#aboutframing

Deming had recently created a temperature reconstruction for the last 150 years, based on boreholes in North America. In his study, he concluded that North America had warmed somewhat in the period since 1850, but had little to say bebond that. This was good, solid science but not the stuff of newspaper headlines.

Here are some expressions in the following sentences:

“considered highly important in climatic science circle”

“with the expectation that temperatures were being driven upward”

“storyline of rising temperatures”

“global warming industry”

“who [the global warming industrialists] thought they saw”

“they thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science”

“flash of light [...] murky shadow”

“the aim was to erase it in the climatological record in its entirety”

My interest here is not in the Deming affair as such [1], but in the function of portraying Deming as doing “good, solid science”, immediately before the intriguing portrait of consideration, expectation, storyline, industry, and other institutionalized thought processes and interests. Beloved Bishop is not known to be knowledgeable in borehology. The statement of his opinion regarding Deming’s work deserves due diligence. As the Auditor might ask his readership to ponder: why?

Here’s my hypothesis. Our Beloved Bishop is framing the Deming affair as the story between a noble scientist versus global warming industrialists. One (or two, if we count Richard Lindzen) against a powerful multitude. A sudden revelation of tainted intentions. Pure light among the murky shadows of climatology.

We can see that defining “good, solid science” is quite secondary. We’re not into the realms of scientific criticism, but more something like scientific opposition research. The way scientific opposition research operates deserves due diligence.

[1] Our Beloved Bishop's Dossier certainly deserves due diligence. For instance, it is claimed that “Lindzen of MIT has confirmed that the email was written by Jonathan Overpeck.” But note 12, which follows this claim, points to an Arxiv document authored by Lindzen. There is one mention to Overpeck in that document: a signature to an international conference invitation. The only mention of “getting rid” of MWP cites (Deming, 2005) as authority. Here is when the Auditor might revive yet another introduction to check-kiting.

I interpret your third argument that consensus messaging of climate change is “toxic” as a suggestion that it poisons the well. If correct, your argument relates to what you call elsewhere external validity, which I would call verification, i.e. in the communication environment. Here are some counterarguments:

(1) the well is already poisoned, as climate change has already become a wedge issue, and it's hard to believe it could get detoxified by any discrete set of communicative actions;

(2) the assumption that this predicament has been caused by consensus messaging lacks in historical details beyond "but Al Gore";

(3) the concept of "consensus messaging" may be kept indefinite to overcompensate for this lacuna, e.g. how is Al's messaging connected with Lew's exactly is not made clear;

(4) "but Al Gore" fails to mention dissensus messaging (defined here as "the opposite of consensus messaging, however you define it") as an active ingredient in well poisoning;

(5) the evidence basis for your own research programme has yet to be externally validated the same way Al Gore's weight has been celebrated, i.e. the national level;

(6) the potential for consensus messaging still needs to be acknowledged unless you wish to argue against the efficacy of the bandwagon effect in advertizing, e.g.:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/cherylsnappconner/2013/07/04/bandwagon-marketing-how-leading-brands-turn-perception-into-reality/

(7) your toxic rhetoric begs the question of real "toxicity" effects, besides being overly moralistic ClimateBall, and perhaps also having itself toxic effects.

The second argument only supports your position indirectly, by reinforcing its relevance. This relevance should go without saying: there are resources involved in communication strategies, so we ought to pay due diligence to them. Granted that "cultural cognition" and "consensus messaging" are two competing research programmes, how can we establish means of comparison? Here are two.

Since your main argument against consensus messaging is its impact on beliefs about climate change, we might ask you how your approach fares regarding climate change cognitions. I don't think your Florida experiment indicates any belief revision, nor does it argue in favor of dismissing the importance of changing attitudes and beliefs. Cultural cognitivists can’t claim being better at changing attitudes if they simply bypass that task. A case could be made that beliefs can be changed via through indirect means, say à la George Marshall. However, any such mean needs to be identified. While “consensus messaging” refers to something like an action, “cultural cognition” only posits something about cognition.

Belief revision also needs to operate at a specific level. As hard as one may try to go bottom-up, local, value-based, consensus-building, and whatnot, your argument against consensus messaging applies at a national level. How does your approach fare at that level? I don’t think we have external validation of this. This point is important, for this is where the “bottom-up” rubber meets the “political” road. This is when Fox News, CNN, and all the other media outlets transform stories into identity-based issues. At the national level, I don't think it's possible to extricate politics from science. Therefore, there’s no reason to expect that we can bypass the adversarial system with yet another paradigm shift.

Lastly, your first argument rests on your "two climate" story, or what Warren Pearce calls an "heuristic." I duly submit that this story may very well contain an equivocation. Take all your examples of conservatives doing things that affect crops and stuff. What you have shown is that people take weather forecasting seriously. This can be distinguished from climate science, which mostly deals with projections.

While there's a debate among scientists regarding where weather ends and climate begins (H/T Michael Tobis, pers. comm.), I think the distinction between weather and climate is quite robust. This distinction may also indicate something about the "nature" of the problem: weather is tangible, while climate is an abstracta. Let cognitive scientists explore that idea. They could for instance compare meteorologists’ and modellers’ beliefs. Even if that only leads to the rediscovery of the old divide between empiricists and rationalists, it might be worth a shot.

As far as I can see, the two research programmes are not incompatible. How could they be when “cultural cognition” and “consensus messaging” are two orthogonal concepts? Moreover, assuming the two programmes prescribe two specific and comparable strategies, they need not be implemented at the same level. They may compete for the same research grants and Al's honey pot. While this may explain the need for your “toxic” rhetoric, there’s evidence it comes from elsewhere:

Studies of the phenomenon of cultural cognition, however, suggest that individuals naturally impute socially harmful consequences to behavior that defies their moral norms. As a result, they are impelled to suppress morally deviant behavior even when they honestly perceive themselves to be motivated only by the secular good of harm prevention. The paper identifies how this dynamic transforms seemingly instrumental debates over environmental regulation, public health, economic policy, and crime control into polarizing forms of illiberal status competition. It also proposes a counterintuitive remedy: rather than attempt to cleanse the law of culturally partisan meanings - the discourse strategy associated with the liberal norm of public reason - lawmakers should endeavor to infuse it with a surfeit of meanings capable of affirming a wide range of competing worldviews simultaneously.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=963929

As far as I can see, you’re applying the good ol’ liberal argument to ClimateBall. The risk, it seems to me, is that your "toxic" rhetoric looks a lot like a polarizing form of illiberal status competition.

TL;DR -- the concepts of "climate," "consensus messaging" and toxicity need to be clarified if you want to build a more convincing argument for your approach.