Andrew Hoffman - How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate

HOW CULTURE SHAPES THE CLIMATE CHANGE DEBATE

ANDREW J. HOFFMAN

stanford briefs

An Imprint of Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

2015 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this brief may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hoffman, Andrew J., 1961 author.

How culture shapes the climate change debate / Andrew J. Hoffman.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8047-9422-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Climatic changesUnited StatesPublic opinion. 2. ScienceUnited StatesPublic opinion. 3. Political cultureUnited States. 4. Social psychologyUnited States. 5. Public opinionUnited States. I. Title.

QC903.2.U6H64 2015

304.250973dc23

2014042786

ISBN 9-780-8047-9505-0 (electronic)

Typeset by Classic Typography in 10/13 Adobe Garamond

CONTENTS

PREFACE

Academia is a field of brick-makers. This was the theme of an essay written by Bernard K. Forscher for Science magazine in 1963. few social scientists are building an edifice, telling a whole story as it presently exists, and deciding what new pieces of information (bricks) may be necessary to tell the next chapter in the story.

This book is different. My first goal in writing it was to build an edifice from the large and growing body of research in sociology, psychology, and other social sciences about why people accept or reject the science of climate change. From this edifice, I hope other academics will search for missing bricks. And I hope that I can bring the important and underrepresented voice of the social sciences into the national debate on this issue.

As such, the second goal of this book is to reach not just academic scholars but an educated public who can put the insights of this research into use. Again, this is not something that the rules of academia reward scholars and scientists to do. Academics are encouraged to build bricks that are usedor more accurately, citedby other brick-makers. The predominate focus on A-level journals feeds what some have called our theory fetish, in which practical relevance takes a back seat to theoretical rigor and empirical evidence is used to inform theory, not the other way around. Whether this work actually creates real-world change is a question that is rarely, if ever, asked.

This, I believe, is dangerous for both society and higher education. One of the reasons (among many) that the public discourse on climate change has become so confused is that too many academics do not see it as their role to engage in it. I believe they have an obligation to engage in it. If society is to make wise choices, those who create knowledge must find ways to move it beyond the ivory tower. Regardless, I also believe that increased engagement is unavoidable in an emerging educational reality in which a college degree is becoming too expensive, the academic disciplines in which those degrees are conferred are becoming too narrow and specialized, the people who populate those disciplines are being further removed from empirical reality, and external

Whether this book succeeds in its two goals is up to the community of readers. Success will be measured not in citation counts but in the extent to which it changes the way people think about how they think about climate change. The actual metrics for the attainment of that goal are anyones guess. Yet the lack of a precise measurement for impact has always been a problem for the academy, and citation counts have always been a poor proxy. This fact should not discourage those who wish to make an impact. I offer this opening thought as a challenge for my colleagues.

I would like to thank Margo Beth Fleming, Senior Editor at Stanford University Press, for her steady encouragement and guidance on this book; Bob Perkowitz and Max Boykoff for their very generous and thoughtful reviews of an earlier draft; and Mary Fritz and Rich Grousset for their help with the early literature review. Thank you all for your help and support.

A CULTURAL SCHISM

In January 2014, the Eastern and Southern United States were plunged into extraordinarily frigid temperatures that stranded air travelers, stressed power grids, closed schools, and killed more than twenty people. In all, the lives of more than 187 million people (roughly 60% of Americans) were affected by the record-breaking cold. Meteorologists identified the culprit as the Polar Vortex, a large cyclone, first studied in 1853, that circles at the poles of the Earth. And much to their dismay, they watched it become yet another flash point in the rhetorical war over climate change.

On the one side, Rush Limbaugh called the Polar Vortex an invention of the liberal Left to further promote the global warming agenda. Fox News referred to it as the so-called Polar Vortex and aired multiple pundits claiming that global warming could not be true because it was so cold. Under a regular blog called Planet Gore (named for former vice president Al Gore), the National Review mocked alarmists for a tendency to believe that there is absolutely nothing that global warming cant be linked to if you try hard enough. Adding fodder for the war, a Russian research vessel became stranded in the Arctic while studying, among other things, global warming. That led Donald Trump to enter the fray, tweeting, This very expensive global warming [expletive] has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps, and our [Global Warming] scientists are stuck in ice.

On the other side, a headline in Climate Central pronounced that the Polar Vortex in U.S. May Be Example of Global Warming. A Time magazine headline concurred that Climate Change Might Just Be Driving the Historic Cold Snap, adding that melting Arctic ice is making sudden cold snaps more likelynot less. Common Dreams went even further: Every weather event in the modern world is attributable to climate change. Many also directed attacks on the contrarian viewpoint. The Weather Channel, for example, ran a story, Polar Vortex and Climate Change: Why Rush Limbaugh and Others Are Wrong.

In the midst of this rhetorical war, scientists tried to explain that the issue over climate change is about global temperature increases, not regional weather deviations, and that one weather event does not prove or disprove the science. John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, produced a two-minute video explaining the Polar Vortex, the extreme cold weather, the science of climate change, and the relation among them, concluding that the odds are that we can expect as a result of global warming to see more of this pattern of extreme cold in the mid-latitudes and some extreme warm in the far north.

But these messages became just more ammunition in the rhetorical war. Headlines on the one side read, White House Smacks Down Climate Deniers in New Video, White House Strikes Back at Climate Skeptics over Polar Vortex, and W.H. Science Director Knocks Climate Change Skeptics. Headlines on the other side countered, The White House Gets into the Polar Vortex Climate Change Blame Business, and Global Warming Propaganda Video White House Wasting Tax Payer Money On.

This is what stands for public debate today. Climate change has been transformed into a rhetorical contest more akin to the spec Physical scientists are mystified and frustrated by this state of affairs. But it makes sense to social scientists from disciplines like psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, ethics, and philosophy, who offer valuable tools, first for understanding why people take such polarized views on controversial issues and then for moving beyond the rancor. This book is an examination of this research work, which it presents in a cohesive narrative, one that describes the climate change debate at its core as cultural.