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The Poli t ics of Uncert ainty and the Fate

of ForecastersRenzo Taddei

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Et hics, Pol icy & Environm ent , 15:2, 252-267

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Ethics, Policy and EnvironmentVol. 15, No. 2, June 2012, 252267

FEATURE ARTICLE

The Politics of Uncertainty and the Fateof Forecasters

RENZO TADDEISchool of Communication, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

ABSTRACT Using ethnographic data from rural Northeast Brazil, this article explores, firstly,how climate uncertainties are interconnected to processes of accountability and blame, and,secondly, how this connection affects the activity of climate forecasting. By framing climateevents in ways that downplay the inherent uncertainties of the atmosphere, political discourseson various scales, as well as religious narratives, create a propitious context for the enactment ofwhat I call accountability rituals. Forecasters seem to attract to themselves a great deal of thecollective anxieties related to climate, and are very often blamed for the negative impact ofclimate events. This blaming may take place in a variety of ways, and has a range of practicalresults: from real physical violence to attacks on the authority and legitimacy of forecasters,by way of ridicule and jokes. I conclude by suggesting that, on the one hand, the study of thesocial uses of climate-related uncertainties offers special opportunities for understandinghow human societies deal with uncertainty and blame; and that, on the other hand, a betterunderstanding of these issues is necessary to improve relations between climate forecasting andthe societies where it takes place the latter being a key issue in the processes of understandingand adapting to climate change.

Introduction

The Western political world expects science to produce certainty as a resource for

political action. Mainstream political discourse is structured around a positivist

understanding of science, representing scientific activity as a process in which

epistemic uncertainty is reduced with time. Nowadays, those who have to think

about uncertainty as part of their profession most of them working in the fieldsof climate sciences, quantum physics, and financial markets do not understand it

in quite that way. Yet the power of the political game is too hard to ignore; its

conceptual gravity is too intense. In the climate sciences, the usual expectations

politicians have about science may explain the political strategy adopted by the

scientists associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

After decades of unfruitful attempts to warn the main political bodies of developed

nations on the perils of carbon dioxide emissions, the personal lobby gave way to the

periodic gathering of a large number of scientists, where they produce a series of

Correspondence Address: R. Taddei, School of Communication, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Av.

Pasteur, 250. Rio de Janeiro, RJ 22290-902, Brazil. Email: [email protected]

2155-0085 Print/2155-0093 Online/12/02025216 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21550085.2012.685603


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reports in which the most important political message is the fact that uncertainty

about anthropogenic effects on climate change is decreasing. The transformation

in the ways in which the IPCC reports represent uncertainty, from their first report

(IPCC, 1990) to the latest (IPCC, 2007), would suggest that the authors seem

to follow the positivist view of science espoused by the political game: evidence

accumulates over time and the level of uncertainty is reduced to the point where

political action is not only supported, but becomes imperative. That would be ironic,

given that climate scientists are among the few people who understand uncertainty as

an unavoidable element in the way human minds relate to natural systems as

overwhelmingly complex as climate. Yet, the scientists leading the IPCC enterprise

are not incoherent: this episode only shows that they understand what it takes to turn

scientific ideas into an effective political point. To achieve that goal it is necessary to

reduce public perception of uncertainty.1

The goal of this paper is to discuss the political uses of uncertainty, and howthey affect configurations of accountability and blame by focusing on the politics of

climate-related uncertainty in Northeast Brazil as a case study. This research was

done in the state of Ceara , in Northeast Brazil, and focused at the production,

dissemination, and use of climate knowledge, by local rain prophets and the local

bureau of meteorology. Ethnographic fieldwork was carried out for three years,

relying on participant observation, interviews, and surveys. I soon came to realize

that what I was dealing with was what I shall call the social life of uncertainty, that is,

how uncertainty is strategically managed, disputed, feared, and very often concealed.

As I intend to show, anthropological analyses of forecasting activity offer

a possible explanation for one of the main problems meteorology faces today:the reasons why (despite important recent technological advances such as the

understanding and modeling of the El Nin o phenomenon) meteorology has a lower

degree of social recognition than other scientific disciplines in most parts of the

world (and, indeed, a markedly bad image in some places such as rural areas of

Northeast Brazil).

