A while back some colleagues from my institute returned from a workshop in Copenhagen. A number of STS-”hotshots” attended the event, including Sheila Jasanoff. Upon return, a couple of them (not the hotshots, but my collegues) noted how Anthony Giddens had been rather aggressively attacked (not literally of course, he was not there..) during the proceedings.

I haven’t read Giddens for some time, but when I realized his most recent work deals with climate change and energy policy, I felt sort of obligated.  Thus, I have started reading ”The politics of climate change” (2009). I have only finished a couple of chapters, though,  so I can’t really comment much on the book in general. The first pages, however,  have reminded me of how Giddens has dealt with “nature” in his past work, and how this stands in stark contrast to how nature is perceived and described in the STS-literature (most notably by Bruno Latour, I guess). Perhaps this is part of the reason why he (apparently) is so loathed by (at least some) STS-scholars?

In “Modernity and Self-Identity” (1991) for example, it is clear that Giddens believes an original, pure, virgin-like nature to have existed at some point in history. This “natural world” was of an entirely different character than the social (modern) world we inhabit today. As such there is a visible and explicit dichotomy between nature, the “natural world” and the “social world” in Giddens account. He writes:

Technological intervention into nature is the condition of the development of abstract systems (…) but of course affects many other aspects of Modern social life as well. The ’socialization of nature’ has helped stabilize a variety of previously irregular or unpredictable influences on human behaviour (p.135)

On another instance he goes further, and argues with Bill McKibben that nature, as it at some point existed in it’s pure form has been abolished:

Socialized nature provides a telling (…). MicKibben argues, with great plausibility that human intervention in the natural world has been so profound, and so encompassing, that today we can speak of the ‘end of nature’. Socialized nature is quite different from the old natural environment, which existed separately from human endeavours and formed a relatively unchanging backdrop to them (pp. 136-137)

This view of “real nature” as a thing of the past is also repeated in “The politics of climate change”, allthough it has not been a major focal point in what little I have read of it so far. On page 29 Giddens briefly touches the subject:

(…) the distiguished scientist Martin Rees speaks seriously of the possibility that we – the human race – might not survive the twenty-first century, because of the quantity of dangers built up through the diverse interventions into (what used to be[1]) nature

In other words Giddens’ view basically seems to be that at some point the “human” or the “social” co-existed with the “natural”, but that the two were separate worlds,  not interfering much with each other. The natural was an “unchanging backdrop”, merely a context over which the social could unfold. I guess this is quite typical of sociologists (shame on us!), giving privilege to the social over the material.

From an STS-point of view the Giddens-account of nature would be problematic, to say the least. At what point did we begin to “socialize” nature? Was it when we started making tools that we utilized to hunt or harvest? Perhaps it was when we tamed fire? Possibly when we started cooperating to bring down large animals? Did it happen with feudalism, or was it a result of western industrialization? This very idea of a starting point, of a “before” and an “after” distinguishing “true nature” from a socialized counterpart is indeed problematic.

Of course, one can argue that this is of theoretical importance only to a relatively small group of people, and that the practical implications in terms of “real life” policy-suggestions wouldn’t necessarily be too large. If avoiding (or limiting)climate changes is the goal, I guess finding the best practical solutions would be the overarching task, not pondering the theoretical and philosophical relationship between humans and non-humans(the obvious counterargument is that this understanding is essential to reach the policies which best serves all, both humans and non-humans – and I guess that is a valid argument in the climate debate).  As I said, I haven’t read much of Giddens book yet, so I don’t really know which suggestions he raises. None the less I think the following is a valid question: if he reaches more or less the same types of conclusions that “we” (STS) do and give more or less the same types of advice – does it really matter if he “over-sociologizes” to a certain degree, and over-simplifies on some points? Scientific quarrells are just part of the game, I guess, but I hope they aren’t counter-productive…

[1] My bold..

[2] He discusses some ideas on nature in this lecture (interesting and quite entertaining at times).

It seems like there is an impression amongst a lot of actors that there is an abundance of raw materials easily available and ready to be utilized in commercial bioenergy production in Norway. None the less, when discussing the issue with people in the business, it strikes me that most of them claim access to good raw materials is a major challenge and a real cause for concern.

