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Alternative Facts and States of Fear: Reality and STS in an Age of Climate Fictions

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Abstract

In the decades since the Science Wars of the 1990s, climate science has become a crucible for the negotiation of claims about reality and expertise. This negotiation, which has drawn explicitly on the ideas and techniques of science and technology studies (STS), has taken place in genres of fiction as well as non-fiction, which intersect in surprising ways. In this case study, I focus on two interwoven strands of this history. One follows Michael Crichton’s best-selling 2004 novel, State of Fear and its reception by neo-conservatives as a commentary on the mis-uses of facts to stoke fear about anthropogenic climate change. The other considers Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s 2010 publishing success Merchants of Doubt as the inverse, a demonstration of the forms of disinformation that have been used to undermine scientific consensus around climate change. I show that both Crichton’s as well as Oreskes and Conway’s approaches were critiqued by academic STS even as their accounts constituted the most high-profile performances of its stakes and the politics of knowledge since the Science Wars. In highlighting the STS practices deployed by each, as well as how those practices were differently linked to accusations of fear-mongering and a perversion of the purity of STS, I demonstrate the need for a reflexive history of STS. Such an approach, I argue, can better consider the social life of STS ideas and practices amidst calls for more politically-engaged approaches to knowledge production.

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Notes

  1. “Conway: Press Secretary Gave ‘Alternative Facts’” Meet the Press, 22 Jan 2017. Available online at https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/conway-press-secretary-gave-alternative-facts-860142147643. Accessed 8, March 2018.

  2. See the response from the hoaxers published online on 1 Oct 2018 at: https://quillette.com/2018/10/01/the-grievance-studies-scandal-five-academics-respond/. The historical role of emotion in the production of scientific knowledge has been powerfully described by historians of life and behavioral science (Lindee 2005; Silverman 2011).

  3. Disagreements on whether “post-truth” was a product of the success of STS ideas of “symmetry” received explicit attention in a series of exchanges between STS practitioners (Sismondo 2017; Collins et al. 2017; Fuller 2016, 2017). Lynch (2018: 597) summarizes and attempts to neutralize these arguments by pointing out that “much of the research in the field [of STS] has abandoned symmetry in favor of more engaged and particularistic positions that have little to do with a generalized ‘post-truth’ mentality.”

  4. The Michael Crichton Fund at of the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard supports the W.H.R. Rivers lectures in Social Medicine, and provides support for research. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2002/04/crichton-informative-and-candid-at-hms/. Accessed December 14, 2018.

  5. In the novel, the * is a footnote to an actual peer reviewed article: “Chylek et al. (2004). ‘Global warming and the Greenland ice sheet,’ Climatic Change 63, 201–221.” Crichton includes this excerpt from the article in his footnote, “Since 1940…data have undergone predominantly a cooling trend…The Greenland ice sheet and coastal regions are not following the current global warming trend” (Chylek cited in Crichton 2004: 47).

  6. Especially when, in 2006, Oreskes testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (Oreskes 2006).

  7. Busselle and Bilandzic (2008: 256) argue that a reader’s knowledge that a story is invented does not diminish the power of a narrative; indeed the stories that most effectively engage readers are “both fictional and unrealistic.”

  8. The Union of Concerned Scientists, for instance, launched its own counter campaign. http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/solutions/fight-misinformation/crichton-thriller-state-of.html#.WSB0bTvnvB8.

  9. For an STS-inspired analysis of this testimony, see Besel et al. (2012).

  10. Incidentally, it was more recently reported that in 2017, a trillion-ton Iceberg, four times the size of London, broke off of the Antarctic ice shelf (Boyle 2017).

  11. Emphasis mine. https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-collapse-of-western-civilization/9780231169547. Accessed May 14, 2018.

  12. Crichton was intimately familiar with the politics of spin. Crichton’s father, John, was a journalist and from 1962 until his death in 1970, the President of the American Association Advertising Agencies—the professional organization of the public relations figures who coached Oreskes and Conway’s merchants of doubt.

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Acknowledgments

Thank you to Susan Gaines and David Kirby for the invitation to first speak on this topic at the 2017 Narrating Science Conference in Toronto, Canada organized by the Fiction Meets Science groups at the University of Bremen and the University of Guelph. David, along with Peter Weingart, Doug Bruce, and anonymous reviewers provided valuable advice in developing the argument into the present paper. I could not have finished it without Deanna Day’s expertise and encouragement. Henry Cowles and members of the STS community at the University of Michigan provided a gracious and stimulating forum for feedback at a critical moment. Elizabeth Karron and Beans Velocci performed exemplary research and editorial support.

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    Joanna Radin

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Radin, J. Alternative Facts and States of Fear: Reality and STS in an Age of Climate Fictions. Minerva 57, 411–431 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-019-09374-5

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