Uncertainty and its effects or rather, uncertainty as objectified in discourse

and as an element of the context in which social action unfolds are socially and

politically distributed in specific ways. More systematic anthropological research on

the social life of uncertainty that is, how it is dealt with in cultural formations

and personal and collective psychologies, and how it is socially distributed andpolitically manipulated is yet to be done, in part because of the logical and

methodological limitations of working at the limits of culture and cognition

(Daniel, 1998). Climate is an especially interesting locus for observing how social

and cultural processes deal with uncertainty, particularly because of the fact that

climate phenomena constantly remind us of how fragile our knowledge systems

(and political institutions) are, and consequently, how clumsy are our attempts to

forecast and control natural processes. At the same time, the impacts of climate

events usually connect a wide range of socio-cultural phenomena: political structures

and institutional configurations, cosmologies and religious rituals, collective

psychological responses. This set of issues also poses a methodological challenge:

they can lead us in so many directions. For this reason, I shall limit my focus to the

ways in which political discourses interact with the activity of producing and

disseminating climate forecasts in the State of Ceara , Northeast Brazil.

The politics of uncertainty 253


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Scapegoating Forecasters

During the 2006 annual meeting of the Brazilian Meteorological Society, a local civil

defense official described his participation in the events that proceeded the momentwhere Hurricane Catarina hit the southern region of Brazil, in March 2004. He and a

meteorologist from the local climate agency went to the state governor and suggested

that, given the seriousness of the threat posed by the hurricane, he personally should

warn the population on TV, rather than having it done in the usual manner through

the local civil defense. The governor immediately consulted his advisors. He then

heard from his secretary for public affairs that an evacuation warning could create

chaos in the state, given the lack of official evacuation plans and the bad state of

local roads. And if the hurricane did not hit the state, the advisor said, the governor

would lose credibility with the population, which could have disastrous results for his

future reelection. At that moment, the civil defense official reported having said that,given the destructive potential of the hurricane, it would more advisable to err on the

side of exaggeration. After all, he reminded the governor, he could always blame it

on meteorology.

Throughout my research, I had found references to violence against forecasters at

many different sources: in some cases, as we find in the famous Herman Hesses

rainmaker tale (1943/2000), the ritual sacrifice of the forecaster was pointed out to be

the normative way of dealing with extreme climate crises. The fall of the great city of

Teotihuaca n, Mexico, in the ninth century, may have been provoked by a popular

revolt against the class of priests in charge of the relationship with those gods

concerned with the weather, in the context of devastating droughts (Carlson, 1993).We find something similar in popular culture, as in the film The Weather Man

(Verbinski, 2005), where the main character, interpreted by actor Nicolas Cage,

suffers physical assaults on the streets for no apparent reason. Interviews in Brazil

were also collected, where meteorologists told me how, out of fear of being verbally

abused, they avoided going to public places like supermarkets whenever they felt

there was a general perception that previously issued climate forecasts were wrong.

And finally, I have heard jokes ridiculing meteorologists while doing fieldwork

in rural Northeast Brazil, and I have found comic strips making fun of meteorology

in Argentina, Brazil, England and the US.

Figure 1. Mafalda, a comic strip from Argentina ( Quino 2004).Miguelito: Amazing!

An observatory in England has electronic machines to forecast the weather.Mafalda: Well . . . At last they have found a way to automate embarrassing mistakes.

254 R. Taddei


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For the sake of my analysis, I would like to suggest that we can treat physical

violence, verbal abuse, and the ridicule of meteorologists as different degrees of the

same phenomenon: the degradation of the social identities of forecasters. The

main point of my argument is that for this to happen, a specific understanding

of uncertainty is necessary. In contemporary climate theories, as in quantum

physics, there is a degree to which uncertainty is insurmountable. Uncertainty ceases

to be just a measure of our ignorance (as probability is generally understood),

and becomes part of the way reality is structured and organized (as is the case

for quantum mechanics2), or at least part of the way we make sense of reality

(for climate theories; see Hacking, 1990). Although atmospheric systems are not

indeterministic as is reality at the quantum level, they are characterized by inherent

chaotic variability (Schwartz, 2002; Smith, Karl, & Reynolds, 2002).

Yet, social attitudes towards climate forecasts demonstrate a rather different

perception of what they are. If I say, for instance, that there is a 83.3% chanceof getting between one and five as a result when throwing a die, and I do it and get a

six, there is no mistake made: it is just a probabilistic outcome. In general, scientific

climate forecasts are distributions of probabilities (for example, 40% of chance of

total rains below the historic average for a given rainy season); but in contradis-

tinction to the case of a throw of the dice, very often communities around the globe

interpret forecasts in ways that make meteorology accountable, in some ways, for the

negative impacts of climate events, as if forecasts were not probabilistic statements.3

As Mary Douglas theorized (Douglas and Wildavsky, 1982; Douglas, 1992), risk

and danger evoke collective emotional responses, and for this matter, everything that

implies risk becomes a moral matter. Such a state of affairs very often triggers socialresponses that Douglas called forensic theories of danger (1992), in which someone

unpopular is made accountable for the situation and punished according to local

practices. For this reason, danger tends to be politicized. Throughout her career,

Douglas was at pains to show that this way of dealing with risk and danger

characterizes the vast majority of societies in the planet, including urban Westerners.

