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Despite strong scientific consensus that global climate disruption is real and due in significant part to human activities, stories in the U.S. mass media often still present the opposite view, characterizing the issue as being “in dispute.” Even today, the U.S. media devote significant attention to small numbers of denialists, who claim that scientific consensus assessments, such as those by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are “exaggerated” and “political.” Such claims, however, are testable hypotheses—and just the opposite expectation is hypothesized in the small but growing literature on Scientific Certainty Argumentation Methods, or SCAMs. The work on SCAMs suggests that, rather than being a reflection of legitimate scientific disagreement, the intense criticisms of climate science may reflect a predictable pattern that grows out of “the politics of doubt”: If enough doubt can be raised about the relevant scientific findings, regulation can be avoided or delayed for years or even decades. Ironically, though, while such a pattern can lead to a bias in scientific work, the likely bias is expected to be just the opposite of the one usually feared. The underlying reason has to do with the Asymmetry of Scientific Challenge, or ASC—so named because certain theories or findings, such as those indicating the significance of climate disruption, are subjected to systematically greater challenges than are those supporting opposing conclusions. As this article shows, available evidence provides significantly more support for SCAM and ASC perspectives than for the concerns that are commonly expressed in the U.S. mass media. These findings suggest that, if current scientific consensus is in error, it is likely because global climate disruption may be even worse than commonly expected to date. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the discovery of oil well drilling, energy policy (particularly offshore petroleum policy over the past three decades) has led the United States, and indeed the industrialized world, into a cycle of dependency, profit, and risk taking that made a Macondo-like blowout likely, if not inevitable. This article examines the broad political, economic, technological, and environmental contexts surrounding the growth and development of both our ability to obtain petroleum and our dependency on it. The authors use the tools of environmental sociology, environmental history, and political ecology to trace the path to the current situation in which the myth of “energy independence” is used to justify practices that are counter to the very concept. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is a response to a critique by professor Matthew S. Carroll and colleagues to a longitudinal analysis of logging industry job losses. The critique by Carroll and colleagues has two main parts. The first involves questions of scientific and technical judgments, the second has to do with what is sometimes called the moral exclusion literature and with the perceptions of those who live in the logging-dependent communities of the Pacific Northwest. There are a number of statistical and inferential problems with their argument. At the outset, however, it is worth pointing out that the arguments of Carroll and colleagues ignore the extensive work that has been done by historians who have explicitly examined the logging industry of the Pacific Northwest. Those historians, including Carroll's respected Washington State University colleague Paul Hirt, have reached a very different set of conclusions. In Hirt's memorable terminology, the ready embracing of optimistic assumptions, combined with the failure to note the more ominous warning signs, amounted to a veritable conspiracy of optimism. Still, like another distinguished historian of the forests of the region, Nancy Langston, he notes that the conspiracy was not a matter of straightforward venality. Instead another crucial consideration involved the realm of psychology.

Focuses on sex differences on the attitude towards environmentalism. Feminist literature on gender socialization; Features of research on environmental and technological controversies that has addressed the issue of gender differences in attitudes; Findings on sex and attitudes toward technological/environmental risks.

The protection of habitat for an officially designated "threatened" species, the Northern Spotted Owl, is widely seen as having endangered the survival of a very different "species," namely the rural American logger. In spite of the widespread agreement on this point, however, it is not clear just how many jobs have been endangered, over just how long a period, due to the protection of spotted-owl habitat and of the environment more broadly. In the present paper, we analyze longer term employment trends in logging and milling, both nationally and in the two states of the Pacific Northwest where the spotted-owl debate has been most intense, to determine the length of time over which such environmental protection efforts have been creating the loss of logging and milling jobs. There are three potential key "turning points" since the start of high-quality employment data in 1947--the 1989 controversy over the federal "listing" of the Northern Spotted Owl under the Endangered Species Act, the earlier increase in environmental regulations accompanying the first Earth Day in 1970, and the still-earlier "locking up" of timber after the passage of the Wilderness Protection Act in 1964. We also examine the effects of two other variables that have received considerable attention in the ongoing debates--levels of U.S. Forest Service timber harvests and the exporting of raw logs. We find that the 1989 listing of the spotted owl has no significant effect on employment--not even in the two states where the debate has been most intense. Instead, the only statistically significant turning point came with the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964. The direction of the change, however, was precisely the opposite of what is generally expected. Both nationally and in the Pacific Northwest, the greatest decline in timber employment occurred from 1947 until 1964--a time of great economic growth, a general absence of "unreasonable environmental regulations," ... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a basic historical background for understanding the nature of contamination, corrosion and social order. The history of disaster research started when military planners began to wonder about the ways in which communities might respond to something as disastrous as a sneak nuclear attack, and as technological prowess and post-war prosperity combined to offer at least some prospect for managing the wildest of nature's moods, rather than merely responding to them. The professional community studying technological disasters has gone through a substantial shift in viewpoints over the past several decades. By the mid-1980s, a growing number of researchers were beginning to wonder, whether the systematic differences between natural and technological disasters might most reasonably be traced to causes that include but go beyond the kinds of obvious death and destruction that were the major preoccupation of the field during its early decades. If the aftermath of a natural disaster is typified by volunteers who come in to offer a hand, the aftermath of a technological disaster is perhaps best typified by lawyers who offer instead the back of a hand.