The epistemic tribes of climate change

by | Sep 3, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks

John Llewelyn, a senior economic policy adviser at Lehman Brothers, had a great piece in the Observer yesterday identifying five distinct categories of belief on climate change:

The Ideological Mainstreamers: this group has been around the longest. Its members did not have to wait for evidence. They were certain there was a problem well before the rump of scientists reached today’s near-consensus.

The Ideological Contrarians: these people require standards of proof no higher than those of the ideological mainstreamers, but hold the opposite view. If they have an intellectual belief, it is that they are smarter than the crowd. More often, though, it is just a game of attracting attention by attacking the majority.

The Grey Conservatives: members of this coterie specialise in appearing reasonable. They are neither pro nor anti, they gravely insist: the problem is simply that there is not enough evidence to support policy action of any sort. Do more research, collect more data and continue the debate, they counsel sagely.

The Non-Sequiturians: various arguments are advanced by this group, but they share a structure. Warming was caused by sunspots, or fluctuations in the Earth’s orbit, or volcanic eruptions. Therefore it cannot be caused by mankind. The ‘therefore’ is the giveaway, the delicious non sequitur: just because Earth has warmed for one or another reason in the past is no reason why it cannot warm for a completely different reason in the future.

The Busy Executives: their argumentation is loftier, but no fuller than it needs to be. Elevating pragmatism to a virtue, they take the position that what matters is not whether the science is right or wrong, but what policymakers are going to do. Given that it increasingly seems that policymakers are going to do various things, the argument runs, skip the argumentation and go straight to the implications for business.

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One to watch: Iran coverage this week

by | Sep 2, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa, North America

George Packer in the New Yorker has a blog post up today quoting my CIC colleague Barney Rubin:

If there were a threat level on the possibility of war with Iran, it might have just gone up to orange. Barnett Rubin, the highly respected Afghanistan expert at New York University, has written an account of a conversation with a friend who has connections to someone at a neoconservative institution in Washington. Rubin can’t confirm his friend’s story; neither can I. But it’s worth a heads-up:

“They [the source’s institution] have “instructions” (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this—they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is “plenty.””

…Postscript: Barnett Rubin just called me. His source spoke with a neocon think-tanker who corroborated the story of the propaganda campaign and had this to say about it: “I am a Republican. I am a conservative. But I’m not a raging lunatic. This is lunatic.”