Facts and Affects in Online Climate Denial: Towards a Model of Tribal Epistemology

• In Event: Cultures of Fact Travel

Abstract

In the US, climate politics is highly polarised. Some 90 percent of liberal Democrats accept climate science, compared with around 30 percent of conservative Republicans. This 'tribal epistemology' has little to do with scientific literacy. It is becoming well-established that exposure to more climate science only galvanises climate deniers. As Dan Kahan and others have shown, climate epistemology is overdetermined by social acceptance; the emotional and even economic costs of holding a view at odds with one's peers overrides more objective concerns. This is especially true in climate denier circles, but also present amongst those who accept climate science.

Climate change is only one dimension on which US society is polarising. Evidence of a deepening sociocultural divide marked by mutual antagonism is mounting and, although talk of a new post-truth era of 'alternative facts' is premature, the epistemological implications of polarisation are underexplored. In this paper, I attempt to describe how tribal epistemology works by drawing on my ethnography of climate-change discussion groups online. Exploring connections between the affective, libidinal, fantasmatic, performative and political-economic aspects of online climate discourse, I will offer the beginnings of a model of tribal epistemology that offers a richer explanation of the relationship between belonging and belief.

Author

• Benjamin Glasson, University of Melbourne