What Motivates a Climate Skeptic?

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I always like digging around in the academic literature for insights about todayโ€™s politicized science battles. Now that social scientists have begun to apply themselves to public fights over the hard sciences, I find that they have a great deal to offer. The latest exhibit: The work of Andrew J. Hoffman, Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the University ofย Michigan.ย 

Hoffman is an โ€œorganizational theorist.โ€ As such, he believes that โ€œfailing to attend to the deeper social and cultural forces within the climate conflict, and in particular the counter-movements that resist the dominant logic,โ€ is a bigย mistake.

So he went and studied the โ€œculture and discourseโ€ of climate skepticsโ€”which involved attending their conferences and eventsโ€“and describes some of the preliminary results in a recentย paper in Strategic Organization. As a result, Hoffman argues that three themes are dominant in the movement. And hereโ€™s where, to me, it gets really interesting.

1.ย Stealth Attack on Personal Freedom. Skeptics, write Hoffman, think concern over global warming just a ruse to curtail personal libertiesโ€”by increasing the power of government to interfere in the market. This of course carries over to a deep distrust of the U.N. At a climate skeptic conference, writes Hoffman, one presenter โ€œwent so far as to suggest that a binding international agreement on climate change would end with individuals being required to carry โ€˜carbon ration cardsโ€™ on theirย person.โ€

2.ย Free Marketeers. Relatedly, the skeptics have a โ€œstrong faithโ€ in the free market. Renewable energy is distrusted because it needs to be subsidized. Huhโ€”what do they think of fossil fuel subsidies, then? Hoffman does not discuss what seems to me one plausible outcome of this free market commitment: The belief that markets could not really create a problem like climate change, or if they do, markets also will solveย it.

3.ย Distrust of Peer Review. To me, this was the most intriguing finding. Skeptics, write Hoffman, โ€œargue that public funding of science in the post-Second World War era through organizations like the National Science Foundation (NSF) corrupted the scientific process.โ€ Um, such funding also made us the worldโ€™s science superpowerโ€”but I digress. The point would seem to be that skeptics distrust all government, publicly funded science because they believe the peer review system has been corrupted and incestuousโ€”after all, itโ€™s not a free market systemโ€“and the โ€œClimateGateโ€ brouhaha just served as a confirmation to them of this deeperย distrust.

So if youโ€™re one of those people who asks yourself, โ€œhow can they believe this stuff?โ€ Well, thatโ€™sย how.

Whatโ€™s surprising to me is that none of this is, at base, scientific. Itโ€™s all about distrusting some kind of power associated with the government, while very much trusting other kinds of power that areย unregulated.

In other words, itโ€™s about how societyโ€”not the atmosphereโ€”is organized. ย ย 

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