Kari Marie Norgaard
Whitman CollegeThe Social Organization of Climate DenialWhat do we know: What does Sociology bring to the table for studying the human dimensions of global
climate change?
Sociological knowledge about the human dimensions of climate change breaks into three broad areas concerning:
human causes, human impacts, and human responses. Sociology, with its endemic focus on social institutions and
culture, addresses each area with attention to the complex interactions between individual behavior and macro
forces that are often overlooked by the rationalistic and positivist assumptions about social behavior made by
economic and policy analysts.
While all three areas need attention, there is arguably greater sociological understanding of and consensus
around the first: human causes of climate change. Here we know for example, which sectors of society generate
most climate gasses, how this relates to economic activity and trends in the production of climate gases across
time and space. Concerning sociological knowledge of human impacts of climate change we also know a fair
amount. Scientific predictions concerning sea level rise, storm surge and intensity, and shifting weather patterns
have to some extent been translated into descriptions of impacts to agriculture, disease patterns, and transportation
systems. We know that those with less social capital experience the consequences of climate change most directly
and forcefully. Social inequality also buffers the experience of climate change for those with greater social and
economic resources, leading to the lived perception among the better off that the problem is less urgent than it
actually is.
What do we need to know: What are the major sociological research questions?
It is the third area, the state of sociological knowledge as it applies to human responses to climate change, that
is the most understudied, and I propose, in need of significant attention. What sociologists have identified is a
widespread lack of public reaction to scientific information regarding climate change. By “reaction” sociologists
include the widest possible range of reactions from planning by federal and state officials, to social movement
activity, to individual behavioral change, or even acknowledging the information by letting it cross our minds
or talking about it with friends and family. Climate scientists may have identified this as the most important
environmental issue of our time, but it has taken over 20 years for the problem to penetrate the public discourse in
even the most superficial manner. Yet the IPCC calls for reductions of 50 to 80% in greenhouse gas emissions by
- Although public concern is beginning to arise, climate change has been neither a policy issue, nor publicly
salient in the broadest sense. Following Habermas, we can understand this failure of information to move through
the public awareness and into policy outcomes as a failure of communicative action. But to understand both why
it is happening, and what to do next, we must look to the sociology of denial. Most research to date has examined
denial on the level of individual psychology. Yet what individuals choose to pay attention to, or ignore, must be
understood within the context of both social norms shaping interpersonal interaction and the broader political
economic context.
How we respond to information that is highly disturbing, information for example about a lack of
certainty of our future survival, information that challenges the basics of our social organization, is a complex
process. My work in Norway, supported by preliminary research in the U.S. indicates that people want to protect