Lifeworld Colonization Meets Mass Communication, Global Warming Edition

Democratic theory 101: there is a technical sphere and a public sphere, and the two are by design separate and unequal. Where they do come into contact, scientists are charged with providing grist for the deliberative mill via epistemic descriptions of risk pegged to measures of sociological consensus. Legislative bodies and argumentative forums take the information and use it to hammer out whether the likely impact of inaction justifies incurring the costs of action. It’s not a perfect system, though it works well enough to balance nuclear meltdowns vs. necessary power production, epidemics vs. costly mass immunizations, and so on.

Of course the actual give-and-take is much messier. Scientists tailor the projected benefits of their research to fit political priorities. Politicians pressure scientists to produce data that will bolster preferred legislation. But those institutions are nonetheless designed and, to some extent, experienced with those ideals in mind. Scientific institutions, for all that they’re irreducibly argumentative, don’t even approach deliberative ideals. Formal credentialing, the gate-keeping function of peer review, etc – all of these straightforwardly violate even watered down validity conditions. They’re excellent for subjecting epistemic claims to rigorous testing. They’re awful for balancing social needs and desires.

The concern is not, of course, that individual scientists have legislative preferences and seek to manifest them electorally as citizens. Problems begin emerging, however, when the ethos of a technical institution is brought to bear in the context of deliberative discussions to achieve political ends that were deemed desirable by processes internal to that institution. The danger here can be described precisely. The structures that grease the wheels of technical argument are likely to corrupt deliberative evaluations. It’s not an accident that the Habermasian corpus is devoted to identifying and rooting them out of the public sphere. When scientists can wield rhetorical and material resources to lean on policy makers or to manipulate journalists, we’re firmly within the horizon of colonization ala Goodnight, Doxtader, Mitchell, etc.

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The leaked emails and files from the Climatic Research Unit, at the UK’s University of East Anglia show that’s exactly what AGW scientists have been doing. There has been a widespread and systematic breakdown in how climate researchers related to the public that funds them and the media outlets that reported on them. None of which is to say that anthropogenic global warming, for which there is actually a preponderance of evidence, isn’t happening. Unfortunately the overzealousness of warming scientists who sought to blur the boundaries between technical and public spheres has advanced the cause of skeptics and hindered efforts to genuinely address the crisis.

The issue of media manipulation – and the unpacking of how it is a distinct issue from internal academic questions about shoddy research or contaminated peer review. Other venues have dealt with the damage that’s been to day-to-day scientific practice. What hasn’t been unpacked is how AGW scholars systematically undermined public debate by framing their media messages to provoke unjustifiable anxiety, manipulating media institutions to untenably emphasize or deemphasize findings, and punishing scientists who strayed from the party line in media appearances. Climatologists could be model researchers internally – which is to say, their findings could be perfectly tenable – and the behavior exposed in the emails would still represent a corruption of public deliberation.

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(1) Message framing - Two PDFs from the file dump are particularly interesting here. The first is titled “The Rules Of The Game” (surreal subtitle – “the game is communicating climate change; the rules will help us win it.”) It seems to be the product of several UK governmental and non-governmental organizations and it purports to present “the principles of climate change communication”.British taxpayers were funding a project on how to manipulate themselves:

These principles were created as part of the UK Climate Change Communications Strategy, an evidence-based strategy aiming to change public attitudes towards climate change in the UK. This is a ‘short version’ of a far longer document of evidence that can be found at www.defra.gov.uk. There is plenty of evidence relating to attitudes towards and behaviour on climate change, general environmental behaviour change and the whole issue of sustainable development communication… At first glance, some of the principles may seem counterintuitive to those who have been working on sustainable development or climate change communications for many years. Some confront dearly cherished beliefs about what works; a few even seem to attack the values or principles of sustainable development itself.