My argument is that the work of blaming is incompatible with an understanding

of uncertainty as something insurmountable: the acceptance of randomness makes

declarations of guilt difficult. As Douglas herself noted, long before the issue of

climate change came to play a central role in Western political debates, when anyone

mentioned high levels of uncertainty in a political arena, there was a tendency forthat to be interpreted as evasion of accountability (Douglas, 1992, p. 30). So here

I suggest that when we see instances of Douglas forensic theory of danger in action,

they are necessarily accompanied by a specific way of understanding uncertainty

which involves the actual misrepresentation of uncertainty.

As we shall see below, this misrepresentation may be facilitated by the ways

in which political discourses frame events. It happens at a number of levels: ranging

from local politicians trying to avoid social unrest by providing a sense of control

when things are chaotic, to the way economic development officials present climate

science knowledge and technology as part of their packages of solutions for the

poor regions of the globe (Broad et al., 2007; Lemos & Dilling, 2007; Lemos & Rood,

2010; Taddei, 2005). Political rhetoric as a discursive genre tends to use uncertainty

in specific ways: politicians rhetorically create the illusion of certainty, while

their everyday lives consist of a never-ending struggle to tame the unavoidable



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uncertainties of the political arena (Bailey, 1969, 2001). Winston Churchill is

reported to have said that a political leader has to be able to say what is going to

happen in the future, and later, to explain why it did not happen (Bailey, 2001).

Climate events are filled with uncertainty, and, as a result, they trigger all sorts

of emotional responses. The usual understanding that managing collective anxieties

is the role of political and religious leaders turns climate forecasting into a political

matter. Therefore, climate is a deep concern for politicians at all political levels;

it is also a fertile ground for blaming and scapegoating rituals. Evidence shows that

the number of witches murdered in Renaissance Europe is positively correlated

with the negative impacts of historic climatic variations on local communities (Oster,

2004, p. 215). In todays rural Tanzania, the number of witches killed doubles during

years of extreme rainfall (Miguel, 2005, p. 1153). Davis suggests that one of the

causes of the Boxers Wars in China was the belief that the presence of Western

missionaries in that country put the feng shui of the land out of balance, thusgenerating droughts (Davis, 2001). There are innumerable examples of such

politicization of climate. We could safely say that the oldest and most deeply

rooted meteorological theory in human history is that it didnt rain (or rained too

much) because of the actions (or sins) of the community (or of specific individuals,

e.g. witches, or enemies).4

Scientific Climate Forecasting in Northeast Brazil

The Brazilian Northeast is a relatively highly-populated region, and the poorest

of the country. It is known for its pristine beaches and for the periodic droughtsthat devastate the states hinterland. The socioeconomic standards of the region are

deeply connected, according to Costa, Kottak, and Prado, to a reality of periodic

severe droughts, poor soils, skewed land distribution, low levels of education, high

levels of poverty and underemployment, and limited physical and social infrastruc-

ture (1997, p. 138).

The state has about 8.6 million inhabitants (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e

Estatstica [IBGE], 2010). The proportion of the population dependent upon

agriculture is still above 30%. Even after a decade of improvement, over 52% of the

rural population are still considered poor by local standards. The rate of rural

illiteracy is 31% (IBGE, 2010). The vast majority of local peasants produce corn and

beans as their main subsistence crops, and access to perennial water sources and

irrigation infrastructure is the privilege of a few. As is usual in semi-arid areas,

animal husbandry is also a common activity. Recurrent multi-year droughts have

been identified as critical factors in Ceara s current low state of economic

development (Gira o, 1986; Magalha es, 2002; Neves, 2002; Parente, 2000, 2002;

Prado Junior, 1989). It is claimed that droughts have shaped the ecological and

sociopolitical landscape since the first inhabitants settled in the region. Climatic

variability has been linked to cyclical migrations of native populations prior to the

arrival of Europeans (Montenegro, 2001; Neves, 2002; Villa, 2000), to religious

practices, including the importance of rain gods in local cosmologies (Couper-

Johnston cited in Magalha es, 2002), and to economic and demographic instabilityfrom the seventeenth to the twentieth century (Gira o, 1986; Greenfield, 2001;

Montenegro, 2001; Parente, 2000).

