Global Environmental Change 18 (2008) 204–219 Experiences of modernity in the greenhouse: A cultural analysis of a physicist ‘‘trio’’ supporting the backlash against global warming Myanna Lahsen à Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Colorado and Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Epaciais (INPE), Av. dos Astronautas, 1758, Sa˜o Jose´dos Campos, SP 12227-010 Brazil Received 18 March 2007; received in revised form 5 October 2007; accepted 29 October 2007 Abstract This paper identifies cultural and historical dimensions that structure US climate science politics. It explores why a key subset of scientists—the physicist founders and leaders of the influential George C. Marshall Institute—chose to lend their scientific authority to this movement which continues to powerfully shape US climate policy. The paper suggests that these physicists joined the environmental backlash to stem changing tides in science and society, and to defend their preferred understandings of science, modernity, and of themselves as a physicist elite—understandings challenged by on-going transformations encapsulated by the widespread concern about human-induced climate change. r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Anti-environmental movement; Human dimensions research; Climate change; Controversy; United States; George C. Marshall Institute 1. Introduction Human Dimensions Research in the area of global environmental change tends to integrate a limited con- ceptualization of culture. It commonly conceives of it as just one factor among others, a non-pervasive factor separate from central social processes associated with environmental change, including scientific understanding. However, a growing area of scholarship stresses the need to also study the role of culture and politics in the very production of scientific knowledge and associated adjudi- cations (see, among many, Fischer, 2003; Jasanoff and Wynne, 1998; Jasanoff and Long Martello, 2004; Lahsen, 1999, 2005a, 2007; Rayner and Malone, 1998; Shapin and Schaffer, 1985; van der Sluijs et al., 1998; Wynne, 1994). Such research continues to be scarce in the area of Human Dimensions Research focused on global environmental change, despite efforts to change this fact. In a 1998 article in this journal, Proctor (1998) argued in favor of a conceptualization of culture as a pervasive factor structur- ing also scientific understanding of global environmental change itself, what he termed a ‘‘strong theory of culture.’’ Arguing that the essential role of science in our present age only can be fully understood through examination of individuals’ relationships with each other and with ‘‘mean- ings sedimented in institutions and other perennial forms’’ (ibid.), Proctor concluded the article by commenting on the importance of considering how cultural contradictions and experiences of modernity relate to global environmental change: One crucial object of human dimensions inquiry thus ought to be the differentiated condition and experience of modernity [y]. Modernity is full of cultural contra- dictions—the professed mastery of nature juxtaposed against the burgeoning environmental movement, for example. How do these contradictions influence and respond to global environmental change, and what future implications exist? (p. 243) Nearly 10 years later, analyses of climate science controversy still tend to ignore its deeper socio-cultural roots and the extent to which it involves a debate about wider social values, as also recently noted by the founding ARTICLE IN PRESS www.elsevier.com/locate/gloenvcha 0959-3780/$ - see front matter r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2007.10.001 à Tel.: +55 12 9185 0776; fax: +55 12 3545 7101. E-mail address: myannal@gmail.com