The content reads like a topline from a several focus groups and surveys. It discusses gain frames vs. loss frames, limits on cognitive dissonance, importance of social learning, emphasis on emotions and visuals, etc. At least a few of the recommendations speak directly to how climate scientists focused on public manipulation and policy outcomes:

Linking policy and communications. These principles clearly deserve a separate section. All the evidence is clear – sometimes aggressively so – that ‘communications in the absence of policy; will precipitate the failure of any climate change communications campaign right from the start: 10. Everyone must use a clear and consistent explanation of climate change… 11. Government policy and communications on climate change must be consistent Don’t ‘build in’ inconsistency and failure from the start. 16. Create a trusted, credible, recognised voice on climate change. We need trusted organisations and individuals that the media can call upon to explain the implications of climate change to the UK public.

The second PDF is what probably emerged from the initial studies. The actual advice is sophomoric but there is the assurance that “we also have a brand that has been created for use on government climate change communications: ‘Tomorrow’s Climate Today’s Challenge’.”

Surprisingly absent from the leaked strategy emails was NASA’s James Hansen, who has proven quite apt in controlling media frames. In December 2005 he trotted out his “hidden tipping point” meme, suggesting that the visible trend of slow and adaptable observed warming was misleading. A hidden threshold existed, after which it would skyrocket. A month later the Washington Post declared on A1 that “[t]his ‘tipping point’ scenario has begun to consume many prominent researchers in the United States and abroad.” That was a baldly inaccurate description of current scientific consensus – the phrase had appeared exactly three times in exactly one paper – but it confirmed that, if nothing else, Hansen had chosen a phrase that resonated. He subsequently took care to ensure that “tipping point” appeared in his soundbites, in his Goddard press releases, and in the discussion sections of journal articles where science journalists go to learn what they’re supposed to write.

Yet “tipping point” shows up only once in all the CRU emails, as a Hansen quote in a huge article roundup. One wonders if the meme had been “consumed” by prominent researchers – and then rejected as indefensible. Certainly there is public evidence to that effect, including studies describing how Hansen wielded his institutional power to brush off peer reviewers. The NASA scientist was in fact startlingly honest how the rhetorical advantages of “tipping point” as channeled into the public sphere justified trumping the objections of his fellow scientists:

“Tipping point”, although objectionable to some scientists, conveys aspects of climate change that have been an impediment to public appreciation of the urgency of addressing human-caused global warming. It is a valid concept: as climate forcing and global warming increase, a point can be reached beyond which part of the climate system changes substantially with only small additional forcing.

The rhetorical import of “valid” is actually misleading in this context. In normal scientific discourse it would describe something precise. But here it’s actually used as a compacted modal term: “the dynamic possibly obtains, but there’s insufficient evidence to conclude that it does.” It’s no wonder that pysicist Freeman Dyson described Hansen as “the person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming… he consistently exaggerates all the dangers… Hansen has turned his science into ideology.”

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(2) Institutional manipulation - This category is a little tough to untangle from the message framing dynamic – the whole point of framing is to ensure that alarmism gets public traction – but there’s a separate institutional element where climatologists play on journalism as an institution. Hansen’s use of the resonant phrase “tipping point” was rhetorically brilliant but it was also deployed in specific, journalist-friendly ways – talking points, journal discussion sections, and easily-quoted press releases. These all interact with how journalists do their work, combining the challenge of a complicated and politically charged subject with a hard print deadline. The proper crafting of press releases was apparently a consideration across the board among AWG scholars, all the way down to PR layout:

From: Ben Santer – Peter Thorne suggested that it might be useful to delete the explicit reference to the UR/UAH group, and instead refer to the Douglass et al. IJoC paper in a footnote. After some internal debate, I have not done that. Anne Stark advised me that footnotes are not often used in press releases (they tend to get ignored by reporters). Furthermore, I couldn’t see an easy way of getting rid of the “UR/UAH” acronym, yet still making a clear distinction between their results and our results, their test and our test, etc., etc… please let me know as soon as possible if there’s anything you can’t live with in the press release.

Per Phil Jones, AGW scientists have a well-oiled “publicity machine” at their disposal. In one thread Michael Mann – the creator of the Hockey Stick curve – tried to organize climatologists to push back against inconvenient astronomical data. His plan involved “a piece… co-authored by 9 or so prominent members of the climate research community.” Chimed in Jones:

Count me in. I’ve forwarded you all the email comments I’ve sent to reporters/fellow scientists, so you’re fully aware of my views, which are essentially the same as all of the list and many others in paleo. EOS would get to most fellow scientists. As I said to you the other day, it is amazing how far and wide the SB pieces have managed to percolate. When it comes out I would hope that AGU/EOS ‘publicity machine’ will shout the message from rooftops everywhere. As many of us need to be available when it comes out.

