PRODUCTION scientists pro Romney and Denial ; IMPACT scientists pro Obama and climate change reality ?

undergrad scientists DENY climate change, vote Romney

The latest Washington Post/ABC TV poll has a few figures you probably hadn't seen in this polled-to-death election season : the difference in GOP/DEMOCRAT support between people with undergraduate and post graduate degrees : undergrads pro Romney, post-grads pro Obama.


I believe it explains the push back on climate change reality in one easy sentence:

Undergraduates with degrees in science tend to go to work in factories producing things (and pollution) ; while scientists with post graduate degrees tend to work in universities and government assessing the impact of that pollution upon the wider world and society.

Allan Schnaiberg's election

Canadian sociologist Allan Schnaiberg - dead for years - could probably explain the current American election (the one that has both sides refusing to mention climate change)   better than anyone alive ---- thanks to his theory of the primal conflict between production science and impact science.

The pushback on climate change reality is coming from people with undergraduate degrees in science - enough to be minimally credible to speak on science matters , but not really involved in current world class basic research.

Typically, the lead climate deniers are TV weathermen in their seventies, with an undergraduate science degree from a fourth rate university that they obtained in the early 1960s, based on mediocre teachers whose own science education was last seriously updated in the late 1940s.

State of the art climate science today is simply quite different than it was 65 years ago and this is fuelling the conflict between two sides , both sides sincerely convinced that their science is the state of the art....

"DENIER science" aims for the stars : but sometimes hits London instead...

To Stars..or LONDON

A whole lot of Denier-Watchers themselves deny that DENIERS even have have "a science" - mostly because they insist that deniers deny and disbelieve the basic tenets of "Science".


Well obviously I strongly disagree with my good pals or this blog would have no purpose!

Not C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" but rather "Two Sciences"

Let me begin my friendly disagreement with them, by myself denying there is any one thing called "Science" .

Instead, I see ( per Canadian Allan Schnaiberg's famous distinction) two main types of science : Production science aka science of the first law of thermodynamics (wildly optimistic skygod science) versus Impact science of the second law of thermodynamics (cautiously grounded earthling science.)

Production science is very good at building rockets but is very indifferent as to the tragic consequences when they fall on London and Brussels rather than ascend to the stars ( to re-use an old, old gag about Nazi-American patriot Wernher Von Braun !)

Denier science is indeed "building" our human civilization but it is also killing our human civilization and our planet, in the process.

My job - as I see it it - is to stop them and I hope you will consider  starting up efforts to stop them as well.....

the only war that Climate Skeptics ever lost was WWII (and we have the SF books to prove it !)

People who like to contrast the big finned car culture of the Fifties with the counterculture hippie dropouts of the Sixties must remember a lot different 1950s that I do.

In the bright daylight, we sure were an optimistic bunch of baby boomers, I'll grant you that.

But at night, before the glowing screen ?

Totally dif.

It was all about invading body snatchers and slimy Blobs and radioactive mutant ants eating New York.

My mom wasn't alone in liking to read sci fi short stories and by 1961, so did I.

Most had been written between the 1930s and the 1950s, long before being bundled in science fiction hard cover anthologies in the early 1960s - these were not your current SF, by any means.

Even as a twelve year old I could tell that the older stories (which I now know were written in the pre-war late1930s and early 1940s)  had a totally different atmosphere from most of those set in my own time (actually written from the very late1940s onwards, ie in the post-war period .)

Adult re-reading only confirms it ---- and the literary critics, much more SF-oriented than me-- helped explain why.

Production SF pre 1945 vs Impact SF post 1945

Hard SF ,"production SF", really suffered a loss of faith after 1945, while soft SF, "impact SF" became what the SF magazine readers got to read (because, perhaps, that was all that talented SF writers felt like writing !)

Now I have borrowed (and adapted) the terms "production science" and "impact science" , originally conceived by Canadian-born sociologist Allan Schnaiberg in 1980 --- I first came across these terms in the work of Myanna Lahsen who I feel offers the best grained explanation for the reasons why famous scientists become infamous deniers.

Best as in , natch ,  'cause it agrees with my assessment.

Production science was about the scientists who designed and built  linear, deterministic, discrete, man-made "machines" : successfully, on time and under budget, end of story.

Impact science was the scientists who went outside the lab or worksite, into the garden where the machines had been placed and asked, how did this new machine react to all its human, biological and physical neighbours - and them to it.

It was a complex, chaotic science and so unpredictable and unexpected results were the norm of their discoveries.

As in "atomic bomb tests, done to defend America from Communist attack, end up creating mutant giant killer ants from harmless American garden ants - and they destroy New York - while the sneaky Russian Commies sent in humanitarian aid and assistance to a grateful New York state".

Hard "production' SF is Denier porn ; soft "impact" SF is sci fi for Greens .

Hiroshima Atomic Energy and Auschwitz Eugenics had made many an optimistic 1939 NY World's Fair SF Convention attendee lose a little faith by late 1945 - and it showed in their writing : most SF writers became proto-greens but some remained proto-deniers.....