Notions of Absolute Certainty: Diversionary Tactics in the Global Warming Debate
Megan Jennaway, School of Population Health, University of Queensland
Contemporary discourses of global warming are fascinating for their capacity to reveal the topography of the ideological terrain. This in turn reflects structural conflict between competing economic and political interests, and potentially renders global warming as just one among a multiplicity of ideological or discursive effects. But global warming is more than just a symptom of conflict at the level of ideas; it has highly tangible impacts in the world of things. Among the diversionary tactics deployed by the nay-sayers is the claim that global warming isn’t happening; when that failed, that it isn’t anthropogenic; and finally, that there’s ‘insufficient’ evidence for it. On this logic, we should never believe that a risk exists until it is realised. While this argument may serve a number of powerful interest groups, it ill behoves anthropology to take any heed of them. Climate change in a hotter direction is upon us and none of us knows where it is taking us next. Our task as anthropologists is to marshal cadres of committed researchers and action-oriented applied anthropologists who will:
- Turn their minds to this critical and urgent issue
- Gather as much evidence from the field as rapidly and thoroughly as possible
- Assess potential impacts on indigenous communities and all populations that are most vulnerable to the effects of global warming
- Develop (and funding permitted, implement) action plans on impact management and mitigation, based on pre-existing models of managing disaster, emergency and conflict/post-conflict situations.
- Lobby governments, donors and world bodies to take constructive action
This paper is a polemical piece designed to stimulate critical thinking and action around a research agenda for the anthropological study of global warming.
