Inside the World of Climate Change Skeptics
Review by Mike Hulme
[T]he art of politics is not to get everyone to agree with you, but rather to find allies with whom you can find joint ways forward, even if sometimes compromised. Consistently demonising those who think differently than you makes it harder, if not impossible, to forge alliances. In this excellent book, Kristin Haltinner and Dilshani Sarathchandra show a better way.
There is a saying that people can be divided into two types, those who divide people into two types and those who don’t. This witticism can easily be applied to those commenting over the past 25 years on public debates about the reality of, or responses to, climate change. There have been those who have sought to reduce the complexities of climate change to a Manichean struggle between two opposing camps, the believers versus the sceptics. If not the majority, then these voices have certainly been the loudest. And then there are those, appearing to be a minority, who have sought to defuse this ‘winner-takes-all’ struggle by recognising the spectrum and nuances of beliefs that people hold about climate change.
Haltinner and Sarathchandra (hereafter H&S), both at the University of Idaho, are in this latter group of analysts and commentators, as perhaps befits their status as, respectively, political sociologist and sociologist of science. This book joins a small but growing set of studies — psychological, political, anthropological, literary, and historical — which treat climate scepticism seriously and respectfully as a sociological phenomenon that needs to be understood rather than be denigrated from a position of moral virtue. I am thinking, for example, of the work of Chloe Lucas in Australia, Kari Norgaard’s study of the town of ‘Bygdby’ in Norway, Greg Garrard’s transnational ecocritical analysis and Raul Lejano’s investigation into climate sceptical narratives.
What marks this book out from some of these others, and related academic work, is the empirical richness of the evidence upon which H&S develop their insights. They draw upon a three-year project they conducted in the state of Idaho in the USA’s Pacific Northwest, conducting 33 in-depth interviews with sceptical citizens, another 21 interviews with citizens who have switched beliefs, and a related survey instrument on a sample of 1000. H&S have published the results from this extended empirical research in academic papers over the last few years, and what they do here is to collate, organise and synthesise these insights in a systematic and accessible way.
This book avoids the combative seeking out of “the enemy” or “the ignorant” disbelievers, who have been “turned” by the evil empire of fossil fuel interests. Rather, H&S seek to understand sceptical beliefs and attitudes towards climate change on the terms, and for the reasons, offered by such citizens … “with open minds, to listen, [and] to understand their concerns” (p.180). Leaning heavily on social identity theory, and the related in-group/out-group dynamics, H&S run through several dimensions of climate scepticism chapter-by-chapter, in each case contextualising the empirical voices they foreground with a helpful mini-survey of the related academic literature. Chapter 6, for example, on the emotional lives of climate change sceptics is particularly helpful.
Given their focus is so exclusively on the American context, and on Idaho in particular, I do think that their book would have been better titled ‘Inside the world of American climate change sceptics’. The worlds of Australian, Norwegian or Brazilian sceptics are not the same. And we should also recognise that the deep empirical approach H&S adopt towards understanding climate scepticism can, and should also, be applied symmetrically to those holding fervent doomist beliefs.
In their conclusion, H&S offer five take home messages with a view to shaping better public communication around climate change: consider the audience; consider the messenger; shape emotional engagement; emphasise common ground and agreed-upon solutions; and minimise in-group/out-group tensions. These are all sensible proposals, although they will not surprise anyone who has followed the social and cultural psychological literature of the past 10–15 years, for example, the work of Dan Kahan or Matt Nisbet in the USA, and George Marshall and Adam Corner in the UK.
The value of this book lies not so much in these conclusions but resides in the authors’ willingness to undermine the bi-polar view of climate change beliefs resting on the detailed empirical evidence they mobilise in support of these conclusions. To “get people behind a common visionary purpose” (p.196) is not easy. But if one sees it as a worthy political goal, then it should be remembered that the art of politics is not to get everyone to agree with you, but rather to find allies with whom you can find joint ways forward, even if sometimes compromised. Consistently demonising those who think differently than you makes it harder, if not impossible, to forge alliances. In this excellent book, Kristin Haltinner and Dilshani Sarathchandra show a better way.
Mike Hulme is professor of human geography at the University of Cambridge, UK. He studies the scientific and social construction of climate change and is the author of Why We Disagree About Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and, most recently, Climate Change Isn’t Everything (Polity, 2023).
