Mann, Bradley, and Hughes (1999) reconstruction, removing the hockey stick graph from the SPM, and showing it overlaid with other reconstructions in the paleoclimatology chapter. Despite the increased number of paleoclimatic reconstructions
155 considered, which exhibit greater temperature variability than previously found by Mann,
Bradley, and Hughes, recent temperatures still appear anomalously high in a historical context, and AR4’s claims about the significance of 20th century warming was broadly consistent with those found in TAR.
Information Wars in the Global Warming Controversy After 2005
In the mid-2000s, significant shifts took place in the landscape of the global warming controversy, particularly as it took place online. RealClimate and Climate Audit were soon joined by other blogs, which could typically be clearly associated with the network of climate skeptics (that has often been extended to include “lukewarmers” such as
Lucia Liljegren) or AGW advocates. An attempt to map these networks was recently commissioned by Oxfam, and some preliminary results have been circulated among climate blogs (Liljegren 2010a; Shrubsole 2010) as shown below:
156
Figure 3: Preliminary network analysis of the global warming debate conducted by Profero for Oxfam. Much of the linking and arrangement can be questioned, but the map does have some heuristic value.
157
NOAA GISS David Keith Sonja University Boehmer- of Calgary Christiansen James Richard Hansen Willie Lindzen Soon Phil Jones Sallie Heartland Baliunas Institute UEA/ Naomi IPCC CRU Christopher Oreskes Monckton Al Gore Fraser Tim Ball Institute David Tom Suzuki Harris FCPP Mike Hulme Chris de Michael Freitas Mann Judith Curry Ross McKitrick Friends of Gavin Science Hans von Schmidt The David Storch Suzuki Foundation Roger Pielke Jr.
Steve McIntyre/ Lucia DeSmogBlog Climate Audit Liljegren
RealClimate SourceWatch Anthony Watts/Watts Up With Legend: DeepClimate That?
Think Tanks
Blogs/Bloggers
Figure 4: My own attempt at mapping the controversy, which traces connections between many of the actors mentioned in this study.
158 DeSmogBlog.com and deepclimate.org have specifically targeted the climate skeptics’ network, uncovering climate “misinformation” and skeptics’ financial ties to industries. A notable addition to the climate skeptics’ network was former television meteorologist
Anthony Watts’ blog wattsupwiththat.com.11 Watts’ blog was launched near the end of
2007, and supplemented his website surfacestations.org, which coordinates a volunteer effort to photographically document weather stations across the U.S. Hundreds of individuals have participated by uploading images of weather stations, many of which appear to be in violation of standards for properly positioning such equipment. While wattsupwiththat.com features posts on a variety of climate-related topics, as well as its own
“audits” of climate records, it is these photos of the instrumentation used to determine national weather trends, sited near machinery or in urban areas (suggesting the influence of an Urban Heat Island effect), that have been among the site’s most compelling contributions to the controversy.12 wattsupwiththat.com can currently be described as the most visited of all the climate blogs (Alexa n.d.).
While Climate Audit continued to post “audits” of climate science from available data, McIntyre increasingly focused his attention on gaining access to additional data, weather station information, and even the email correspondence of climate scientists, through requests made via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to institutions such as the CRU and the National Ocean and Atmospheric Association (NOAA). McIntyre’s personal requests for data from scientists such as Mann and Jones had rather quickly become ignored, but FOIA requests allowed him to legally demand access to raw data, as well as additional information such as intermediate calculations, codes, and research-related
159 correspondence. McIntyre also used FOIA to request access to digital copies of IPCC reviewer comments from the NOAA. While the NOAA claimed it did not have the jurisdiction to comply, the IPCC did subsequently publish such comments online (McIntyre
2009c), and McIntyre took credit for this development (McIntyre 2007). McIntyre was joined by several other “data liberationists” intent on gaining access to climate science information, such as Doug Keenan, David Holland, and Willis Eschenbach.