A few days ago I visited Røros, a small town about 140 kilometres south of Trondheim. The purpose of the trip, besides experiencing all four seasons within a few hours, was to gather data from the company “Vi-Tre A/S”. This, I believe, is the largest pellets factory in Trøndelag today. I met up with the general manager of the company and the managing director of their owners, “Røros e-verk” (Røros electricity company).

Vis større kart

Basically, Vi-Tre is a pellets factory with an annual production-capacity of around 9000 tonnes of pellets. This is a small figure compared to large internationally oriented factories, but considering the total Norwegian consumption of pellets, 35-45 000 tonnes a year, it’s still quite large. The factory was recently upgraded at a cost of 17 million Norwegian kroner, so the commercial effort involved is also substantial.

This means, of course, that it requires a relatively large amount of raw materials, which for most bioenergy is some kind of wood. But not just any wood. When you choose technology, you also make choices about which materials you can use. If you install a certain type of heater in a building, for example, it requires a certain type of fuel. The same goes for pellets factories, the pellet compressors doesn’t handle all types of wood. Vi-Tre installed a compressor that was more or less dependent on excess materials from carpentries, sawmills and the construction industry. This is the most common choice in conventional pellets production, and is apparently the choice with the best developed technology. This works very well in good times, when these industries are loaded with work. These days, however, the access to this type of excess wood is proving increasingly difficult. The price of whatever is available on the market has nearly doubled since January ‘09, and Vi-Tre is now operating at only a fraction of their total capacity. Instead they’re importing pellets at steep prices to be able to deliver according to their local contracts. I’ve told more or less the same story starring another company before, and when visiting a third company last week (Nord Energi) it was repeated once more. The financial crisis, it seems, has landed with full strength in Norwegian pellets production.

The question, then, is why so many companies go for a pellets-based solution, rather than installing for example heaters that can handle pure wood-chips. There are many technical reasons: moisture content, volume (4-5 times larger with wood chips – this leads to the need for larger silos and more transportation), maintenance intensity, power efficiency, and I’m sure I’m missing a few points here. All of these translates into monetary expenses and/or extra work-hours. On the pro-side, the raw materials are often easily available locally without much hassle. Thus many small scale rurally located operations which depend on voluntary work can go ahead and choose this type of fuel, and be less influenced by the types of economic fluctuations which we have recently seen. As far as the large scale “greening” of a nation goes, however, this won’t get us very far.

In this situation with so many companies struggling find raw materials for pellets production  it is peculiar to note that a relatively newly established company called Bio Wood Norway are opening the worlds second largest factory (!) for pellets production, right here in the middle of Norway, in just a few years. The plan is to produce 450-500 000 tonnes of pellets, roughly ten times more than the total annual consumption in Norway today. To achieve this, they need 1,2 million cubic meters of raw materials on a yearly basis – which they obviously won’t find locally, at least not for a while. In stead this will be imported, mostly from Canada and Africa. How this adds up financially and in terms of climate gas emissions, I do not know, but digging into it would certainly be interesting.

This is pretty good. Trond Vivelstad, a member of the board in the organization “Klimarealistene” (The climate realists – wiki) has published a response on their website to an article I published in Dagbladet a few days ago. In the article I argued that Norwegian newspapers between 2002-2008 failed in their communication on the subject, feeding the readers with a combination of non-constructive skepticism and dramatic encounters with natural disasters (more in my last post).

