The culture and discourse of climate skepticism

Abstract

The current public debate over climate change centers on two primary themes. The first is the scientific consensus that human behavior is causing a rise in greenhouse gas (GHG) levels, and that these gases are altering the global climate. The second is the policy consensus that the solutions to this problem lie in technological development and behavior change that must be spurred by a government-induced carbon price. To many, these two themes cover the entire climate change debate. They are wrong. While the scientific, technical and policy components of the issue are critical, climate change is also a cultural issue. More importantly, it is a highly contested cultural issue in which competing movements engage in discursive debates – or framing battles – over the interpretation of the problem and the necessity of solutions. This dimension of the issue is overlooked because social scientists who can identify and analyze it have been notably absent from the public debate. Even more surprising, they have largely neglected to attend to the issue even within their own academic realms. Climate change in the social and managerial sciences has been very slow to develop (Goodall, 2008), and more recent attention to the issue by business and social science researchers has ignored debates over the reality of climate change and moved straight to an assessment of strategy options available to individual and organizations to address the issue. In fact, our social science discipline either takes a relatively dismissive attitude toward those who challenge the scientific view that climate change is real – dubbed ‘climate skeptics’ – or subscribes to them sinister motives and neglects their beliefs altogether (see McCright and Dunlap, 2000, 2003, 2010 for exceptions for exceptions). In this article, I argue that this neglect is a problem and highlight how researchers can advance their scholarship and social relevance by studying the ongoing debate over climate change.