Perhaps the first FOIA request in the controversy was actually sent by Eschenbach to CRU in 2007 (UEA 2010) for a list of weather stations and the raw data used by Jones to construct the influential HadCRUT3 global temperature record, after Eschenbach failed to get the information from Jones personally. In a post on a climate skeptics’ discussion group, Eschenbach described his motivation as,
…trying to get access to the taxpayer funded raw data that they built the global temperature record out of. I was not representing anybody, or trying to prove a point. I am not funded by Mobil, I’m an amateur scientist with a lifelong interest in the weather. I’m not “directed” by anyone, I’m not a member of a right-wing conspiracy. I’m just a guy trying to move science forwards. (McIntyre 2009c)
Later in the post, Eschenbach goes on to quote Climategate emails which demonstrate that
Jones, Mann, and others had been concerned about the U.K.’s FOIA as early as 2005, before the newly-implemented legislation had been tested by its first request. Upon hearing about FOIA, Jones asked colleagues not to publicize that such an act existed, lest climate skeptics find out about it, and he considered ways in which FOIA requests might be rejected, including deleting emails, and citing confidentiality agreements (ibid.). While the
FOIA requests which eventually arrived were generally rejected, additional climate
160 scientists began to recognize the potential accessibility of information that had previously been kept private. In 2008, after refusing a FOIA request from McIntyre for information he felt was unreasonable (and using scathing language to describe McIntyre and “his cronies”), Ben Santer wrote, “I must assume that any email I write… may be subject to FOI requests, and could ultimately appear on McIntyre's ‘ClimateAudit’ website” (Jones
2008a). In September 2009, Jonathan Overpeck encouraged his colleagues to “write all emails as though they will be made public” (Overpeck 2009).
As previously mentioned, FOIA requests sent by McIntyre and others to gain access to information related to climate science generally did not prove very productive. Such requests were typically rejected by individuals tasked with processing them at their respective institutions, and in mid-2007, Jones wrote that he thought he had “managed to persuade UEA [University of East Anglia] to ignore all further FOIA requests if the people have anything to do with Climate Audit”, and that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology was following a similar procedure (Karl 2007). In 2008 Jones described his experience in more detail in another email to his colleagues:
When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions - one at a screen, to convince them otherwise showing them what CA [Climate Audit] was all about. Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA… became very supportive. I've got to know the FOI person quite well and the Chief Librarian - who deals with appeals. (Jones 2008b)
These emails do suggest that scientists and their institutions “contradicted [the] spirit of openness” in science (Pearce 2010b), and they are among the most serious of the
161 credible allegations made in light of Climategate. However, some appreciation is warranted for the position of the scientists who resisted these FOIA requests. As evidenced in several emails, Jones, Santer and others considered these requests to be a form of harassment which essentially sought to consume their time and interfere with their work, without benefit to science (Pearce 2010b; Santer 2009a; Schneider 2009). There was speculation that these requests constituted an “organized attack” (Osborn 2008), and that McIntyre was part of a “highly orchestrated, heavily-funded corporate attack campaign” (Mann 2009).
Furthermore, despite the view that climate skeptics or data liberationists were simply interested in finding flaws in their work for political gain, much of the information which was being requested from climate scientists was simply not easily accessible, in disorganized form, not the individual property of those scientists, or would have taken considerable time to arrange into the forms being asked for. Journal publications in climate science had traditionally not required the complete and openly accessible archiving of data and methods, and some of the CRU’s raw climate data appears to have been lost in the
1980s (Pielke, Jr. 2009) – this being part of what climate skeptics find unsettling. Jones has admitted that the unorganized state of some of his raw data contributed to his reluctance to share it with critics (Harrabin 2010). Climate science publications are not unique in respect to issues of data access and accountability, but such problems are of immense importance in climate science due to the scope of the political decisions being justified with its findings, and the public trust which is necessary to support such decisions.
Finally, it should be noted that not all climate scientists shared the much criticized
“circle-the-wagons” mentality (Curry 2009) of Jones and Mann. Even within this embattled
162 “tribe” there was some ambivalence about the release of data. Santer altered his position not long after his scathing criticism of McIntyre in 2008, releasing the requested information in the hopes of not being encumbered by further FOIA requests (Santer 2009a).
Tom Wigley wrote to Jones in 2009, in a discussion of how to respond to a specific critique from McIntyre, that,
[T]he issue of with-holding data is still a hot potato… Yes, there are reasons – but many *good* scientists appear to be unsympathetic to these. The trouble here is that with-holding data looks like hiding something, and hiding means (in some eyes) that it is bogus science that is being hidden. (Jones 2009)
The importance of openness, transparency (Merton’s norm of communism), and reproducibility in science was clearly not entirely missed by these climate scientists, but they felt either that their critics already had sufficient information to reproduce their work, or that these skeptics had no real interest in reproduction, and would simply search for errors that could be misunderstood or blown out of proportion for political gain. However, in their attempts to tightly guard the borders of climate science against individuals they considered to be ill-intentioned outsiders, they were in effect laying the foundations for a scandal which would compel a re-drawing of those very borders. The conflict was already achieving greater attention in the summer of 2009 in the pages of Nature (Heffernan 2009), at a time when CRU was receiving a dramatic increase in FOIA requests, attributable to
McIntyre’s encouragement of his readers to submit requests for the release of non- disclosure agreements that were claimed to restrict CRU’s ability to share data (McIntyre
163 2009a). However, it would take the release of the Climategate files to kick off a wave of stories that would shake the core institutions of climate science.
