My observation is that there would need to be care taken to avoid something like the fundamental attribution error. That is to say, being an ‘expert’ in a given field is strongly conditioned by situation. So the very choice of who the experts are may be conditioned by unacknowledged cultural bias. My conjecture is that experts therefore say what their audiences and sponsors expect them to, otherwise they would be unrecognizable as experts. In situations where the message is critiqued, so is the messenger’s status as an expert. In situations where the message is positively received, the messenger’s status as expert is regarded as obvious.

Three possible examples:

Who is an expert in local economic development? Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition Towns movement, tends to have a strongly Egalitarian outlook on the world. He recently complained that the ‘growth as usual’ mindset of local council officers called into question their competence as expert in their own field. His position is that true economic development experts would take into account peak oil, economic crises and climate change and allow for the possibility that economic growth, as it has been understood, may be a thing of the past.

Second example: Climate science has its experts and it is an open question as to whether the geologist Ian Plimer is one of them. At one level he is not an expert in climate science since that is not his area of professional competence. However, he has written a book on the subject and since he is a ‘climate sceptic’, there are some people who wish to present him as an expert in climate change. His new book for students was launched by a former prime minister of Australia.

The third example is that of US judges, experts in legal deliberation, many of whom are appointed on specifically political grounds. Voters have a sense of the liberal and conservative candidates for office and they vote accordingly. To those of us living in places where the judiciary is appointed on merit rather than elected, this appears strange indeed. After all, what could be less political than judgements concerning the facts?

In these examples the kinds of statements made by ‘experts’ are received not on the basis of whether the person in question actually has qualifications or professional standing, but on whether their words fit with a particular cultural bias. That is to say, each cultural bias already has its own experts, who are brought into the argument in order to cast doubt on the competence of the other side’s supposed expertise.

So before we can identify how experts behave it’s necessary to create a definition of expert that is broadly acceptable across the conflicting cultural solidarities described by Cultural Theory. The three examples given above show that this may be quite difficult.

Who would you trust to tell you what the risks are?

Research from the Cultural Cognition project suggests the cultural identity of the presenter matters significantly to the public reception of a particular message about risk. In other words, we need our experts to be our experts, not the other side’s experts.

It follows from this that one way of reducing the polarization of debates on risk may be to provide a variety of views on an issue from within a particular cultural bias. Two examples of this in practice are presented below, one quite successful, the other less so.

First, the standard view of climate change from the political right is that a) it isn’t significant and b) if it is, private enterprise will fix it through free markets and price mechanisms, provided government regulation doesn’t contribute to market failure. But there are several personalities with impeccable right-wing credentials who don’t toe this line. John Gummer, aka Lord Deben, was Chairman of the UK’s Conservative Party in the Margaret Thatcher years and subsequently Environment Minister and has been touring the world promoting conservative responses to climate change that acknowledge its existence and seek to do something about it. He routinely critiques the ‘it’s a left-wing plot’ line whilst reminding his audiences that if climate change science was good enough for Margaret Thatcher it should be good enough for the Right as a whole.

Second, the standard environmental activist view of nuclear power is “No thanks!” but journalist George Monbiot has proposed that a knee jerk reaction to the Japan meltdown will result in worse outcomes for climate change, precisely to the extent that it results in reductions in atomic energy capacity. He’s probably right about this. Coal kills a lot more people than nuclear, but it does so stealthily through particulates etc rather than by high profile disasters. Nevertheless he’s been pretty exhaustively vilified by his erstwhile constituency, who still want to say “No thanks!”

It must be hard work for these opinion shapers to stand out from their home crowd. This leads to the suggestion that one of the contributing factors to polarization may be polarization itself. For experts and spokespeople cultural bias is a vicious circle. The pay-off for polarizing the debate is quite strong: large niche audience, adulation, employment, tenure, publication deals etc. Meanwhile the pay-off for de-polarizing the debate is quite weak: being ignored, vilification, lack of obvious employment, the eschewing of clear niches etc.

So here’s my question: how can they be rewarded, those brave souls who refuse to toe the party line? Are there good examples of this working in practice?

(One possibility is that there’s a rich mine of policy formulation lying just beneath the surface of each cultural bias.)

For an interview with Prof Dan Kahan on this general issue see an article in Discover Magazine.

