Neuner Stein/Flickr. Some rights reserved.Climate change rejection or denial produces particularly imaginative conspiracy theories. As David Runciman has shown, different sides of the debate – those who deny the existence or seriousness of climate change and those who point out the conspiracies behind climate change denialism – share a conspiracist logic. Pushing this line of inquiry further, I ask if it is conceivable to have an overlap between climate change accounts and conspiracy theories? Distinct as the two might appear, is it possible to tease out any shared beliefs or politics between them? In other words, are conspiracy theories necessarily and always radically incommensurable with climate change accounts? This case study from the Indian Himalaya would suggest not.
I briefly describe two seemingly contradictory narratives: an official one emanating from the local state that adduces certain phenomena to be caused by climate change. The counter-narrative to this, voiced by Himalayan residents, was skeptical of climate change as the causal factor. Their counter-explanations for the very same events were, in turn, dismissed by agents of the Indian state as idiotic conspiracy theories. My suggestion is that these two narratives have more in common than is immediately apparent.
