Riley E. Dunlap
Oklahoma State UniversityThe Conservative Assault on Climate Science: A Successful Case of Deconstructing Scientific Knowledge to
Oppose Policy ChangeWhat do we need to know: What are the major sociological research questions?
Environmental sociology has grown in prominence and credibility over the past two decades because it has
become widely recognized that environmental problems such as climate change are “people problems”—they
are caused by human behavior, viewed as problematic because of their impacts on humans (and, for some, their
impacts on other species and ecosystems) and their solution requires collective action by humans (Dunlap 2007).
Not surprisingly, the emergence of a mature environmental sociology has involved a rapid growth in theoretically
informed empirical research on the causes, impacts and solutions to environmental problems (see, e.g., Dunlap
and Marshall 2007).
These broader trends in our field are reflected in the case of climate change as well, although obviously
environmental (and other) sociologists have been slower in focusing attention on it than on problems such as
air and water pollution, deforestation, and toxic contamination which achieved prominence a decade or two
before global warming was widely accepted as a problem. Nonetheless, the past decade has seen a surge of
empirical research on the causes of climate change, with proponents of such widely divergent perspectives as
World Systems Theory and Human Ecology providing important evidence of, e.g., national-level characteristics
associated with CO2 emissions. Indeed, this large body of cross-national research (too voluminous to cite) is
arguably the most important sociological contribution to climate change our field has thus far produced. We are
also seeing increasing attention to the impacts of climate change, with emphasis on its inequitable impacts both
inter- and intra-nationally (e.g., Roberts and Parks 2007), and we can expect to see more work along these lines
as Environmental Justice specialists continue to expand their attention from local toxics to global warming.
Lastly, we are seeing more sociologists join with political scientists in examining the global governance processes
necessary for achieving the effective climate change policies required for making any progress toward solutions
(e.g., Fisher 2004)—although at this stage “adaptations” seem more likely than solutions.
Environmental sociologists have historically had a fourth major emphasis in addition to work on
the causes, impacts and solutions to environmental problems, and that is to analyze the processes by which
environmental conditions are recognized and successfully defined as problematic, or how environmental problems
are socially constructed (Dunlap 2007). In the 1990s such analyses were the most visible sociological contribution
to climate change research, as there was a plethora of studies of the social construction of climate change (see
Rosa and Dietz 1998 and references therein). While such work provided valuable insights into the growing
awareness of climate change and the emergence of the IPCC and climate science, it often made the point that
climate science was highly “contested” (e.g., Taylor and Buttel 1992). Early critics of this work (Dunlap and
Catton 1994:19-23) pointed to the inherent weakness of analyses that treated the competing claims of skeptics
sponsored by conservative think tanks such as the Marshall Foundation as equivalent to those of mainstream
scientists, and the problems posed by the relativist stance of strong constructivism for making sense of climate
change debates.
While criticism of constructivist analyses provoked a bit of a backlash (e.g. Burningham and Cooper
1999), events over the past decade have made the shortcomings of constructivist research that analyzes competing