2003 Publication of Soon & Baliunas (2003) and ensuing controversy at Climate Research, including von Storch, de Freitas, Mann et al.
2004-2005 McIntyre & McKitrick (2003; 2005) critiques of Mann et al. gain attention. “Dueling blogs” Climate Audit and RealClimate founded.
2005-2007 Additional climate blogs appear, first concerns expressed by climate scientists over possibility of FOIA requests.
2007-2009 First FOIA requests submitted to CRU, generally rejected.
August 2009 Surge in FOIA requests to CRU, following Climate Audit post.
November 2009- Climategate release made public. Other scandals and criticisms 2010 follow. Efforts made towards increased transparency & access to climate data. Future of IPCC questioned. Figure 5: A chronology of included events.
The Internet as an Agent of Change in Climate Science
It is possible to see the technology of the internet as of peripheral importance to some of the controversies described above. Controversies concerning peer-reviewed publications, such as the one which affected Climate Research, certainly have occurred
(albeit at a somewhat slower pace) prior to email. FOIA requests are also not dependent on electronic communication, and can be thought of as a legal innovation that in recent years has had the consequence of legally compelling scientific institutions to comply with requests for information from the public, or to use legal justifications to avoid compliance
164 with such requests.13 However, I would argue that the internet did play a key role in all of these events, whether by facilitating rapid communication and the coordinated action of multiple individuals, or by creating entirely new landscapes, platforms, and arenas in which the controversy could play out – namely climate blogs. All of these developments also took place at a transitory time in science, during which old practices and structures were being
(and continue to be) reshaped by the diffusion of computer technology (Nentwich 2003: ch.
1.2.3). Electronic publishing in particular, not only increases the mobility of old texts, but has also resulted in an increase in scientific publication, due to the ease of self-publishing online (albeit often with less quality control) (ibid.: 367). Despite the fact that computer technologies make it easier to appropriate and modify information, they also provide it with greater permanence due to the ease of reproduction and data storage, much to the imagined disappointment of some of the Climategate email authors, who might have assumed that deleting an email would have truly removed it from existence.
The other key observation that follows from the developments previously described is the increased permeability and limited conceptual value of the shrinking border between what might be characterized as “popularized science” and “real science”.14 Many of the scientists involved in the global warming controversy take the reporting of the mainstream media very seriously, and recognize its impact not only on climate science, but also on the public’s conceptions of climate change. Indeed, it is arguably the mainstream media
(particularly in the U.K.) which has dealt the biggest blows to the credibility of certain climate scientists and institutions, and created much of the public pressure to investigate or reform the work of climate science. Blogs however, are also a form of science
165 popularization or science reporting, to which mainstream media have paid increasing attention since 2004 (Neuzil 2008: 229-230). Climate blogs additionally serve the function of being a platform on which climate science can be promoted, critiqued, or even replicated and refuted. Climategate emails reveal the indignation some scientists felt at being subjected to “audit” by McIntyre, but it is clear that they recognized the power that his blog held among climate skeptics, and as time passed, and McIntyre’s efforts were joined by other data liberationists, the consequences of this movement became impossible to ignore.15
Whether it is fair to characterize climate bloggers as an “extender peer community” for climate science as Ravetz has done (Watts 2010) can be debated, but climate blogs do make possible the review and communication of science by members of a newly empowered public (including some scientists) for a large online audience.
A number of climate scientists have complained that skeptical bloggers spend all of their energy criticizing and undermining climate science, but some bloggers have recently responded by constructing their own temperature records (Liljegren 2010b). To date, the scientific contribution of these bloggers remains quite modest (albeit highly consequential in the public debate), being largely restricted to identifying errors in the work of others – but this role could expand in the future. It seems clear that there now exists a movement or network of “amateur scientists”, who have in recent years served a watchdog role for climate science, but may now be able to make more of a contribution to the production of new climate knowledge (though there is no prospect of blog posts being accepted for review in the next IPCC assessment report). Some accredited climate scientists meanwhile,
166 have increasingly turned to climate blogs to express their views, or to address current topics with a speed and distribution, or mobility, that other media cannot offer.
