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Talking To Climate Skeptics
Reflecting on ‘How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate’ (2015)
Andrew J. Hoffman, in How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate, uses existing social science research to examine “why people accept or reject the science of climate change” in the United States. Our goal should be “real-world change,” and this implies that academics are ethically obligated to participate in public discourse.
Humans “have grown to such numbers and our technology to such power that we can alter the global climate.” Those who recognize that this is true have to grapple with “a series of related cultural challenges,” including global cooperation “far beyond anything that our species has ever before accomplished.”
“The challenge,” he says, “is as much about the communication of science as it is about the science itself.” And furthermore: “We cannot recognize the environmental problems created by our way of life, nor can we develop solutions to address them, without first facing and changing the beliefs and values that have led to them.”
What’s the Scientific Consensus?
Humans are driving changes in the global climate. That is the scientific consensus. It was already the consensus when this book was published in 2015, and it continues to be today in 2022.
How do we know that this is the consensus? Because of “the reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization of thousands of scientists that summarizes the vast body of climate science and presents conclusions in ‘consensus statements,’ which have become successively more definitive.” These reports are endorsed by “nearly two hundred scientific agencies around the world” and supported by “independent reviews of the scientific literature.” Furthermore, most “practicing” climate scientists recognize what’s happening to the climate; for example, in a 2011 survey, 97 percent of them agreed that global temperatures were rising and only 5 percent thought humans play an insignificant role in it. And, perhaps of special significance within the US, both the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science say that there is “consensus.”
