Climate science as a cultural contest

This paper explores the cultural contest over climate science with particular reference to the United States.  Cross-national comparisons of public attitudes about climate change and climate science routinely find substantially higher levels of climate scepticism in the US than in other countries. The standard explanation for these findings points to a mixture of intentional disinformation (e.g., US energy industry interests that actively promote scepticism so they can continue burning fossil fuels) coupled with media practices (e.g., a journalistic norm to present both sides of an issue) which have facilitated the distribution of that misinformation. This explanation, however, appears inconsistent with evidence from the last few years. On the one hand, environmental and other groups expended large sums of money getting out their message leading up to Copenhagen. There was not, as the standard account suggests, an underfunded David valiantly trying to be heard over the well funded roar of the energy industry Goliath.  Similarly, recent studies show that US media practices changed substantially following the release of An Inconvenient Truth and the publicity accorded Oreskes work documenting the level of consensus among climate scientists. At the same time this was happening, polling data show both an increase in the level of climate scepticism among the US public and in the rigidity and certainty with which those views are held by a certain section of the population. There is now less acceptance of climate science than of evolution among white evangelicals. In short, the extent to which the science is contested has increased at the same time that the mechanisms which supposedly fuelled the scepticism were losing power. An alternative explanation for the dynamics of American public opinion on climate change and climate science, one based on Douglas and Wildavsky's cultural theory of risk, is proposed.