–

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928043.300-how-not-to-change-a-climate-sceptics-mind.html

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate-change-doubters-are-endangering-our-common-future/story-fn59niix-1226025032986

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/mar/31/double-standards-nuclear

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2011/02/14/new-point-of-inquiry-dan-kahan-the-american-culture-war-of-fact

Image Credit: CC Payton Chung/Flickr

Related articles

• Malcolm’s speech: “If Margaret Thatcher took climate change seriously…” (petermartin.com.au)
• Moving beyond a failure in the marketplace of ideas (fourcultures.com)
• The Bias Trap: Are We All Just A Bunch of Motivated Reasoners? (desmogblog.com)

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A theory of change requires a set of assumptions about the status quo. These assumptions often go unnoticed and unquestioned. Sentences that include the words always and never are indicative of these assumptions hard at work in the background, demonstrating the unexamined existence of a worldview in which particular forms of stability are taken for granted.

The Russian leadership’s reluctance to ‘believe’ in climate change has undergone something of a shift recently because the assumptions about what is always the case or never the case in Russia have been shaken to the core by drought, massive forest fires and unprecedented (but not uncontested) melting of the permafrost. A recent article by Tony Wood in the LRB outlines these events.

One could be cynical at this point and note that a single extreme weather event is no more indicative of long term climate change than a single swallow is indicative of the arrival of Summer. For the Russian president to change his mind on climate change just because he can smell smoke in Moscow is as naïve as the previous position in which climate change was denied. Russian winters are pretty cold and anyway it’s all a plot invented by Al Gore’s business interests.

But here too the assumptions about stability which underpin our theories of change are under revision. The well established claim that you can’t read climate change from unique events is now itself being revised.

Two thirds of Russia is made up of Permafrost – vechnaya merzlota. Both in English and Russian this is ‘permanent’ or ‘eternal’. By very definition it cannot change and is therefore impervious to rising temperatures or any other supposed shift.

I am mentioning this here because the way things supposedly always are is a crucial mental category, one that organises and disorganises almost all our social relations. We take it for granted at our peril.

Related Articles

• Will Russia’s Heat Wave End Its Global-Warming Doubts? (time.com)
• Putin ponders climate change in Arctic Russia (reuters.com)
• Russian Heatwave Worst in 1000 Years – Daily Death Rate Doubles in Moscow From Smog & Heat (treehugger.com)
• Borehole network confirms, permafrost is thawing worldwide. (thearcticsounder.com)

http://bit.ly/959Dmp

Prof Kahan says:

‘we need a theory of risk communication that takes full account of the effects of culture on our decision-making.’

However, Monbiot claims the cultural biases in CT don’t fit his particular case, since he sees himself as an Egalitarian who has unwillingly been put in the invidious situation of defending scientists against their detractors, many of whom are themselves Egalitarians.

But a closer look at Monbiot’s article reveals that he has in mind an ‘ideal type’ of scientist, who precisely fits the Egalitarian conception of how scientists should behave. There are three key characteristics.

• First, Egalitarian scientists should do no evil. Weaponising anthrax is out, as is the development of terminator genes in food crops. A non-Egalitarian argument can be made for both these activities, but Monbiot isn’t interested in that.
• Second, Egalitarian scientists should produce freely accessible knowledge. Locking it away in pay-to-access journals isn’t on, and all well-meaning scientists should act together to end the monopolisation of knowledge the journal publishers have created for themselves (actually I think it’s a cartel, but we’ll let that pass).
• Third, and most importantly, the kind of scientific knowledge Monbiot as an Egalitarian is especially interested in is what he thinks scientists should be producing impartially: hard evidence of major threats to civilization. A fact, on this view, is something that has the power to bring the group closer together and promote group behaviour. What self-evidently guarantees the veracity of such facts is the classic Egalitarian resort to ‘consensus’.

Taken together, these features of ideal science make it clear that the Egalitarian worldview describes Monbiot’s position to a tee.

He asks how it is possible to persuade people who just don’t want to be persuaded – and has no answer. The answer, from a cultural Theory perspective, is fairly straightforward.

People and institutions with different cultural biases create, fund, support and pay attention to four very different types of evidence. What matters then is to produce and shape a variety of evidence, not only the Egalitarian evidence that Monbiot privileges as the only kind of truth.

