In one of several responses to my recent My Turn, “Where is the Fire Department,” I received some pithy advice from one correspondent. He suggested, “It might be useful to occasionally stop-up your ears and turn your eyes away from media and simply look around yourself at unfiltered reality. If you then see the bodies dropping around you as a consequence of extreme weather events, I will readily concede that you are indeed correct in your article.”
Fortunately, I live in New England where extreme weather events, other than sudden windstorms and flooding, have not caused any human deaths. So I cannot verify to my correspondent that I have personally witnessed “bodies dropping around (me) as a consequence of extreme weather events.” However, from penguins in Antarctica to butterflies in Spain, honeybees in America and rodents and coral in the Great Barrier Reef, as the world warms these species are disappearing.
Might some of us be next?
The issue is not whether our climate crisis is real. It is. The issue is why do people still think climate change isn’t real?
At its heart, climate change denial is a conflict between facts and values. People deny the climate crisis because, to them, it just “feels” wrong. Acknowledging climate change involves accepting certain facts. But being concerned about climate change requires connecting these facts to values.
Denial happens when climate science rubs us up the wrong way. Instead of making us want to arrest the climate crisis, it makes us resist the very thought of it, because the facts of anthropogenic global heating clash with our personal beliefs and priorities.
It could be that the idea of climate change is a threat to the way we perceive the world. Or it could be that we fear society’s response to climate change, the disruption created by the transition to a low-emissions economy as espoused by the Green New Deal. Either way, climate change becomes such an “inconvenient truth” that, instead of living with and acting upon our worries, we suppress the truth instead.
There is an important distinction between denial that is personal and psychological, and denial that is institutional and organized. The former involves people who deny the facts to themselves, but the latter involves the denial of facts to others, even when these “merchants of doubt” know the truth very well.
It is no secret (any more) that fossil fuel companies have long known about climate change, yet sought to prevent a wider public understanding. Since 1977, ExxonMobil scientists internally acknowledged climate change even while the corporation mounted an enormous disinformation campaign to sow doubt in the public mind about climate science. The fossil fuel industry has also invested heavily in conservative foundations and think tanks that have paid contrarian scientists to speak against the IPCC findings. Social media has provided corporate deniers an effective medium for spreading disinformation. A recent analysis of anonymized YouTube searches found that videos supporting the scientific consensus on climate change were outnumbered by those that didn’t.
“In sum, denial is repressed knowledge,” writes David Hall on The Conversation web site. A senior researcher in politics at Auckland University of Technology, Hall writes that “this repression occurs at both the psychological level and social level, with the latter providing fodder for the former. This is a dismal scenario, but it shines some light on the way forward.”
Hall said, “It reminds us that deniers are capable of acknowledging the science — at some level, they already do — even though they struggle to embrace the practical and ethical implications. Consequently, climate communications may do well to appeal to more diverse values, particularly those values held by the deniers themselves.”
It goes without saying that not all climate change deniers will be convinced. Some downplay and discount climate change precisely because they recognize that the low-emissions transition will adversely impact their interests or their lifestyle. This is why piling on additional climate science is unlikely to succeed with deniers. Their faculty of reason is motivated to defend itself from revising their beliefs.
What will make a difference as we are beginning to see from the school strike movement inspired by Greta Thunberg and other growing public protests is the power of the people. Public surveys are showing that throughout the world, deniers are in the minority. The worried majority doesn’t need to win over everyone in order to win on climate change.
John Bos is a Shelburne resident who has been writing about the climate crisis for the past eight years. Comments and questions are invited at john01370@gmail.com