256 R. Taddei


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The rainy season in this region lasts from February to May, a period in which

there is abundant stream flow in the rivers. During the rest of the year, there is no

significant precipitation, and before the construction of reservoirs, rivers commonly

dried out. As local people explain (Taddei, 2005), given the fact that very often the

rainy season fails in that region, in the first half of the year they live with

the uncertainty of rainfall, and in the second half, with the certainty of the absence

of rain.

Due to the central role of climate in diverse aspects of life in this semiarid region,

it is not surprising that efforts to combat drought have included intense scientific

endeavors. In addition to past applications of cloud seeding technology, reservoir

building, and the adoption of efficiency-driven water management models,

one recent technical response has been an attempt to improve climate prediction.

The capacity to predict general patterns of seasonal climate variability has improved

over the past 20 years, especially after the El Nin o phenomenon was modeledand studied indepth. Towards the end of the 1990s, the meteorological agency of the

State of Ceara , FUNCEME, became part of a network of national and international

institutions that jointly monitor meteorological indicators and issue seasonal

forecasts for the Brazilian Northeast.5 Funded mainly by the Brazilian Northeast

Development Bank (BNB), the World Bank, and the Brazilian Ministry of Science

and Technology (CNPq), FUNCEME could afford access to the computing power

to run sophisticated mathematical models developed jointly with meteorologists

based in New York.6 Additionally, FUNCEME receives satellite images, updated

every 30 minutes, from an American satellite owned by the National Oceanographic

and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and from a Brazilian meteorologicalsatellite.

All these infrastructural aspects do not solve the main problem Brazilian

meteorologists have: namely the high level of unpredictability of some types of

meteorological systems. For many meteorological phenomena of short duration

(although of potentially catastrophic effects), such as what meteorologists call cold

fronts, there are no reliable forecast models available for the northeastern region of

Brazil.7 Even for more well-known and predictable meteorological systems such as

the variation in the surface temperatures of the Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon

referred to collectively as El Nin o (warm phase) and La Nin a (cold phase), or the

strip of clouds above the Atlantic ocean that meteorologists call Inter TropicalConvergence Zone the number of variables is too high and the phenomena

involved, too complex. That means that no computer modeling can provide a

seasonal climate forecast that is any more than a distribution of probabilities for

specific future climate configurations. In Ceara , forecasts for the rainy season

are presented as a distribution of probabilities for the seasonal rain, with reference

to the categories above, similar to, or below what is calculated as the historical

average precipitation for the region.

Forecasting in political and religious contexts

Climate information has strong political implications and, for that reason, it isconstantly subject to political manipulation. In Brazil, as in many places where

economic development has been and still is sponsored by central governments,



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it is not unusual for meteorological agencies to be located inside the government

institutional apparatus. It is also a rule that heads of meteorological agencies are

politically appointed by state governors or by ministries of the federal government.

Keeping meteorology under close political control seems to be a strategy for taming

uncertainty although, as we could easily predict, it is a somewhat ineffective

strategy, given the high level of uncertainty in climate phenomena. Local political

discourses on climate systematically use the idea of uncertainty in a way that

damages the social image of meteorology, making promises that cannot be fulfilled

and blaming failures on the supposed lack of competence or scientific underdevel-

opment of local meteorologists.

Climate forecasting occurs in an environment of endemic, though low intensity,

political tension between official agents and some social sectors. This directly affects

meteorologists: climate forecasts are perceived as being politically explosive, and

are therefore to be handled with extreme care. The announcement of a possiblefuture drought can generate a wave of declarations of emergency situations in the

hinterland, in which municipalities request emergency funds from the state and

federal governments. Some of these requests are for the maintenance of local social

structures and processes, which in times of drought are affected in proportion to

social and economic hardship. However, many municipalities of Ceara s hinterland

live with a constant scarcity of drinking water, which is supplied by an unreliable and

inconsistent fleet of tanker trucks that usually sell bad quality water at high prices.

For these municipalities, the possibility of drought worsens what is already a difficult

situation, and evokes haunting images of malnutrition, rising mortality rates among

children and the elderly, conflict and migration. In this context, local mayors,well aware of the usually slow pace of official bureaucracy, prepare for the worst

by requesting money from the state government in advance. Sometimes, due to the

constant poverty that some communities face, the influx of drought relief money

raises the living standards of communities, even if only temporally, to levels even

higher than those of years with abundant rains.