Here are some suggestions:

Egalitarian climate change:
demonstrate with science and/or emotive rhetoric (whichever appeals best to hearts and minds) that our very civilization is in danger unless we change our profligate ways. Changing our energy sources is to be depicted as only a preliminary step to changing our values. Peter Preston says we need an ‘eco-prophet’ to show us how to believe but this is emphatically wrong. Such Egalitarian eco-prophets as have arisen – Al Gore, even George Monbiot himself – have been shot down in flames, derided as extremists.
Egalitarian authority comes from the masses. Common sense, what everyone knows, is what is true. That’s why scientific consensus is so much more important to Egalitarians than it is to scientists themselves.

Individualist Climate Change:
provide information and examples on how to make a profit from climate change. If it turns out you actually can make a profit from climate change, and do so better than your competitors, then it must exist.
Alternatively, demonstrate concrete (not hypothetical or future) impacts on the bottom line of those institutions that have ignored Climate Change.
On this view scientists who make photovoltaics competitive with coal fired power stations are doing more to combat climate change than any amount of hand-wringing by the likes of James Hanson, who is simply discounted as a crypto-religious or crypto-communist ‘fanatical environmentalist’. A figurehead Individualist expert would be someone like Shi Zhengrong, China’s first solar billionaire. Money doesn’t lie.

Hierarchical Climate Change:
develop and promote management theories of climate change. If you can reconfigure governance to take account of climate change in ways that enhance management functions, if it makes sense to have a Minister for Climate Change for instance, then  it must exist. Alternatively, demonstrate (perhaps by means of case study) real and damaging governance failures of those institutions that have ignored Climate Change in their management structure. Ideal Hierarchical experts will be at or near the top of the tree. It will be their status that speaks loudest. If Prince Charles and the Pope and the President all worry about climate change, who are we to argue?

Fatalist Climate Change:
demonstrate the randomising impact of climate change on the status quo. Fatalism thrives by enhancing and systematising the luck of the draw and turning it into policy (explicit or, more often than not, tacit), or reward (the lottery). Fatalists tend to say ‘climates change!’ with the implication that there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Fatalist institutions tend to make a virtue of doing nothing about it, and try to make sure no one else does anything about it either. Science which proves it’s pointless to act in response to climate change is favoured by Fatalism. In some respects climate change isindeed a classic example of the ‘postcode lottery’, in which where you happen to live makes all the difference.

It’s intuitively obvious that our views, opinions and beliefs are linked together a bit like constellations in the night sky, but when it comes to working out what exactly it is that connects them, it’s quite hard to come up with a viable answer. Now it seems the pattern is becoming clearer.

Well into the Twentieth Century the slate industry of North Wales was the world’s largest. It roofed the buildings of the world and left a huge scar on the beautiful landscape of what is now the Snowdonia National Park. But that’s not all it left. If you visit Yr Amgueddfa Llechi Cymru – the National Slate Museum – outside the village of Llanberis you can tour the old buildings of the slate quarries, including the infirmary. One of the human legacies of the industry was to bequeath workers, especially slate-splitters, with chronic and fatal respiratory illness from breathing in the slate dust created from dressing the raw material and turning it into usable roof slates. In oral accounts you can hear at the museum workers describe how the air in the slate dressing buildings was thick with dust. On the wall of the infirmary is a row of certificates signed by medical doctors. These documents certify that not only is slate dust not the cause of respiratory illness, it is actually promotes good health. If you ever happen to be visiting North Wales, go and have a look.

My forebears worked in the Dinorwic quarries near Llanberis and so there is a family, if not a personal reason to feel a little affronted by the lie perpetrated by people who could have known and almost certainly did know better. The lie they told on the walls of the infirmary and in their supposedly professional diagnoses condemned many, many people to a slow and painful death. Slate dust was not safe. It was obviously not safe. Anyone who worked in it could have known and did know that. And yet profit was to be made by avoiding and denying the obvious.

These days we like to think health and safety has come a long way. In some ways it certainly has. It’s improved a lot since the time my great great uncle fell and was injured on the quarry face, only to be charged by the company for delaying production. But when I look at the climate change denial industry, I realise in truth we’ve barely moved forward.



The Heartland Institute, an American advocacy group part-funded by oil company Exxon, among others, has campaigned tirelessly against the idea that climate change is happening. Its fall-back position seems to be that even if climate change is happening in a modest, natural way, it will be good for us.

In a poster The Heartland Institute claimed first that global warming was not man-made, and second that it was not harmful. Past warmings were beneficial, there are no current harms, future warmings will be modest and warmer is better. A policy study written by president of the Institute Joseph L. Blast claimed:

A modest amount of global warming, should it occur, would be beneficial to the natural world and to human civilization.

