The Climate Change Controversy: A Technical Debate in the Public Sphere.

• Author: Eckstein, Justin

The Climate Change Controversy: A Technical Debate in the Public Sphere. By William Mosley-Jensen. Saarbrucken, Germany: VDM Verlag Dr Muller GmbH & Co. KG, 2011. pp. 100.

The Climate Change Controversy is an insightful investigation into the politics surrounding climate change policy. Mosley-Jensen locates the climate change controversy between "two heterogeneous camps that have organized in support or opposition to the principle document on climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report": assenters who agree with the report and dissenters who oppose the IPCC's findings (p. 8). Despite this divide, Mosley-Jensen provides ample evidence suggesting a scientific consensus for anthropogenic causes of climate change (p. 43).

Mosley-Jensen's inquiry seeks to elucidate how a consensus in the technical sphere becomes a public controversy. "What is interesting about the case of climate change," Mosley-Jensen writes, "is that the controversy has promulgated in exactly the opposite direction, agreement has been reached in science but the dissenters have taken their case before the public post hoc" (p. 15). Mosley-Jensen explores a number of the dissenter's tactics, but finds that their common goal is to produce enough uncertainty to perpetuate deliberation and extend the controversy, thwarting any sort of policy action. The dissenters frustrate calls for policy reform by carefully cultivating a scientific ethos. Shedding insight into the nature of controversy and the relationship between science and the public sphere, The Climate Change Controversy represents a useful addition to argumentation theory because it indexes the various rhetorical and argumentative strategies invoked to perpetuate controversy. Further, Mosley-Jensen extends the scholarly conversation surrounding controversy by theorizing the way that controversy can be used strategically to achieve certain political ends.

Following his first chapter's reflection on previous scholarship (including the work of G. Thomas Goodnight, Edward Panetta, and Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca) about argumentation and controversy, Mosley-Jensen's second chapter seeks to contextualize and explicate how climate change functions as a controversy. Mosley-Jensen contends that George W. Bush's administration deliberately attempted to muddle and problematize climate change science. Citing the passage of the Data Quality Act (p. 28), appointment of questionable...