Indeed, those who study the climate itself rather than the bogus debate in the newspapers and the blogosphere understand that climate science and popular perceptions of climate science are diverging rapidly, not least because the news on the former is getting worse.

Indeed. But there’s something of a perception lurking around here that ‘science’ is one thing and ‘politics’ another, which I think is false.

It’s certainly the case that whatever ammunition denialists use against climate science is not itself part of the ‘skepticism’ which is said to be integral to the scientific method. Rather than proposing an alternative hypothesis which would better explain the range of observations made, any line of attack is used, no matter how contradictory with others it may be. So, what we have in denialist discourse is all politics, and no science. No scientific method.

It’s important to underline this point. What denialists cannot provide is anything which can approximate to a truth statement. Methodological doubt, Cartesian style, is supposed to be a prelude to the uncovering of a truth, not a rhetorical strategy of dismissal. Climate change skepticism, contrary to the claims of some of its proponents, has absolutely nothing to do with ‘The Enlightenment’. Quite the contrary.

Their other classic move is to hold science itself to an impossible standard. Somehow the findings of climate science have to be unequivocally true. What we actually see, then, in this contre-temps is a debate over what constitutes truth. Statements made by the IPCC, for instance, are couched in terms of Bayesian probabilities, rather than ‘predictions’. It’s the same form of statement as with genetic predispositions individuals may have to particular diseases; having such a predisposition does not imply that one will necessarily develop the disease. Probability is not destiny or fate. But probabilities of 90%, as in the IPCC’s Fourth Report, are very strong indeed.

But asking science to articulate truth, if truth is understood as incontrovertible knowledge, is asking it to do something it cannot do.

Nor is the process of reaching a consensus the only method of achieving scientific truth. Statements such as that a 2 degree rise in global temperature is a ceiling beyond which catastrophic climate change will occur are artefacts of a particular process, which is not unrelated to the previous adoption of that range in EU public policy. That’s not to say that it has no merit, or isn’t ‘true’. If anything, the likelihood is that things a lot worse than envisaged will happen if temperature can be restricted to this range, for a range of reasons. The ‘consensus’, then, is likely to be more conservative than the actuality.

That’s also because the model of expert knowledge being the foundation of public policy is an out-dated one – politics and values always intervene, and must intervene, in the process of arriving at a mediation between science as truth and policy as truth effect. To the degree that scientists are being asked to do something other than what a notion of a bounded rationality would suggest, it’s best that they, and we, recognise this. The imbrication of science and values is not of itself a problem, or need not be. Here we can learn from Max Weber’s insights in Science As A Vocation.

In Hamilton’s writing, as in the work of others who are concerned about science communication in a political context, there seems to be an implicit belief that communication is a straightforward process of explaining science to a public. That is not so. And not just because some publics lack knowledge of scientific process, but also because there are different cultural and affective dispositions which inflect how the message is received.

It’s not the case that communication on climate science fails because it’s mediated through a political lens, full of noise created by denialists and politicians and the media. Or rather, it’s not wholly true, because communication is never linear, but always mediated. The challenge is not better to communicate a truth, but rather to realise that the construction of a truth is always via mediation, and that values and politics are, and must be, part of that.

To circle back to the question the post posed; Pilate asked a good question. But the answer to it is not that the truth cannot be discovered. It is to recognise that truth is a matter of persuasion, involving particular dispositions among interlocutors. Values and fact, therefore.

Sparrow examines how the ground for a populist upsurge of climate change denialism among “the old, the white and the angry” was well prepared by the Howard era culture wars.

Once upon a time, the Liberal Party, an organisation temperamentally suited, after all, to hierarchy, accorded an almost royal deference to Big Science. Menzies presided over an Australia that wondered at atom splittings and Sputnik launchings, and not in the sceptical sense of that word but with genuine awe, with the mysteries expounded by clipboard-carrying oracles understood as evidencing the remarkable advances of the modern age.

Under Howard, however, the party embraced a populist anti-elitism, in which the instincts of ordinary folk always trumped the hoity-toity pronouncements of over-educated know-it-alls. Throughout the culture wars, the high falutin’ elitists in their inner-city apartments, those whining postmodernists confounding the common sense of you and me and the bloke next door, were a perennial punching bag for the Liberals and their mouthpieces.

