The other day, I mentioned Clive Hamilton’s series of posts on climate change denialism at The Drum. In today’s edition, Hamilton comments:
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.
Of media narratives, truth and narratologies
It would be interesting to study the role of the economics editor. In Australia, at least, those papers and media outlets which employ such a person appear to see the role as enforcing the BCA line on liberal economics, even if sometimes the actually existing BCA companies have their hands well and truly out for the largesse of the state. There’s a bit of a story about ideology here, and the neo-liberal whip gig only really works if one is not too partisan about it – so Paul Kelly’s portentous ponderings fit the bill exactly. At The Australian (and here, the broader tale is one of the trajectory of that paper overall), Michael Stutchbury has taken the commentary in a more openly pro-Coalition direction. Witness, as they say on the op/ed pages, his latest rather unfocused piece – decrying Labor governments (and social democrats, and Rudd advisor Andrew Charlton) for mixing politics with economics. Magically, of course, blatant political fixes by conservative administrations never seem to attract the same opprobrium. It’s as if the “reform test” constantly being applied to Kevin Rudd (despite what he himself has said about his own views on economics, and perhaps it were better had he been taken at his word) were one of complete purity in adherence to the gospel according to the Productivity Commission, or whoever represents the yardstick for this stuff at any particular point in time.
It would be possible to expose any number of non-sequiturs, rhetorical moves, sophistries, and general incoherence in Stutchbury’s article.
But there’s a broader point here.
We live, we’re told sometimes, in an age of story-telling. Continue reading ‘Of media narratives, truth and narratologies’