‘An Inconvenient Truth’: A social representation of scientific expertise.

Chapter from forthcoming book *Science and the Politics of Openness: Here Be Monsters*. Manchester: Manchester University Press. [Pre-review version]June 30, 2006 marked the release of An Inconvenient Truth (AIT), a climatechange documentary presented and written by leading US Democrat politicianAl Gore. The film has contributed to making climate change expertise publicthrough a heady combination of scientific data with personal stories andcalls for political action that offered a particular social representationof climate change. In this chapter we discuss AIT as an example of takingclimate change expertise out of the pages of science journals and into thepublic sphere. We draw on the ideas of John Dewey and their elucidation byMark Brown to show how the notion of expertise is key in understanding thefilm’s motivation, successes and critics. While the purpose of thedocumentary was to persuade its audience of the consensual truth impartedby climate science experts, its effect was to become a lightning rod fordissent, critique and debate of that expertise. Overall, AIT created adominant representation of climate change, based on expertise that became atouchstone for consent and dissent, action and reaction.In the following we shall first provide some background to the film’semergence, highlighting its echoes of Dewey’s argument that expertknowledge should be integrated in society. We then use the concept ofsocial representation to show how Gore combined scientific content withpersonal and political context in order to provide a meaningfulrepresentation of climate change expertise. We then highlight how AITsought to create its own public for scientific expertise, returning climatescience expertise to society as one of the many tools with which citizensmake sense of the world and solve problems. We then show how the veryelements that helped AIT towards establishing a dominant socialrepresentation of climate change also contributed to the creation of acounter-representation and counterpublic that questioned how AITrepresented climate science expertise. With AIT’s success in bringingsocial context to scientific content came inevitable contestation. Weconclude with some tentative lessons for science communicators from the AITstory.-- Dr Warren Pearce<http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/socstudies/staff/staff-profiles/warren-pearce>,