The Changing Face of the Climate Skeptic Counter-Movement
All of this raises the question of just what the climate skeptics’ counter-movement
(or alternately, the data liberation movement) represents, and who it is currently composed of. What are their interests and motivations? What of the links between climate skeptics and industry uncovered on blogs such as DeSmogBlog and Deep Climate? Is this a
“legitimate” grassroots counter-movement, or a carefully engineered, coordinated, and secretly funded campaign, as Gore, Mann, and other AGW advocates have argued?
Any attempt to generalize the views of climate skeptics would run into the same difficulties posed in the previous chapter’s attempts to describe the AGW consensus.
Clearly there is significant variability in the stated positions of various skeptics, and even some of the most iconoclastic skeptics, including McIntyre, avoid claiming that the AGW hypothesis is false, instead emphasizing the uncertainties and flaws in climate knowledge.16
Indeed, it might be possible to conceptually separate the data liberationist movement, with its interest in transparency and access, and the climate skeptic counter-movement, which doubts, questions, or seeks to refute the AGW hypothesis, often for political or commercial reasons. However, these two movements overlap and are deeply interconnected, though many bloggers (including McIntyre) appear largely free of corporate financial support.
Think tanks have also established a presence on the internet,17 and their involvement overlaps with more grassroots efforts in other ways. For example, a think tank such as the
167 Heartland Institute might support an appearance by their resident expert Christopher
Monckton, a clip of which would then be posted at wattsupwiththat. Alternately, McIntyre and Watts, who both deny outside funding, have been speakers at an annual conference of climate skeptics sponsored by the Heartland Institute (SourceWatch 2010a).18 Thus, individuals such as McIntyre benefit the more traditional structures of the climate skeptics’ counter-movement, including think tanks and PR campaigns, which have been funded in part by industries concerned about regulation (SourceWatch 2010b). But McIntyre and
Watts also benefit from this arrangement, by using such structures of the counter- movement, the existence of which precedes their own work, in order to gain greater publicity – although they carefully negotiate their involvement with think tanks and related groups to maintain the appearance of disinterestedness, and it remains difficult to claim that their work is somehow financed by industry.
What does seem clear is that the current form of the climate skeptic counter- movement cannot be explained simply as a coordinated campaign of resistance to regulation by interested industries. Such a characterization would have been more accurate during the 1990s, but today only amounts to a very partial explanation. It is difficult to know what the scale of continued industry funding to support climate skepticism is, as much of it appears to be hidden and routed through indirect channels, but significant parts of the climate skeptic network are largely independent of such support. Fred Pearce (2010b) has characterized individuals such as McIntyre as part of a “grey power” movement, composed of, “retired numerate professionals with time on their hands, an obsessive streak in their heads and a cause to pursue”. This generalization does appear to be broadly
168 applicable (though not all prominent skeptics are retired or “numerate professionals”), and even the FoS membership is drawn largely from retired geologists and other industry professionals, many of whom have backgrounds involving quantitative analysis, and who appear to be motivated by personal conviction to question the AGW hypothesis. However, the FoS also demonstrates the hybrid nature of the climate skeptics’ network – being a grassroots organization, albeit one willing to associate itself with funding sources and organizations tied to industry. While it is only possible to speculate what would happen to the climate skeptic counter-movement if financial support from industry dried up entirely, it does appear that it would in large part survive, due to the involvement of a large number of individuals whose participation is not motivated by financial enrichment.
Conclusions Concerning Climategate and its Repercussions
Some of the events related to Climategate have previously been reviewed at the start of this chapter, but I find it necessary to conclude with some final remarks on these developments. First, many of the allegations of climate skeptics related to outright fraud or the fabrication of data central to the AGW hypothesis are simply not supported by the released emails. However, Judith Curry (Kloor 2010) has criticized the recent
“exoneration” of the CRU in the Oxburgh report, because (among other reasons) the investigation focused on determining if there had been such egregious academic misconduct, while ignoring the more nuanced criticism offered by individuals such as herself, McIntyre, Hulme, and von Storch. There are a number of issues of concern implicated in the Climategate emails, but those related to data transparency do warrant
169 careful consideration, and it now appears that concerns related to FOI and open access to data are being addressed to some extent.