We are not, it’s probably safe to say, personally breathing in dust from a slate quarry, so reading the claim, consigned to a museum, that slate dust is good for your health will not harm you. But we are living in conditions of climate change, and being told warmer is better is an insult to the intelligence. If it weren’t all so sad, we could perhaps look forward to the day the class actions against oil companies begin, calling them to account for the scurrilous lies promoted with their money by this and that ‘Institute’.

If this kind of advertising carried any factual weight we could ask: why have both the private and public sector failed in their duty to provide us with more and faster global warming? Shouldn’t they be trying harder?  If warmer really is better, why should we settle for the defeatist claim that ‘future warmings will be modest’?

Modest? Why so coy? We would surely want – demand – a return to the ‘beneficial warmings’ of the past. For an ideology that believes growth is always good, surely a large and fast rise in temperature is far better than a modest one. And if it leads to a large rise in disasters, so much the better.

[I'm not finished yet...]

• denialists (ideological disagreement)
• skeptics (scientific disagreement)
• warners (scientific agreement)
• calamatists (ideological agreement)

This is a very worthwhile attempt at getting some subtlety into the standoff between the naysayers and the yeasayers. But frankly, I think the existing typology of Grid-Group Cultural Theory does a more parsimonious job of this, at the same time as giving us more information about the motives and practices of the proponents and their institutions.

This typology, derived from the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas,  can be summarised as:

• Indvidualist (low grid-low group)
• Egalitarian (low grid-high group)
• Hierarchical (high grid-high group)
• Fatalist (high grid-low group)

Fourcultures has recently called these four approaches expanders, restrainers, managers and shruggers.

There’s more about whether climate change or its denial is a ‘new religion‘

and about climate change responses as four types of deviance (reflecting the work of Robert K Merton rather than Mary Douglas).

Fourcultures has previously written about:

• Mike Hulme’s book, Why we Disagree about Climate Change
• a critique of the idea that climate change deniers are necessarily acting in bad faith
• the climate change debate as an exercise in four types of deviance
• and quite a lot more on the social aspects of climate change.

Upton Sinclair said

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Let’s just try to understand a fairly straightforward question. I don’t mean straightforward as in ‘easy to determine’ , but as in ‘you’d think it might have a definite, clear answer’. Here it is:

How much carbon dioxide do volcanoes emit?

This seems exactly the kind of question we should be able to answer if we want to be able to say anything serious about climate change (see the top left box of the diagram). It also seems to be the kind of thing that scientific observation and measurement ought to be able to help us with.

Furthermore, it would in principle be perfectly reasonable to conclude that we don’t actually have an answer yet because it’s just too hard to measure volcanoes with existing methods and technology. A little humility never hurt anyone.

So here goes with the answer.

First, the United States Geological Survey claims:

“Human activities release more than 130 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes.”

Second, Ian Plimer’s book Heaven and Earth states:

“Volcanoes produce more CO2 than the world’s cars and industries combined”. (p. 413)

Since there is a difference of a factor of around 130, it’s reasonable to suppose that these contrasting answers cannot both be correct. Inconveniently, however, the Plimer source does not actually state how much carbon dioxide is produced by volcanoes.

When challenged on this discrepancy in an interview, Ian Plimer did not deny the USGS figures but claimed they were only measuring terrestrial, not oceanic volcanoes: “85% of the world’s volcanoes we neither see nor measure… They leak out huge amounts of carbon dioxide… That does not come into the USGS figures nor does it come into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s figures.”

Is this correct? Vulcanologist for the USGC, Dr Terrence Gerlach replied:

“I can confirm to you that the “130 times” figure on the USGS website is an estimate that includes all volcanoes – submarine as well as subaerial … Geoscientists have two methods for estimating the CO2 output of the mid-oceanic ridges. There were estimates for the CO2 output of the mid-oceanic ridges before there were estimates for the global output of subaerial volcanoes.”

