Thomas Malthus and Sociologists

A new article in Wired interviews a sociology professor from Whitman College on why people in America are increasingly less supportive of initiatives to combat global warming (or as it has been altered "climate change"). The webpage for the professor describes her work in the following way - "At Whitman, I am a member of both Sociology and Environmental Studies. Within the field of Environmental Sociology, I am particularly interested in the intersection of social inequality (e.g. gender, race, class) and environmental problems. This area is also known as environmental justice. "

She comments "In addition to being a major environmental problem, global climate change is a highly significant global environmental justice issue (Athanasiou & Baer, 2002; Baer et al., 2000; Agarwal & Narain, 1991; Donohoe, 2003; Pettit, 2004; Roberts, 2001)." So almost regardless of the science, this is about justice or (not to put words in the professor's mouth) equity.

In the lead article which Wired seems to have found interest the professor argues "Existing research assumes that a lack of information about the causes of global warming is the primary reason for the public’s failure to respond—an orientation that Harriet Bulkeley (2000) calls the “information-deficit model.” In essence the information deficit model assumes that skeptics about the vast array of global warming theories are simply uninformed. Certainly professors like Richard Lindzen, who is an MIT climatologist, would not be included in that group. But in the Wired article the professor goes on to suggest that a lot of the change in opinion has been caused by conspiracy - we're being duped by Exxon Mobil and others.

The professor then goes on to demonstrate her "research" with a series of interviews. My favorite exchange was "Researcher: I want to ask you about some different things that have happened here in Bygdaby(a city in Norway) that I have noticed since I arrived in November, and one of them is that there hasn’t been any snow. What do you think of that? Hilde: Yes we think it’s a bit odd, you know. The way I remember winters, or winters before, you know there was always lots of snow, and it was cold the entire winter, you know." Now that is compelling research.

Then the article gets to the crux of this issue, the author's initial premise has been shattered - people know about the problem (they are not in information deficit) - but she is concerned that even with the knowledge they are not prone to act with the same level of alarm that she is "As I became increasingly convinced that the people I spoke with were well informed about global climate change, my research questions shifted. I began asking myself a different set of questions: How did people manage to produce an everyday reality in which this critically serious problem remained invisible? What difference did it make that people who knew about global warming failed to take action?" No value laden words in those statements.

When Malthus penned his essay on population he had some pretty convincing data - that Britain would run out of food unless it controlled population. His motives were not clear - he was appealing to parliament to not extend the equivalent of welfare. And his data, which came from Benjamin Franklin, had a number of flaws. Finally, he did not anticipate the power of ingenuity. The invention of the steel plow pre-dates Malthus' work by five years. And with the steel plow yield per acre increased significantly.

Each generation is blessed with one or more Malthusian projections. And each generation has found that the linear absolutist logic of these scenarios is always wrong. Dressing it up in pseudo-scientific language does not make it any more compelling. Perhaps that might not be as satisfying an explanation as some high sounding term but based on the experience since 1798, it seems a lot more reliable than listening to sociologists with a pre-conceived picture of the world.