For such reasons, the state government is always cautious in terms of what

information to publicize and with regard to the recognition of any situation that

could be technically considered a drought. The state government uses two strategies

to deal with the problem: one is the isolation of technicians from local politicians

and the media, and the other is strict control of the communication of climateinformation. With regard to the former, the key strategy seems to be the use of

scientific discourse that tends to neutralize the possible politicization of such

agencies. The states Civil Defense, for instance, created a set of technical criteria to

rank municipalities applying for drought relief funds or services (such as the request

of tanker trucks for water transportation) in terms of priority. The technicality of the

adopted set of criteria prevents the government from being accused of favoring

some municipalities at the expense of others (Lemos, 2003; Lemos, Finan, Fox,

Nelson, & Tucker, 2002), something that happened extensively in the past.

Governmental interference in the communication of climate information in the

years 1992 and 1993 constitutes an interesting example. In December 1991, the local

meteorological agency issued a forecast with high probability of drought for the

following year. The governor then traveled throughout the hinterland distributing

drought-resistant seeds. While rains dropped 73% from average, harvests dropped

258 R. Taddei


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only 18%. The government addressed the media and affirmed that science had

finally won its battle against climate, and against the traditional knowledge of local

rain prophets (Nelson & Finan, 2000; Orlove & Tosteson, 1999). According to the

perception of meteorologists, results were disastrous: it reinforced expectations

among local populations that climate sciences were finally capable of predicting

with certainty the occurrence of drought, something climate scientists know they

are unable to do.

Then in 1993, a forecast pointing to a high probability of regular amounts of rain

was issued in January. A month later, global meteorological conditions changed, and

a new forecast, this time pointing to a drier than usual rainy season, was produced.

The governor feared that a bad forecast would attract negative attention to the

government, and forbade the dissemination of the drought forecast (Orlove &

Tosteson, 1999, p.14). By April, the state was going through one of the worst

droughts of the decade, and the media harshly accused meteorologists of makinggross mistakes in their prediction activity.

In the years that followed, the occurrence of cold fronts right before the rainy

season brought unpredicted rains and generated the perception that the forecast was

wrong. 2004 was a special case: in mid-January, the local meteorological agency

forecasted a season of lower-than-usual rainfall. Then, between January 20th and

February 1st, a strong cold front generated drenching rains that produced the wettest

January in recorded history, flooded the state, and temporarily displaced 90,000

people. At the end of the season, statistics showed that the average precipitation

between February and May was in fact below average; yet, public perception in the

state was that 2004 was a year of disastrous rains.Another way in which climate subsists within local political discourses is through

being encoded in religious beliefs. The majority of the state population is Catholic,

but local religious practices mix Catholicism with indigenous beliefs. The most

important local saint, Padre Ccero, is not recognized by the Catholic Church. For

the inhabitants of the state, climate is an aspect of spiritual order in the cosmos.

Pilgrimages to the towns of Juazeiro do Norte and Caninde are organized at the

beginning of the rainy season (especially on Candlemas Day, February 2), where

peasants pray for abundant rains. In 1877, while the region was going through the

harshest drought of the nineteenth century, the local bishop produced a pastoral

epistle in which he stated that the drought was a divine punishment for moralcorruption amongst his contemporary fellows. During the floods of January 2004,

127 years later, inhabitants of the same region again expressed the belief that the

flood was divine punishment not only for the sins of local people, but also for the

moral decadence of humanity in general reasons cited went from the invasion of

Iraq, to the cloning of animals, to the expedition to Mars (Mary Lorena Kenny,

personal communication; Taddei, 2005).

According to the local agricultural calendar, if it does not rain before March 19,

Saint Josephs day, it means that the region is going through a drought. Usually,

farmers prepare soils at the beginning of the year and start cultivation after the first

rains. Yet the first rains usually last just a couple of days and stop; and sprouts soon

die. They then repeat the process, repeatedly losing seeds, until rains become steady,

or until Saint Josephs day. After that date, men prepare to migrate to urban centers

in search of labor, and local mayors start the process of requesting emergency funds



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from state and federal governments. It should be noted here that farmers start

cultivation regardless of any forecasts.8

At the same time, the ability to produce rain forecasts is knowledge shared by a

large number of people in rural areas. Some local elders in rural areas are recognized

as rain prophets, issuing seasonal forecasts based on the observation of local

ecosystems, the stars and the atmosphere, or on reading results of experiments, such

as burying a bottle full of water under a fire or leaving salt stones on the house roof

overnight.9 While the media tends to present scientific knowledge as competing

against local traditional knowledge in terms of forecasting accuracy, the government

has a less clear position, often strategically making use of one or the other. In March