However, it also appears that Climategate has served as a catalyst for other criticisms of climate science and the IPCC, which are in many ways independent of the main issues raised by the emails, but the timing of which (in rapid succession during early
2010) suggests that the Climategate scandal has effectively opened previously “settled” domains of climate science to critique and possible reform (Gomez & Jordans 2010; Nature
2010). Ultimately, it remains to be seen how these developments will play out, and to what extent the public’s loss of trust in climate science can be rebuilt. This current period opens the possibility for a new public understanding of climate science, which might better accommodate the uncertainties and complexities of science in action, and the interconnectedness of climate science and politics (Hulme 2009b). If such an understanding were to take hold, it would limit the effectiveness of sweeping pronouncements concerning settled facts and pure scientific objectivity, but may also make scientific knowledge more robust in the face of revelations that scientific practice does not actually meet such lofty ideals.19 Ultimately, the necessity of receiving public support (or at least a sufficient level of consent) to enact any wide-ranging efforts to address AGW requires a certain understanding of, and trust in, climate science. Whether such public support can best be achieved through a discourse of certainty and alarm, or transparency and openness to disagreement, is one of the key dilemmas currently facing the science and politics of the global climate. It now seems entirely possible that, in some cases at least, the urgency of
170 reaching black and white conclusions and decisive action may be sacrificed in the interests of thoroughness and credibility.
Notes
1 See Black 2010; Hulme & Ravetz 2009; Jasanoff 2010; Nature 2010; Revkin, Curry & Hulme 2009a; Rosenthal 2010. However, there are indications that the public’s trust in the science of global warming was decreasing preceding Climategate, and the actual magnitude of the scandal’s effect on public opinion is quite uncertain (Nisbet 2010). 2 Specifically, in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society during the late-seventeenth century. 3 De Freitas and Baliunas in particular, both of whom have also been associated with the FoS [DC 2009a] and a number of think tanks. 4 See Kellow 2007: 53-88; RealClimate n.d.; von Storch & Zorita 2007. 5 Whom von Storch also gave the Editor-in-Chief position the power to select. 6 Or perhaps just one of which, namely Chris de Freitas (Goodess 2003). 7 Whether these data were indeed the appropriate set to use became a controversy of its own following the article’s publication, which is not within my scope to describe. 8 Additionally, Climate Audit has published some of McIntyre’s email exchanges with individuals such as Mann. 9 Both blogs also moderate or regulate these comments, but such moderation is an essentially editorial process which varies in its practice from one blog to the next. 10 Action was briefly contemplated to have them removed as editors they could be proved to be allied with climate skeptics (Hughes 2005). 11 Interestingly, a recent survey of television meteorologists (Maibach, Wilson & Witte 2010) found relatively high levels of skepticism over the AGW hypothesis. 12 Though Watts does not typically argue them to be evidence that global warming has not occurred, instead claiming that the instrumental record is flawed. 13 Similar legal means have been used in the U.S. since the early 1990s to gain access to and challenge scientific data, particularly in controversies over tobacco and environmental regulations (Wagner & Steinzor 2006). 14 See Brossard 2009; Danette 2004; Hilgartner 1990; Weingart 1998. 15 It should be remembered that climate skeptics do not have a monopoly on such techniques, as deepclimate.org features its own “audits” of the skeptics, most recently (DC 2010b) finding significant plagiarism in the Wegman report on the hockey-stick graph. 16 McIntyre (2010c) has also gone as far as to defend Mann against allegations of fraud. 17 Perhaps exemplified by Marc Morano’s blog at climatedepot.com 18 With McIntyre being one of 2009 and 2010’s headliners. His presentation at the 2010 conference, however, was a more moderate account of Climategate than many in the audience apparently expected, with McIntyre denying that Mann and Jones should face jail (Sheppard 2010). 19 See Glover 2006: 130.
171 EPILOGUE
This inquiry has largely avoided adjudicating in disputes between AGW advocates and climate skeptics, and while I have previously raised the question of, “is global warming real or isn’t it”, the answer I provided was a rather ambivalent one, which it is not my intent to clarify further. Nor am I interested in answering the questions of what is to be done about AGW, or what the future relationship between science, politics, and the public should look like; these have been discussed at length elsewhere (M. B. Brown 2009; Giddens
2009; Latour 2004; Miller 2001b; Pielke, Jr. 2007; Prins et al. 2010), though it appears that there currently exists considerable disagreement on the answers.
My intent has been to explore the participation of certain actors in the public domain of the scientific, political, and moral controversy over global warming. Such public participation in the controversy has often bypassed traditional scientific boundaries such as peer-review and the IPCC, instead utilizing public speakers, popular films, websites, and
FOIA requests, to engage with the public and climate science. The impacts of these forms of engagement go far beyond simply communicating science to a popular audience; they are active forms of participation in a highly charged controversy that has major implications for the public, whether through the consequences attributed to global warming, or the policies crafted to address it.
