Two Faces of Climate Denial

Two upcoming events in Urbana-Champaign have me thinking about the subject of “climate denial.” Later today, Gillen Wood, Nicholson Professor of English and Environmental Change Institute Scholar at UIUC (also my dissertation director) will be delivering the annual LAS Humanities lecture, at 4:30 at the Spurlock Museum.  His topic will be “Climate Denial and the Philosopher-King of Java.”  By climate denial, he is talking about the tendency in the humanities to underestimate the role of climate in influencing human events.  For several reasons, most notably the association of climatic determinism with a regressive and even racist political stance, progressive intellectuals have tended to distance themselves from the notion that climate plays a decisive role in shaping world history, instead privileging an autonomous notion of human culture.  Only now, in the midst of the current climate crisis, are we really coming to re-evaluate the relationship between climate and culture in a serious way.

There is another sense of climate denial, of course, by which I mean the well-financed and increasingly aggressive movement to deny or minimize anthropogenic global warming.  And an upcoming event will dramatize that as well. The Illinois Coalition for Justice, Peace, and the Environment is hosting its fifth annual conference (http://icjpe.org/announcements/?id=883), and the keynote speaker, for some reason, will be Alexander Cockburn, author, columnist for The Nation, and editor of Counterpunch newsletter.  Well-known as a sharp polemicist and a contrarian leftist, Cockburn has written often on population issues as well as environmental justice issues.  He is also one of the foremost voices in the public conversation surrounding global warming, which he considers to be a massive hoax designed to draw attention away from more pressing environmental issues and also to spur new investments in nuclear energy.  Cockburn has a tendency to dismiss the virtual consensus of climate scientists as mere “theoretical” work by computer modelers, and argues that dissident scientists have been cowed into submission.

Cockburn has been tilting at this particular windmill for over a decade, and sits virtually alone on the green Left in his attacks on global warming.  I am curious to hear what he has to say.  And certainly his views, like those of global-warming dissidents in general, deserve a hearing.  Whether I would call it appropriate that he is giving a keynote address to a conference on justice and the environment is a different question.