2005,10 for instance, farmers pressing for relief action claimed to be going through

a drought. This was indeed what was happening and was what had been forecast by

meteorologists two months before. The head of the state government agricultural

secretariat tried to stall for time and stated that the government would wait untilSaint Josephs day. That happened 12 years after a former governor announced

that science had finally beaten tradition. Local politicians seem to use scientific

discourse or traditional knowledge according to the specificities of the context: they

may choose to act pro-actively, including science and its forecasting powers in their

political rhetoric; or they may decide to act in conservative and reactionary ways,

questioning the accuracy of all available forecasts and emphasizing the need to wait

for climate impacts to be measured after they have hit the state. This adds evidence

to the already widely documented fact that the availability of a climate forecast

of good technical quality is not sufficient for its use; political factors may prevent it,

as in the case described.The central fact here is that the results of meteorological work sit inside a field

of representations in which certainty versus uncertainty is represented as either

possession, or not, of knowledge and power, with little space for nuance and

gradations. In the religious version of this discourse, climate is seen as forming part

of a morally ordered and predictable universe, in which there is a metaphysical

reason for suffering caused by collective crises, and therefore what is uncertain on

a first level (in this case, climate) reflects, even if in a way that is difficult to interpret,

a divine, absolute and just will. Religious narratives function as semiotic operators

that give certainty to the uncertain and lend the appearance of being definite to what

is probable. Politics is also a field in which the uncertain is presented as certain,and in which ambiguity is constructed and deconstructed according to the needs of

the moment. Politics and religion are fields in which protection is the currency in a

highly emotionally-charged symbolic market. Within this environment, meteorology

is unable to act effectively. Thus, once again because of this, meteorology becomes

the perfect victim for symbolic sacrifice that is, to have its public image severely

damaged recurrently due to the symbolic outcome of a hybrid genre of thought and

action created by the interplay between local politics and religious discourses.11

Now, it is important not to suggest that meteorology is a passive victim of political

manipulations, cultural paradigms and collective anxieties. Eventually, local

meteorologists created an ingenious strategy for avoiding the political censoring

of scientific forecasts: since 1997 they have used their international networks and

have been organizing international climate outlook meetings, where climate scientists

from other parts of Brazil, as well as from the US, Germany, England and Japan,

260 R. Taddei


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present their climate forecasts for Northeast Brazil. In such meetings, they combine

the results of their work and produce one single forecast, which is authored by

all climate agencies at the same time and disseminated in the websites of each

institution. As one can see, the parallels with the IPCC are remarkable. Politically

speaking, the climate forecast has become larger than Ceara , and therefore it became

impossible for the local government to impede local forecast dissemination.

Although the adopted strategy does not solve most of the problems that meteorology

faces in its relationship with social expectations, it shows some degree of awareness

that the problem has important symbolic elements, and more than that, that these

can be strategically manipulated (Taddei, 2005). Meteorologists learned to make

effective political use of the widely shared view that physical sciences are apolitical,

and in doing so, achieved some degree of protection against one type of political

manipulation to which they are most vulnerable. The ritual for communicating

climate forecasts to society is still carefully designed, in order to mitigate possiblenegative interpretations associated with the message announcing harvest insurance

plans or high levels of water accumulation in dams at the same time the forecast is

made public, for instance.

Why meteorology?

A very popular joke in the Jaguaribe Valley during my fieldwork period was:

Meteorologists stop at a house in the hinterland to spend the night. The owner

of the house, an old man, offers the technicians a room inside the house.However, they say they would prefer to sleep on the porch, where they will

hang their hammocks. The old man warns them that it is going to rain. But the

technicians look at the clear skies and say it is impossible. So the old man

enters the house and locks the door behind him. In the middle of the night he

is awakened by the technicians banging at the door, hit by the predicted storm.

In the morning, the technicians ask the old man how he knew about the storm.

He points to a donkey at the front of the house. See that ass missing an ear?

