Cancel culture in climate change
Posted on September 7, 2021 by curryja | 8 Comments
by Robert Wade
A microcosm on the ‘morality’ of cancel culture: the aborted conference on ‘Global Warming: Mitigation Strategies’, hosted by the Italian scientific academy the Lincei.
My essay ‘What is the harm in forecasting catastrophe due to man-made global warming?’ [link] placed the debate about human influences on the climate in the context of a larger process of polarization common when scientific disagreements become public. As described by sociologist of science Robert K. Merton [link], each group then responds to stereotyped versions of the other:
“They see in the other’s work primarily what the hostile stereotype has alerted them to see, and then promptly mistake the part for the whole. In this process, each group … becomes less and less motivated to study the work of the other, since there is manifestly little point in doing so. They scan the out-group’s writings just enough to find ammunition for new fusillades.“
Karl Popper’s epistemological basis for knowledge – knowledge advances by disconfirmation — goes out the window, for the birds, as what scientists believe to be approximately true becomes a function of their group identity. See also Anne Applebaum, ‘The New Puritans’, recently published in The Atlantic.
https://judithcurry.com/2021/09/07/cancel-culture-in-climate-change/#more-27837