The argument in Vivelstad’s response is basically that my claims are preposterous and that climate changes as an anthropogenic phenomenon is seldomly contested in Norwegian media. Let me answere the first part of his critique by offering some insights into how we reached our conclusions. We read, counted and categorized  a selection of about 450 printed newspaper-articles about climate changes from 10 Norwegian newspapers in the period 2002-2007. The trend is that scepticism plays a large role in around 30-50 percent of the stories dealing with the science of climate change throughout the period, allthough it should be noted that this tendency is weaker in 2007 than the previous years. This does not mean that sceptics throughout the period are portrayed in large stories about themselves, it merely implies that the arguments of the two camps are given more or less equal room in the columns of articles dealing with the science of climate change. Most stories, however, aren’t about the science of climate change at all, they simply deal with isolated incidents occuring in nature, which at some point is vaguely linked to the idea of climate changes, without framing it as an anthropogenic phenomenon  or natural variation. The research builds on an earlier study by Marianne Ryghaug, which was published in 2006 by Norsk medietidsskrift (The article is available online here). Today, in 2009 (without having counted I might add, so now I’m being just as speculative as Vivelstad) I think Vivelstad could be correct in his assesment; the media tends to frame climate changes as an anthropogenic phenomenon, and sceptics play a smaller part than they did just a few years ago. I for one, welcome this as a positive development – Vivelstad obviously does not.

This, however, is not all there is to his critique. He goes on to label me as an amateur for claiming that the serious scientific community has reached a consensus on climate changes, and offers an alternative [1]. To solidify his argument he asks:

When did you last see a large story in the newspapers about the Norwegian climate realists, about the Heartland institute-conference in New York or about the fact that in the USA alone there are more than 31 800 scientists (Almost a third of them holds PhD’s!) who disagrees with the hypotheses of the IPCC?

Let us begin with a closer look at the heartland institute, the international scientific alibi of Vivelstad’s argument (Note the institute’s mission: “to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems” . Also, their use of Milton Friedman’s portrait in their banner is quite revealing in terms of ideological position). In the clip below you can see how they market the conference recomended by Vivelstad:

As Vivelstad correctly points out, the heartland institute doesn’t appear much in Norwegain newspapers. The same goes for their conference. There are exceptions, however, like this article in Dagbladet, on how the institute is funded by Exxon Mobile, or this more or less in the same vein. This article in Aftenposten quite seriously deals with some of the arguments found in the institute’s various reports and publications. Although scarcely mentioned in Norwegian media, they have not escaped journalistic scrutiny. There are litterally hundreds of stories on them to be found in more or less respectable newspapers, most of them focusing on their links to big-oil (klick, klick, klick or klick. You get the picture, google for more). This source claims that the institute has received more than 47 million USD from traditional energy companies and right-wing foundations since 1985.

On an unrelated note it does not exactly stregthen their scientific credibility that they have a well-known track record as close partners with the tobacco industry (A relatively recent example from their website: Scientific Evidence Shows Secondhand Smoke Is No Danger). As far as Newspaper coverage goes, I think this institute have gone a long way in discrediting themselves as a possible source.

Viveland’s next concern is about the 31 800 scientists who oppose the conclusions reached by among others the IPCC. Although he does not make it explicit, I believe he’s talking about the so-called “Oregon Petition“, which is also cited at the “climate realists” website. The petition was funded by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, incidentally one of the sponsors of the 2008 Heartland Institute conference in New York.

Under this header people who claim to be scientists lend credibility to the following text:

We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

Circulated with this petition is an article, which have appeared in various forms since the petition first saw the light of day. On the current website of the petition, this article is portrayed as being a “summary of peer-reviewed research” on the subject (full article). In the past, earlier versions of this paper has been heavily criticized for copying the style of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, appearing as a copy of a peer reviewed article. In fact, the article had never been published, and had definently never passed any peer review. The current edition of the paper has, however, been published. The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons accepted it and published it in 2007. This journal, however, is a particular type of journal. It is not listed in the major literature databases of MEDLINE/PubMed or the ISI Web of Science. More importantly, it  is notoriously known for publishing articles with little value except for the outrageousness of their claims. For instance articles published in this forum has claimed that a “gay lifestyle” shortens life expectancy with 20 years, that there is a link between abortion and breast cancer, that HIV does not cause AIDS, and that “humanists” have conspired to replace the “creation religion of Jehovah” with evolution. Considering the sciencetific excellence and rigor of the paper, it does seem a bit strange that the authors settled for publication in a fifth-division medical journal like this.