When he goes to sleep under that shelter over there, it means that it is going

to rain. He doesnt like getting water in his ear. The moral of the story is:

a meteorologist ass is worth more than an ass of a meteorologist.12

While there are widely known jokes ridiculing meteorologists in Ceara s rural areas,

there seems to be no joking about other types of technicians. In Ceara s hinterland,

forecasts are understood against a backdrop of social class differences and affiliation

to specific social groups. Scientific climate forecasts are issued in a formal, technical

language, by a governmental agency located in Ceara s capital city (Fortaleza), using

temporal and spatial schemata that are very different from those understood

and used by local peasants. The characteristics of these forecasts are signs of a

socioeconomic and political world that is, the world of urban elites and poor

rural people can only integrate those signs into their lives in an historical context of

feelings of marginalization, exploitation and impotence. The forecast then becomeslinked to a group of concepts where nature, society, politics and religion are fused

into an integrated representation of the world in which everything, in one sense or



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another, is linked to hierarchical structures and social distinction.13 Scientific

forecasting is then taken, at a local level, to be a government product, and,

when used to regulate public policies, like the timing of official programs of drought-

resistant seed distribution, it is seen as the governments attempt to gain control over

productive aspects of the hinterland population.

There is one important difference in the way the poor rural populations of the

region relate to official forecasts and to other acts or products of the government:

even if scientific climate forecasts are issued by the Fortaleza technical elite

(which, as mentioned, is institutionally subordinated to the local political elite), there

is no direct mechanism through which these forecasts can be imposed and their

use enforced. Although the imposition of enacted regulations especially in the form

of decrees affects how local populations relate to the natural environment in many

ways, as is the case with local regulations regarding the disposal of wild animals,

water use, animal health, the commercialization of agricultural products andpollution and waste disposal, just to mention a few examples, there is no way of

applying the same imposed governability on the collective understanding of climate

issues and on the use of climate information. In this respect, official meteorology is

perceived as being part of an empty rhetoric of government, and it becomes an object

of ridicule, in part, because there is no risk of retribution (Girard, 1979; Scott, 1992).

In addition to that, contrary to the relationship between the rural population and

other government agencies, where there is some kind of exchange,14 there is no

palpable relationship between meteorologists and farmers. Meteorology becomes

a scapegoat to express the rural populations frustration with the government, and

this is expressed by making fun of meteorological agents.As we can see, meteorology exists within a highly politicized environment. This is

not only due to the attempts of local politicians to make use of climate forecasts

according to their agendas, but it also refers to the ways in which wider political

factors such as relationship dynamics between social groups and classes, the social

distribution of wealth, and climate impacts generate symbolic configurations that

frame the way in which the meteorological product is understood and used.

Conclusion

Meteorology is undergoing what might be called a hangover of modernity. On the one

hand, public expectations and political discourse expect science to fulfill the promises

of modernity as understood by the nineteenth century positivistic project, in which

absolute certainty and therefore control was the inevitable destiny of Western

knowledge. To some extent, the monotonic focus on technology and infrastructure

that characterizes current discourses on economic development, as sponsored by

institutions like the World Bank, indirectly reproduces the fetishization of science as

savior of the planets poor and vulnerable.

In the end, the external observer is impressed by the degree of social pressure

heaped upon the shoulders of meteorology, not only by rural producers, but also by

the media, the urban population and the government. This high level of pressure

stems from a very specific semiotic regimentation: the discourse of the naturalization

of misery, that is, a situation in which the extreme poverty of Ceara s rural

population is solely related to climate events. This is an old narrative, already heavily

262 R. Taddei


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criticized by academics and political activists, but one that still exists as a distinctive

trace in collective imagination and in the official discourse concerning drought.

The contiguity of drought or flooding and their accompanied peaks of social

suffering lead people to see the former as the immediate cause of the latter. However,

little attention is paid to the fact that climate is not the only determining factor

in rural hunger and misery. Other elements also play a crucial role in these extreme

conditions. Such factors include specific sociopolitical arrangements mainly the

concentration of fertile land and water which prevent poor sectors from increasing

their means of survival and reducing their vulnerability to climate variations. When

the lack of rain is presented as the sole cause of poverty something we also find

manifested in many forms of local popular culture (as we see in some local popular

poetry booklets called cordeis) the role of excluding social structures, which have

developed throughout history, goes unchecked and therefore remains invisible.

Climate is made out to be the villain, and meteorology, acting as the oracle

responsible for forecasting abundance or misery, receives a great deal of the

projected collective anxiety that revolves around climate phenomena. In that sense,

it affects science and tradition alike: local rain prophet Pedro Nogueira de Lima,

for instance, was accused of being responsible for having produced a drought in his

community just for having predicted it (Diario do Nordeste, September 18, 2004).

