Actually, it is a pretty calm and reasonable analysis (still with blind spots of course) rather than an hysterical moral panic in the name of 'experts' being ignored by uppity and ignorant plebs. Such a welcome change! Back to normal ideology!
The politics of climate change poses a stark dilemma for anyone wanting to push back against the purveyors of post-truth. Should they bide their time and trust that the facts will win out in the end? Or do they use the evidence as weapons in the political fight, in which case they risk confirming the suspicion that they have gone beyond the facts? It is not just climate scientists who find themselves in this bind. Economists making the case against Brexit found that the more they insisted on agreement inside the profession about the dangers, the more it was viewed with suspicion from the outside by people who regarded it as a political con.
The article gets to some arguments about why experts are disregarded, often because the scientific case is seen to be clearly linked to political issues and manoeuvres (not necessarily by the scientists themselves), despire public denials. This escalates into broader cynicism
A sceptic questions the evidence for a given claim and asks whether it is believable. A cynic questions the motives of the people who deploy the evidence, regardless of whether it is believable or not.
As examples of backfiring politicisation:
What politicised the idea of climate change was its adoption as a cause by Democratic politicians in the 1980s, above all by Al Gore. By the start of that decade, evidence of global cooling had faded and a scientific consensus was starting to form around the idea that the climate was warming up. Gore belonged to a group known as the “Atari Democrats”, for their wonkish attachment to science and technology. These politicians saw climate as a useful issue, as well as an urgent one. It was a way of appealing to moderate Republican voters, because the concerns it raised cut across party lines. In the words of another member of the group, Chuck Schumer, then a Brooklyn congressman, now Senate minority leader: “If you’re a Democrat, especially in a middle-class district or on the west coast, [climate] is a great issue … It is an issue with no downside.”
And, more parochially
The ecumenical quality of climate change as a political cause was emphasised when Margaret Thatcher took it up at around the same time. In her speech to the UN general assembly in 1989, she spoke of global warming as one of the most serious threats facing humanity. She was comfortable speaking the language of science, having been a scientist herself. But her motives were political: it suited her prior point of view. She drew extensively from the warnings of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, in part because she had grown to trust their advice on climactic conditions during the Falklands war. She believed in nuclear power as an emblem of free enterprise. And she had historic reasons to be suspicious of coal. For Thatcher, climate change was a convenient truth.
No idea of a general link between scientism and capitalism, of course, but never mind...However, the article gets a bit apologetic with another famous case:
the so-called “climategate” scandal of 2009, when a series of hacked emails from the University of East Anglia was held up as evidence that the scientific evidence was being distorted to fit a political agenda. The emails showed no such thing. What they did reveal is that in an environment of highly politicised scepticism, climate scientists were forced to think about guarding the evidence against opponents looking for any excuse to discredit it.
Check for yourselves, o readers. The poor old experts are in a dilemma though:
If they pull back from politics, they risk letting the cynics set the agenda. If they don’t, they risk proving the cynics right.
The specifics of the climate change issue are then spelled out in some detail, especially the importance of trust as a way of dealing with the actual uncertainties -- and the general lack of trust in experts, especially if they turn out to be hypocrites: hypocrites breed cycnicism especially if they adopt a high moral tone and are despised even more than liars. Exactly the same argument could easily be applied to the Brexit case,in my view, with the Remainers trying to conceal their own interests and agendas, and speak 'objectively' and patronisingly only in the name of 'British interests', with the willing collaboration of the Remainer media who never asked any questions. The public are just not that dim any more.
There is also the elitism issue, appearing especially in the professional 'closed shop':
The economics profession, like any other, is full of people who will express their doubts and uncertainties among friends. But when confronted with a hostile or bemused public, they will close ranks. Economists do not want to appear to be unsure of themselves, given how little the public understands of what they do anyway. So rather than admit that there are many different ways of thinking about, for example, free trade, they insist that all economists agree it is a good thing. As the economist Dani Rodrik puts it, when faced with hostile fire, the natural tendency is to start circling the wagons. For the many voters who do not see the benefits of free trade, this looks like a stitch-up.This tendency is exaggerated by selective treatments in the media too, of course. It took ages for any economists for Leave or socialists for Leave to appear, even as one-offs, and the mobbing and aggression directed towards them in programmes on the BBC (even C4) like the News or Newsnight was so obvious. We were being lectured at by a smug, finger-wagging clique enjoying the benefits of globalization themselves and insulating themselves from any nasty consequences while urging tolerance and austerity on the rest of us.
Oher insights include: 'Science often makes for bad politics, because it pretends that it is not politics....We need to stop thinking that one side has possession of the truth and the other is just running on money and prejudice. Both sides get tempted into being economical with the truth in the cause of politics....Expertise doesn’t just need humility. It also needs to reclaim the idea of scepticism from the people who have abused it. Experts need to find a way of expressing uncertainty without feeling it undermines their expertise. Voicing doubt has been allowed to become a synonym for admitting you were wrong. The way out is to stop insisting that you were right in the first place.
Overall, excellent advice for journalists too! Let's get back to the older ideological stances of 'neutrality'.
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