The climate debate thus arrived with an oppositional script already well-prepared: on the one hand, the fancy-dancing, silver-tongued scientists and ideologues, with their incomprehensible graphs and statistical charts; on the other, the hard-working traditional Australians forced to feel bad about SUVs and air travel by self-righteous scolds.

Slapping down some scientific poindexter became, then, a reflexive defence of values associated with the ’50s, even as it manifested an attitude to the research establishment that Menzies would have found incomprehensible.

He’s also spot on in honing in on the fact that rational argument is incapable of shifting the views of denialists (much as the apparatus of knowledge has to be mimicked with graphs and charts); a mindset driven by affect, emotion and ressentiment, a perceived assault on a way of living and anti-rationalism is by definition immune to persuasion. After all, the frame of ‘the people v. the elites’ rules out the canons of evidence based debate by definition – if you can do that, then you’re one of the dreaded over-educated, latte-sipping tribe.

It is necessary to continue to argue within the rationalist, scientific paradigm, but it’s also vital to recognise that we are talking about two very distinct and opposed modes of being in the world and that the twain will rarely meet. The disjunction between magical thinking and scientific reasoning reinscribes itself because those who are trained in the latter are very often unaware that it is a rare and highly learned skill. The very practice of learning to think rationally naturalises it; and disguises the fact that it is an artifice constructed by human endeavour rather than ‘human nature’. This, then, circles around to the recreation of a feeling of social distance from those who don’t live in the worldview of science.

And that’s what causes a lot of the communicative failures that occur again and again, when incommensurable discourses clash. In fact, respect for science is grounded in status distinctions, as well as concomitant knowledge differentiation, and the erosion of the acceptance of authority pervasive throughout the lifeworld of late modernity erodes the naturalisation of such distinctions, and allows them to be politicised as a cultural war between elites and the folk(s). When you’re at war, dialogue has died.

At the more mundane level of electoral politics, though, all is not lost, because the two opposed constellations of forces are both small minorities within the populace as a whole. (Those who claim to speak “for the people” are also an elite social formation, of sorts.)

Sparrow, again:

Abbott thus faces a ticklish dilemma. On the one hand, the deniers bring a passion that an Opposition sorely needs. On the other hand, the climate sceptics teeter on the verge of overt hostility to the very establishment that the Liberal Party needs to win over. Populists, after all, despise and mistrust not only greenies and EU commissars but Big Media and Big Business.

The Liberal Party, well, not so much.

John Howard managed?—?most of the time?—?to present himself simultaneously as a populist and a man of the establishment. Perhaps Abbott can do the same. But it doesn’t seem likely, at least partly because the rhetorical tenor of the sceptics has grown so shrill.

NB: Related post.

The post is partly informed by the insights of the French sociologist Bruno Latour on knowledge and, particularly, by his claim that ‘we have never been modern’. If he’s right, and I think he is, there is no public sphere of reason to which we can unproblematically appeal. Rather, we need to ground our arguments in a sensibility which bridges the culture/nature divide, and to recognise that the only possible response to climate crisis is political. That’s a challenge both for progressives, who seem in many instances to have forgotten cultural politics, and for those who believe that reason will triumph. That’s also a belief – and it’s one that will only come true if it’s fought for.

You can read the post here.

The issue is not going to go away, regardless of the short-term success or failure of attempts to reach a global agreement to stabilise the climate. The more clearly the political right is identified with the anti-science side of this debate, the harder it will be to salvage any of its existing institutions.

Kevin Rudd’s rhetoric in 2007 recognised that Australian politics deals particularly badly with long term issues. Our statist political culture means that interest groups of all kinds seek to cut deals for whatever their short term interests require, and the veneer of “ideas” – particularly neo-liberal ones – is particularly thin, hardly sufficing to pave over the cracks of corporate self-interest. Rudd, of course, has hardly fulfilled the hopes he himself aroused. But surely it’s worth wondering what long term costs the right will bear after the time passes when denialism loses any patina of plausibility.