(3) Intimidation of Journalists and Scientists - The CRU emails reveal an obsessive focus on media coverage that went all the way down to tracking individual journalists and scientists. That scientists were targeted is a matter of how AWG scholarship was conducted internally – more on that in a second – but the AGW media war room was of a caliber that many political campaigns would be proud of:

You may be aware of this already. Paul Hudson, BBC’s reporter on climate change, on Friday wrote that thereâs been no warming since 1998, and that pacific oscillations will force cooling for the next 20-30 years. It is not outrageously biased in presentation as are other skeptics views.

Mann:

Extremely disappointing to see something like this appear on BBC. its particularly odd, since climate is usually Richard Black’s beat at BBC (and he does a great job). from what I can tell, this guy was formerly a weather person at the Met Office. We may do something about this on RealClimate, but meanwhile it might be appropriate for the Met Office to have a say about this, I might ask Richard Black what’s up here?

That’s the same thread where someone later posted “the fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,” which prompted a brutal rebuttal by Hansen coworker Gavin Schmidt, which in turn prompted a third scientist to weakly suggest: “I just think that you need to be up front with uncertainties and the possibility of compensating errors.”

Throughout the emails Michael Mann figures prominently as an enforcer, keeping scientists on message via various pleasantries and the opposite. One small example: a paper that had first been very pro-AGW but had been changed after reviewer comments. Though Mann had repeatedly and publicly held up the peer review process as a kind of epistemic gold standard, in this case he reacted angrily. Media coverage in particular became an issue, prompting some faux hand wringing. Mann’s issued cartoonish mafioso-esque expressions of regret to the authors – “very disappointed indeed” and “you should have known better.” They almost give the feel that he’s shaking down a pawn shop owner who’s late on protection money, except in this case it’s a scientist:

Sadly, your piece on the Esper et al paper is more flawed than even the paper itself. Ed, the AP release that appeared in the papers was even worse. Apparently
you allowed yourself to be quoted saying things that are inconsistent with what you told me you had said. You three all should have known better… This will be all be straightened out in due course. In the meantime, there is a lot of damage control that needs to be done and, in my opinion, you’ve done a disservice to the honest discussions we had all had in the past, because you’ve misrepresented the evidence. Many of us are very concerned with how Science dropped the ball as far as the review process on this paper was concerned.

… and …

I’m really sorry I couldn’t be more supportive of the final version of the manuscript… I was frankly very disappointed when I saw the final version–it is overwhelmingly different from the version you shared with us originally. Sadly, it seems to have suffered, and not benefited, from the review process–a very odd scenario. I fault the reviewers as much (in fact more) that I fault you for this… I’m trying to be as diplomatic as I can be in my discussions w/ reporters, etc. but I really wish you hadn’t sprung this on us w/ no warning of the dramatic changes that were made. I’m forced to be somewhat critical, because the flaws in some of your conclusions need to be pointed out, or they will be exploited by those w/ alterior motives. You certainly must have foreseen this, as must have the reviewers. I’m very disappointed, very disappointed indeed. I’m sharing my comments w/ Keith, Phil, Tim, Tom, Ray, and Malcolm. I am resisting the temptation to write a letter of response to Science, although my better judgement [sic] dictates that I should…

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Once scientists shift from producing knowledge to circling the wagons in public against “those with alterior [sic] motives,” they’re no longer holding up their end of the science/public bargain. They became activists, using the ethos of a technical sphere to push deliberative choices that had been generated by processes internal to that sphere. Put bluntly: that’s not the deal we have with these people.

References:
* Curry: On the credibility of climate research [Climate Audit]
* The tipping point trend in climate change communication [Global Environmental Change]
* The Civil Heretic [NYT]

Related Icon Index Symbol Categories:
* Public Sphere
* Jurgen Habermas
* Rhetoric of Science