The USCG site actually lays out the figures:

“Scientists have calculated that volcanoes emit between about 130-230 million tonnes (145-255 million tons) of CO2 into the atmosphere every year (Gerlach, 1999, 1991). This estimate includes both subaerial and submarine volcanoes, about in equal amounts. Emissions of CO2 by human activities, including fossil fuel burning, cement production, and gas flaring, amount to about 27 billion tonnes per year (30 billion tons) [ ( Marland, et al., 2006) - The reference gives the amount of released carbon (C), rather than CO2, through 2003.]. Human activities release more than 130 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes–the equivalent of more than 8,000 additional volcanoes like Kilauea (Kilauea emits about 3.3 million tonnes/year)! (Gerlach et. al., 2002)”

Human CO2 emissions relating to energy are also detailed in the EIA Energy Outlook 2009 (using figures from the Energy Annual 2006), with the similar result of 29bn metric tons in 2006.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/emissions.html

The IPPC reports tend to refer to radiative forcing (RF) and it is in these terms that they describe the impact on the climate of volcanoes:

“Because of its episodic and transitory nature, it is difficult to give a best estimate for the volcanic RF, unlike the other agents. Neither a best estimate nor a level of scientific understanding was given in the TAR [Third Assesment Report]. For the well-documented case of the explosive 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption, there is good scientific understanding.However, the limited knowledge of the RF associated with prior episodic, explosive events indicates a low level of scientific understanding (section2.9, Table 2.11)” (Forster et al.  p. 195)

It seems strange that rather than refer to the low level of scientific understanding about volcanic radiative forcing, which the IPPC report concedes, Plimer would make unreferenced assertions about volcanic emissions of carbon dioxide. He is, after all, a professional geologist. Would such a person not know that scientific claims are supposed to be backed up with data, or references or… anything at all? Would he not also be able to work out that even if terrestrial volcanoes were only 15% of all volcanoes, as he seemed to claim, the total CO2 emissions of these plus the ’85%’ of volcanoes supposedly not included by Gerlach and the USGS would still amount to nowhere near the amount emitted ‘by the world’s cars and industries combined’?

The volcano issue is just one of many climate change ‘facts’ that are contested by Plimer, and then re-contested by others, including Ian Enting’s fairly detailed critique of Plimer’s book.

So, would a reasonable person be entitled to conclude that Prof Plimer’s figures are organised on the basis of the preconceived desire to deny anthropic climate forcing? This may or may not have something to do with the fact that he is the director of three mining companies – which we might dub the Sinclair effect (remember the salary that depends on not understanding). Or he may have convinced himself on other grounds, such as an entirely novel and undocumented understanding of the carbon dioxide emissions of volcanoes.
He doesn’t seem to think the directorships could influence his opinions in any way, since science is science whoever does it. But it is clear that Plimer’s book has been used to support climate change denial and has bolstered the positions of a number of influential people.

We should scarcely bother with Plimer’s book – after all, it has been said of it:

“It is not “merely” atmospheric scientists that would have to be wrong for Plimer to be right. It would require a rewriting of biology, geology, physics, oceanography, astronomy and statistics”.

The point of this little polemic is to note how even something as seemingly straightforward (though hardly simple) as the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by volcanoes is the subject of contestation.

We don’t primarily argue about the interpretation of facts, as many would like to believe. We argue about the facts themselves.

Even though to me and to others it appears Prof Plimer has failed to give any reference for his assertion that volcanoes produce more CO2 than the world’s cars and industries combined, he still manages to influence the climate change debate by appealing to people who either already agree with his general view, or who aren’t in a position to query his detailed working  (lack of it, that is). It’s interesting that a number of commentators on Plimer’s book have been impressed with the large number of references it contains. Would one more, detailing all those gassy undersea volcanoes no one else knows anything about have been all that hard to provide?

References

Forster, P., V. Ramaswamy, P. Artaxo, T. Berntsen, R. Betts, D.W. Fahey, J. Haywood, J. Lean, D.C. Lowe, G. Myhre, J. Nganga, R. Prinn, G. Raga, M. Schulz and R. Van Dorland, 2007: Changes in Atmospheric Constituents and in Radiative Forcing. In: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Averyt, M.Tignor and H.L. Miller (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.

Gerlach, T.M., 1991, Present-day CO2 emissions from volcanoes: Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union, Vol. 72, No. 23, June 4, 1991, pp. 249, and 254-255.

Gerlach, T.M., McGee, K.A., Elias, T., Sutton, A.J., and Doukas, M.P., 2002, Carbon dioxide emission rate of Kilauea Volcano: Implications for primary magma and the summit reservoir, Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 107, No. B9, 2189, doi:10.1029/2001JB000407.

Plimer, Ian. 2009 Heaven and Earth. Connor Court Press.