Finally, some of the issues faced by forecasters in Ceara provide useful and

daunting insights on the types of challenges that confront any attempt to

coordinate actions globally with regard to possible causes and negative impacts of

climate change. First, blame and scapegoating rituals associated with climate may

draw attention to and also direct collective energies to issues that may not be central

to global efforts, by causally linking climate impacts to religious or other frames of

understanding that do not reflect scientific understanding about climate change.

Second, because meteorology repeatedly occupies the scapegoat role, scientific

climate information is very often seen as having very low levels of authority and

legitimacy among marginal populations, which naturally makes it more difficult

to convince communities to act collectively in specific directions. These are not

marginal problems: for those who believe new environmental legislation can

overcome all these factors and impose a solution, it suffices to remember that law

enforcement is remarkably inefficient in some of the countries where carbon dioxide

emissions are growing fastest, like Russia, India and China. Mary Douglas did notbelieve we could get out of the cage of forever re-enacting forensic theories of danger.

Proving her wrong is perhaps the most important challenge we have for the future.

Notes

1 As rightly noted by an anonymous reviewer of this article, the uncertainty related to the causes

and effects of climate change did reduce over time among the scientific community. Yet, as the

public debates of the last decade demonstrate, the forms through which the scientific community

understand and express levels of uncertainty have very little resonance in debates outside of

academia. Hence the unusual format (from the formal perspective of standard academicproduction) of the IPCC reports. Rarely, if ever, do scholars in scientific meetings have to

demonstrate publicly their agreement on specific issues.2 In quantum physics, the best example of this is Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle.



14/17

3 This is not to say that objective evaluations of the accuracy of forecasts are impossible. Rather,

such evaluations are made systematically by climate scientists through the development of

computerized climate simulation models. But the ways through which the general public perceives

and judges the accuracy of forecasts are obliterated by a series of psychological and culturalfactors, ranging from cognitive difficulties with statements of probability to cultural models

about climate that are based on religious beliefs, for instance (see Taddei & Gamboggi, 2010, Weber

& Johnson, 2009).4 See, for contemporary examples, BBC News (2010); Imisim (2009); Jackson (2011); Noblat and

Teno rio (1971).5 These institutions include the Brazilian National Meteorological Institute (INMET), located

in Braslia; the Center for Weather Forecast and Climate Studies of the National Institute for

Spatial Research (CPTEC/INPE), located in Sao Jose dos Campos, in the state of Sa o Paulo; the

International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), located at Columbia University,

New York; the United Kingdom Meteorological Office; and many local official institutions from

other Brazilian Northeastern states. FUNCEME is recognized in the meteorological world as the

most capable regional institution in Brazil not directly sponsored by the national government, butrather linked to a state level political apparatus. The institution also managed to create the largest

state monitoring system in Brazil.6 At the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (Columbia University).7 At least not in the time scale demanded by some users, like farmers, who usually need to know when

cold fronts may occur, and with what intensity, many months in advance.8 Although sometimes forecasts may make them choose different crop types and locations, if they

engage in floodplain cultivation.9 For a full discussion about the roles and performances of rain prophets in the region, see Finan

(1998, 2001); Lemos Junior (2000); Martins (2006); Montenegro (2008); Pennesi (2006, 2007a,

2007b); Taddei (2005, 2008a, forthcoming).10 See article Agricultores de 97 municipios estao aptos ao Seguro Safra (2005).11 It should be clear to the reader that I am focusing on the political aspects of religion, which I take

to be the most relevant dimension of religion in this discussion. There are naturally other ways

in which religion and climate issues are connected to each other.12 In Brazil, donkeys are frequently seen as a symbol of stupidity. An interesting variation of this joke

substitutes the earless donkey with a donkey that has sweaty testicles; because a donkeys

sweaty testicles are also taken as a sign of rain in many places of the hinterland (Finan, 1998;

Lemos Junior, 2000).13 It is widely documented that rural communities, in Latin America but also in many places, inside

and outside of the West, tend not to separate religion, politics and social life as urban Westerners

(or as urban western forms of knowledge, as meteorology) do (see Bell, 2007; Dent, 2007; Gegeo &

Watson-Gegeo, 2001; Taddei, 2005). Additionally, Brazilian society is highly hierarchical,

and information (as forecasts) as well as facts of life tend to be understood according to social

hierarchies and the social status of those who act or communicate (DaMatta, 1997a, 1997b;

Peterson et al., 2010; Taddei, 2008b).14 As the distribution of drought resistant seeds by the State Agriculture Secretariat, which regardless

of the existing disputes between local farmers and the government over the best time to carry it out

(see Taddei, 2008a, forthcoming), is locally appreciated.

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