As Hulme (2009a) points out, the idea of climate change can be understood and applied in many ways, from discourses of sustainability, to issues of justice between rich and poor, or the legacy left by one generation for the next. What is broadly at stake is not
172 the change in global average temperature (an outcome which by itself, is not inherently problematic [Sarewitz 2004: 389]), but rather what the consequences of such changes are, a topic of immense uncertainty and competing projections (for the most catastrophic possibilities see Dyer 2008). While it is impossible to know what environmental and social consequences will eventually be attributed to global warming, a more immediate and tangible stake are the policy decisions currently under discussion between the nations of the world, and being debated amongst the broader public. While divergent views and interests have resulted in considerable conflict over these issues outside of the traditional borders of science, the public debate over global warming has increasingly had implications for institutions central to mainstream climate science, such as the Climate Research Unit and the IPCC.
The IPCC was designed as a means of delivering scientific assessments of climate change to policymakers, thus serving as the first stage of a linear process wherein scientific knowledge is transferred to governments, who then use it as a guide in decision making.
However, climate science has long been responsive to the political context of its time, and the IPCC has always exhibited some level of political feedback, wherein political considerations have influenced the output of the science (as exemplified by the drafting of the “Summaries for Policymakers”). In recent years, a broader public domain has increasingly come to mediate this relationship between science and politics. Instead of simply accepting the authoritative statements of the IPCC, climate skeptics have challenged the foundations of climate science, and as a result have contributed to the significant public pressure which has called the future shape of the IPCC into question. The current climate
173 skeptic counter-movement is a hybrid of long-standing efforts to challenge the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, as typified by the work of a number of conservative think tanks and their supporters, and a qualitatively new dimension of grassroots activism conducted by concerned groups and individuals. Since 2005, climate bloggers and data liberationists have, in particular, contributed considerable time and effort to engaging with and challenging what was once a tightly-bounded world of climate science – a process in which the role of the internet has been a key enabling innovation (particularly as combined with the legal innovation of FOI legislation).
The global warming controversy has also served as a highly-active context for observing the construction of scientific expertise and credibility in public, a process in which traditional scientific credentials appear to be surprisingly irrelevant. For public speakers, whose audiences have been greatly expanded through the technologies of documentary films and YouTube clips, what appears more important is the successful performance of scientific expertise, which, in the global warming controversy, has often been achieved without reference to an expert’s PhD in climate science. On the internet, expertise in climate science has also increasingly been achieved by non-scientists, and judging by the number of visitors to their blogs and the sorts of comments which are posted, many members of this online audience find “amateur scientists” such as Anthony
Watts or Steve McIntyre to be more credible and trustworthy sources of scientific information than the working climate scientists found at RealClimate.
174 Facts and Values in the Global Warming Controversy
It has been previously remarked that scientific or technical controversies that also have a strong political or moral dimension, are disputes over values perhaps more so than scientific facts. Daniel Sarewitz (2004) has argued that the profusion of facts in climate science, combined with their inherent uncertainties, has allowed for the construction of various scientific realities in accordance with different value-based political positions.
Further research, in his view, can actually make such controversies worse, by contributing new facts, thus allowing for new constructions that lead to new uncertainties. Mike Hulme
(2009a: 106) has also emphasized the role of underlying values in the global warming controversy, stating that,
“[w]e disagree about science because we have different understandings of the relationship of scientific evidence to other things: what we may regard as ultimate 'truth', to the ways in which we relate uncertainty to risk, and to what we believe to be the legitimate role of knowledge in policy making.
Both Hulme (2009a) and Hans von Storch (2009) make some effort to conceptually differentiate the “cultural construction of climate” from the “scientific” (von Storch 2009), or “physical basis of climate” (Hulme 2009a), though neither sees them as entirely separable. Von Storch (2009) does however argue for a separation of science and values to the extent possible (Mazur [1981] previously envisioned a “science court” to accomplish this same task), and he sees a significant role for the natural sciences in advising policy makers, in accordance with Roger Pielke Jr.’s (2007) ideal of the “honest broker”.
Similarly, Sarewitz (2004: 400) also hopes that science can be “liberated to serve society
175 and the environment”, but only once environmental controversies can be “de-scientized”, and the values underlying various positions in the debate be clarified. If this could be achieved, remaining disagreements and uncertainty could be addressed largely through political, and not scientific means.
From the previous analysis, it should be clear that values and interests play an important role in what often has the appearance of an objective, scientific controversy.
