August 31, 2011, 9:30 am
The Role of Values in Driving Climate Disputes
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Reacting to yesterday’s piece on how better definitions of terms could help clarify climate disputes, Oran Switzer of Phoenix, Ariz., posted a comment reminding folks how values, more than data, largely shape positions on the level of risk posed by greenhouse gases. This is a theme stressed by Dan Kahan and other researchers studying cultural cognition.

Check your views on climate science and policy, then ask yourself if you a communitarian or an individualist, liberal or libertarian? (NPR link) Switzer’s contribution is worth highlighting here as a “Your Dot” post:

    There is not one climate dispute. There are two, and the solutions are not the same. First, we need to separate the two. The science debate does not work in politics. If you study the conservative approach to climate change policy long enough, the implication that they are trying to participate in a scientific conversation starts to fade away and you realize the underlying logic they are using actually starts from the conclusion that regulation and government intervention are bad and proceeds to the premise that there is no real problem with climate change, at which point, they pick around for snippets to support their premise. This allows them to make big, bold, statements about their identity and character and values rather than wallowing around in overly-precise, overly-pedantic language and data.

    The center-left in the U.S. has a persistent problem with this dynamic because they see every situation where they have a factual advantage as proof of their superiority and then they proceed to hammer people with logic while ignoring the repeated lessons of political strategy. The debate needs to start with values! Science has no values. Science only describes the physical world.

    To win the scientific debate about climate change, we just… oh wait, we already did. But to win the political debate, we need to spend less time on the details of the scientific debate and much more on the underlying values — the costs to humanity, society, and the economy of extreme weather, local floods, local droughts, freshwater scarcity, infectious disease, food security, coastline loss, biodiversity loss, etc., etc. It sounds backwards since the political challengers are denying the possibility of those dangers, one might think we need to respond to their challenge.

    We do not. That’s what science is for.

In considering his argument, the work of Kahan and others on cultural cognition, and the paralyzed polarization of environmental politics, the next step, of course, is to test fresh paths toward an energy menu that works for the long haul.