None the less, the number 31 800 signing on to this thing sounds impressive, and as Vivelstad points out, roughly 9000 of these report holding PhD’s. It should be noted, however, that the accuracy of this list seems slim considering it’s inclusion of rather suspect names like “Dr. Geri Halliwell” (spice up your life…), “Dr. Michael J. Fox”, “Redwine, Ph.D” along with a number of corporate names). Just as interesting, however, is the fact that as many as 12 000 report holding BA’s, around 7000 claim to hold a masters degree, and roughly 2000 are medical doctors. In other words the term “scientist” seems to be stretched here. In 2001 Scientific American did a rough extrapolation at a time when around 17 000 “scientists” had signed the petition. They concluded :

“the petition supporters include a core of about 200 climate researchers; a respectable number, though rather a small fraction of the climatological community“.

There are obvious methodological problems tied to reaching this number, but at least it points to the problem of playing the numbers-game with scientists [2] (A game the IPCC has been more than willing to play, I might add, perhaps they would have been wiser to not do so). A more credible approach to the numbers-game is found in the by now relatively famous article by Naomi Oreskes in Science (2004) where she reviews 928 abstracts of peer reviewed  scientific articles in the period 1993-2003 from journals listed in the ISI database. Searching for the term “climate change” she found no articles arguing against the anthropogenic hypothesis, and with this as a backdrop she rather famously (at least in some circles) declared that we had reached “scientific consensus” on climate change [3].

Now, to wrap up my response to Vivelstad:

• In stories dealing with climate changes and the science of climate changes in Norwegian newspapers between 2002-2007 sceptics held a prominent position. This is highly tangible, observable and countable.
• The credibility of the actors you base your arguments on is, to be kind, low. The heartland institute have collaborated with the tobacco industry for years and is leaning towards big-oil and right-wing market fundamentalists for funding. They are an ideologically motivated gropup, and their conference should be considered with this in mind.
• The petition signed by 31 800 “scientists” should be approached with caution and scepticism. There are issues of credibiliy tied also to this. It is the result of a politically motivated mobilization and have little weight compared to decades of peer-reviewed research piling up to establish scientific consensus.

[1] Alright – I wrote that science had “no doubt”, admittedly a tad on the tabloid side of things, researchers are allways in some kind of doubt, aren’t they? In their fourth assessment report the IPCC, for example, on many points indicate between an 80-100% likelihood of their assessments being correct (see box 1.1 for an explanation on the likelihood terminology). The proceedings of the recent congresss in Copenhagen concludes that “Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are
being realised…” (Click for more).

[2] See for example “Project Steve” for a related example on how ridiculous (and fun) these things can get.

[3] She did not, however, claim that this consensus in any way represented the “truth”, she simply identified the consensus as an observable phenomenon in peer reviewed sciene on the subject. She writes: “The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for failing to act on what is not known“

Yesterday the tabloid newspaper Dagbladet printed[1] a small article by me[2], dealing with how Norwegian newspapers have reported on the climate crisis and the science of climate change over the last few years.

My argument in the text is basically that Norwegian newspapers in the period 2002-2008 have failed in their communication on the subject, feeding it’s readership with a combination of non-constructive skepticism and dramatic encounters with natural disasters. Meanwhile they have neglected to report on potential action-strategies for individuals and the lack of concrete action by Norwegian politicians. Compared to the coverage in our favourite country of comparison, Sweden, this is striking – the swedish newspapers have frequently reported on these matters throughout the period.

What could explain the differences? And more importantly, what implications could this have for the general debate and future Norwegian policies? I can only speculate, of course. On the first point – perhaphs it is difficult to sell criticism of a practice that has, after all, made us filthy ritch, whereas this is easier in Sweden? On the second point – I think the Norwegian debate has been more colored by the so called “sceptics” than the case has been in Sweden, making the very existence of anthropogenic climate changes a question of debate, rather than finding a way forward to “solve” the matter. In terms of policy I guess this could cause some delay in important decisions, as well as giving lifesupport to a certain populist party (whose name we shall not speak).

[1] Yes, printed. Hope they eventually publish it online as well, not much 2.0 communication going on in the printed paper.

[2] Well, I have written it, but this was a seriously cut-down (and thus somewhat tabloid) edition of it. The editors did a failry decent job keeping the point intact, though…