Surely it is no coincidence that conservative think tanks overwhelmingly oppose the regulation of CO2 emissions, that the David Suzuki Foundation makes a scientific case for dramatic efforts to address AGW, or that the grassroots support of the FoS has come largely from Calgary's oil and gas sector. Sarewitz (2004) has criticized what he calls “the excess of objectivity” that frames problems such as global warming as ultimately amenable to objective scientific analysis, the factual outcome of which can be used as a clear guide towards solutions. However, as Hulme (2009a: 362) points out, climate change can never be “solved”, and instead best offers us new possibilities to “rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects”. Such decisions made in reference to the vastly complex, uncertain, and multiplicitous global climate will always be open to debate – facts can be questioned, and arranged into various, sometimes contradictory propositions and theories concerning reality.
What the excess of objectivity precludes is the possibility of a multiplicity of legitimate scientific interpretations. Such a singular conception of facts and reality can be a powerful rhetorical device, as found in the rhetoric of closure described in Chapter Four, and the rhetoric of this controversy ultimately carries implications for public policy. In the
176 rhetoric of closure, science speaks with a single legitimate voice, whether this is the consensus represented by the IPCC, or the scientific method trumpeted by climate skeptics.
Both sides of the debate take advantage of the conceptual ambiguities inherent in science and scientific truth, often using similar rhetorical techniques to construct solid and objective realities, any opposition to which is explained as lies, fraud, non-science, or disinformation. Such rhetoric masks underlying value positions, and polarizes debate into uncompromising opposing camps. While it can be argued that such positions should be
“de-scientized” to allow for more constructive engagement between opposing views, it seems quite likely that many participants in the controversy favor the current agonistic relationships with their opponents, and are perfectly content drawing on the authority of science to defend the objectivity of their truth. They may even be addressing their own, largely independent audiences, with no interest in achieving common ground or a common understanding with their opponents.
Paradoxically however, the global warming controversy also demonstrates the inherent limitations of interest-based explanations (see Woolgar 1981), and we should take care not to simply explain away the positions of participants in the debate by attributing some all-important interest. The notion that the existence of the IPCC can be explained as the result of pressure from “green interests”, or that climate scientists engage in some sort of AGW groupthink to protect their jobs and funding, is as simplistic and inaccurate of an explanation of their actions as the characterization of the FoS as a front for the oil and gas industry, or climate bloggers and critical journalists as unwitting dupes for a corporate PR efforts. Such attributions of interest and hidden motives serve to delegitimate these actors
177 in the debate, but also provide a deceptively straight-forward account that fails to appreciate the vast number of possible (and often contradictory) interests that could be attributed to such actors. Attributions of interest also devalue the agency of committed individuals defending their understanding of science, climate, and truth, and obscure the possibility that multiple understandings could exist without some external corruption of objectivity.
Though various studies of scientific controversies with strong political and moral dimensions, including this one, have revealed the malleability of science to serve various actors and ends, this should not be mistaken to mean that scientific facts are little more than an infinitely manipulable smokescreen for political positions and individual or group interests. It may be possible to de-scientize the debate to some extent, and more clearly articulate the value positions of the various participants, but climate science seems destined to remain an important source of knowledge, and its insights (even if they are not all in agreement) will continue to prove useful to various ends. Nature constrains the sorts of scientific claims which can be defended with the data generated from it, despite the variable interpretations that can result. After all, despite some of the more fanciful scientifically- justified claims found at both extremes of the debate, climate skeptics and AGW advocates largely agree on certain facts (for example, few dispute that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, or that there was significant warming at the end of the 20th century), and much of the continued debate revolves around common reference points, such as the three main global climate datasets (created by the GISS, Hadley Center/CRU, and UAH/RSS). Even if expectations concerning science’s ability to resolve matters of causality, certainty, and truth in environmental problems can be reduced, there seems no reason to doubt that
178 controversies concerning climate science will continue, and that these controversies will continue to include the significant participation of non-scientists.
What Role for Sociology?
For all of their criticism of Constance Lever-Tracy’s (2008) call for sociologists to follow the lead of the natural sciences and help address global warming, Reiner
Grundmann and Nico Stehr’s (forthcoming) defense of the “virtues of constructivism” concludes by suggesting that sociology’s most important and practical contribution to the issue of climate change should be, “to identify the social structures and dimensions of agency that will facilitate transitional pathways to a low carbon society”. Regardless of the climate’s sensitivity to CO2 emissions, and the projected or apparent consequences of
AGW, such an approach seems to be a broadly sensible one in the face of a variety of problems associated with our current energy infrastructure (as I write this, a growing oil slick threatens to choke the shores of the Gulf of Mexico). But what role is there for constructivist accounts such as the one provided herein, which pay attention to the public uses of science, and the interconnected political, moral, and scientific aspects of the debate?
A more modest role such studies can serve is to contribute towards a new understanding of science (albeit one informed by decades of work in the sociology of science and related disciplines). The goal of de-scientizing the global warming controversy is a lofty one, and may not even be entirely desirable, but I do see value in identifying
“excesses of objectivity”, and moving towards a new discourse through which it is possible to think and talk about science. If politicians and the public were to expect less of science
179 (namely less certainty, less unity, and a more nuanced idea of objectivity), it seems likely that the resulting understanding of science could cope better with situations such as
Climategate, or other revelations into the ongoing work of climate science and institutions such as the IPCC. The myths of science and Merton's scientific norms might yet retain a place as ideals to be aspired to, but deviations from such norms should be not be seen as scandalous exceptions to the rule. This is not to say that scientists should feel free to withhold data from their critics, or that old concerns over the corruption of science by political or commercial interests have no merit, but it is important to realize that the myth of the pure, objective science, discovering immutable truths devoid of social influence, is so fragile a construction because it is indeed a myth. If such a science did exist, it might provide the clear answers desired to deal with environmental problems and controversies, but the case of global warming demonstrates the difficulties of this approach. Instead it may be better to accept science, warts and all, and revise our expectations of scientific knowledge (for a similar argument, see Collins & Pinch 1993: 142).
Surely some awareness is warranted of the possibility that researchers can easily
(and unwittingly) become active participants in the controversies they study, and that efforts to remain neutral or symmetrical in the treatment of a debate can result in accounts that prove useful to the side with less scientific credibility (Scott, Richards & Martin 1990).
However, despite Lever-Tracy’s (2008: 456-457) warning that constructivist or relativist research can play into the hands of climate sceptics, I have seen little evidence that this has been the case. Constructivist perspectives have typically been ignored by climate sceptics, who largely utilize the same objectivist or empiricist rhetorical techniques of their
180 opponents, with each attempting to out-objectify the other. I cannot deny that the view expressed in this work contradicts that of AGW advocates such as Al Gore, who stress certainty, urgency and the acceptance of traditional scientific authority (even if such authority is embodied by the very untraditional institution of the IPCC). It could be argued that even if the public understanding of science accords scientists and scientific knowledge undue deference, such authority is ultimately a valuable means of achieving public support and mobilization towards worthwhile ends. To such a point I would argue that as long as the public credibility of science depends on myths and misconceptions, it constitutes an inherently weak foundation for action, and one that will always be vulnerable to critique.
Constructivist sociology can help address these vulnerabilities by reshaping expectations of science into ones that could actually be met, particularly along the cutting edge of climate science, where new facts are constantly under construction and debate.
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236 APPENDIX
NOTES REGARDING METHODS
As the preceding work does not contain a formal methodology section, it may be of interest to some readers to learn more about what was involved in my approach. Initially the project began as an analysis of discourse used in the global warming controversy, focusing on the claims made by the FoS in key texts such as the group’s videos and website, which could then be compared with opposing arguments such as those found in
AIT and the IPCC reports. Interviews were scheduled with informants who could provide background on the group. However it soon became clear that any insights reached through this approach, such as identifying key features of the FoS message and its change over time, would yield results of limited broader interest. The FoS retained its place as a sort of representative of the climate skeptic counter-movement, but my scope gradually broadened to include much new terrain. Whereas early SSK scholars could observe knowledge production in the laboratory, my interest was in the use of science as it intersected with the public, and the domain in which these interactions took place was a less tangible one, demanding attention to sites such as mainstream media coverage, public speaking performances, and climate blogs. Being struck by the nature of the leading public experts on the subject, I felt compelled to theoretically account for the performance of expertise in
Chapter Three. As Climategate developed, and the FoS appeared to be of increasingly marginal significance to an unprecedented set of developments, I began to spend increasing
237 hours lurking on climate blogs, browsing their archives, and considering the role of the internet as described in Chapter Five. My advice to anyone attempting a similar approach would be to remain open to alternate methodological possibilities as the constraints of your initial efforts become clear. A changing focus may be best suited for a dynamic and rapidly developing situation, though it does risk the loss of focus and forcing significant re-analysis of previous work if preceding efforts cannot be coherently integrated with more recent ones.