Climate change deniers have their heads in the sand. Illustration: Julie Fiedler www.studiojdesign.com.au
When faced with tragedy, atrocities or grief we humans, it appears, have a wonderful way of dealing with it. Denial.
In his book States of Denial, Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering, sociologist Stanley Cohen writes: “One common thread runs through many different stories of denial: people, organisations, governments or whole societies are presented with information that is too disturbing … the information is therefore somehow repressed, disavowed, pushed aside or misinterpreted”.
The information, including its implications, is totally avoided in a kind of self preservation tactic as we “bury our head in the sand”. However the only legitimate use of the term denial, writes Cohen, is when someone is firstly aware of something, and then deliberately ignores it. To know and at the same time, not to know. Or, as he goes on to state: “information is selected to fit existing perceptual frames and information which is too threatening is shut out altogether”.
George Marshall, founder and director of projects at the UK’s Climate Outreach and Information Network believes Cohen’s research can be applied directly to climate change. As far back as 2001 Marshall wrote of our knowledge and awareness of climate change and “yet, at another level, we clearly refuse to recognise the implications of that knowledge”.
According to Marshall there are many valuable lessons to be learnt from psychoanalytical theory. Such as the way we can angrily deny there is a problem at all. Scan the online comments section of any article on climate change and you will certainly see the level of aggressive denial. Be that an outright denial of man-made climate change, or denial of particular facts and trends.
Another reaction is to blame others, to cast the responsibility onto someone else. An example might be the comments from the new British high commissioner to Australia, Baroness Valerie Amos. She expressed surprise about there being a debate on man-made climate change in Australia. “In the UK there is a degree of political consensus about what in broad terms needs to be done,” she said. In a sense, she is telling us that all is well in the UK and the problem only exists ‘over here’.
As Clive Hamilton and Tim Kasser stated in their paper, Psychological Adaptation to the Threats and Stresses of a Four Degree World, which they presented to the Four Degrees and Beyond conference, held at Oxford University in September this year, this behaviour is a “maladaptive coping strategy”.
“Blame-shifting is a form of moral disengagement whereby people disavow their responsibility for the problem or the solution. Denial of guilt is the first step to shifting blame onto others and is reflected in narratives such as ‘it’s not my fault because my country is small’ and my carbon footprint is smaller than others”.
But the reality is very different. As was reported in Issue 13 of Eco news a Cardiff University survey found 20 per cent of Britons are “hardline sceptics” while 40 per cent believe there are serious questions about the evidence. Growing levels of scepticism and denial it seems, are a global problem not confined to any one country.
So what about examples of denial closer to home?
The Rudd government calls it “the great moral issue of our time”, yet baulks at making the changes suggested by the scientists and encourages the continuation of coal. This, at a time when even big business believes those changes could be viewed as a form of risk management.
Even on an economic level the government appears to be following Cohen’s suggested patterns of denial.
Referring to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, Dr Richard Denniss from the Australia Institute wrote: “There is no economic case for the billions of taxpayers’ dollars that are to be given to the polluters and arguments about the need to protect our polluters are inconsistent with our longstanding strategy of lowering our trade protection to encourage other countries to follow suit”.
Family First Senator, Steve Fielding, recently called for a Royal Commission into whether climate change is man-made. This is known as a “denial of our agency” according to Marshall (a type of ‘I didn’t do it … did I?).
Yet, there is an overwhelming scientific consensus — about 97 percent of climate scientists, worldwide. Recent reports such as The Copenhagen Diagnosis, written by 26 scientists, have warned that the 2007 IPCC predictions may be grossly understating the problem. Without significant mitigation, according to the report, global mean warming could reach as high as 7 degrees Celsius by 2100.
John Cook, a former physicist majoring in solar physics at the University of Queensland believes the reasons for denying the problem exists, or the unwillingness to make adequate changes, are varied.
“Some people don’t like the “big government” solution of cap and trade. Some are worried a global agreement to regulate carbon dioxide will lead to a one-world government,” he said.
“Basically, people don’t want to change their lifestyles. And as we get closer to actual laws regulating carbon dioxide, the opposition is intensifying.”
This is a trend we have witnessed before according to David McWilliams, an Irish economist, journalist, and presenter of the recent ABC TV documentary series, Addicted To Money.
Speaking with Phillip Adams on his long-running ABC radio program Late Night Live, McWilliams believes there are parallels with the financial crisis. Despite the warnings, we tend to wait for the crisis to appear. We appear “pathologically, almost terminally, unable to act until there is a crisis,” he said. All this at a time “when the insatiable demands of six billion people are going to crash into the limits of our natural resources. When we have not just peak oil, but peak everything.”
He believes we travel through a general set of three stages when faced with immense problems. The first is ridicule and denial of the problem. Those who ring alarm bells are often ridiculed and dismissed. ‘Extreme greens’, ‘climate fanatics’, the ‘new religion of environmentalism’ and ‘climate fraud’ are terms constantly appearing in writings from those who deny the science of climate change.
The second is a violent or aggressive opposition, such as the East Anglia email theft, or “climategate” as many would call it. Criminals stealing personal information and publishing it, in what appeared to be a somewhat desperate attempt to expose climate change as a ‘fraud’ prior to Copenhagen. A similar form of desperate opposition appeared two years ago when the Bush administration used pressure to limit the use of the words “global warming” or “climate change” according to a 2007 Union of Concerned Scientists and the Government Accountability Project report.
Thirdly, said McWilliams, we have universal acceptance, often after the crisis has arrived, such as when the financial crisis finally hit. Governments around the world, instead of implementing preventative actions before a crisis, are forced into reactionary responses.
So do we have a way forward through the fog of denial before it’s too late?
Speaking on the same program, Tony Kevin, visiting Fellow at the Australian National University and author of the book Crunch Time, which argues that a renewable energy based economy is the urgent and only option we now have, believes we need to move beyond the question of economic and market-based solutions.
Basically, we need to view the issue of climate change through the prism of morality. It was morality, he said, that drove William Wilberforce to help end the horrendous transatlantic slave trade — known at the time as “black gold”. By the late 18th century, 80 per cent of Britain’s foreign income was related to the slave trade. Two decades later, after years of ridicule and claims that its abolition would lead to economic collapse, the British slave trade was finally ended.
According to Tony Kevin we need to work “within the resource and waste disposal limitations of the planet”. We don’t need a single “Wilberforce’ type figure to emerge to champion climate change mitigation. Instead, those who understand and trust the science must unite and not argue about which form of renewable energy is best or whether taxes are better than cap-and-trade schemes, and so on. While we argue, he said, “the coal lobby smiles smugly above the fray”.
“Doing what we are is poisoning the atmosphere of our planet and it is therefore morally wrong for the future,” he said. “We cannot base our prosperity on cheating our children and grandchildren”.
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I did two science fair projects in seventh and eighth grade about a balanced aquarium and a balanced aqua-terrarium. I went to state science fair on both. That was over thirty five years ago. We were facing a cooling down planet then. I still believe that we are responsible for the condition of the planet now. God created us as caretakers of the planet–see Genesis.
We need to do a better job at taking care of the planet. We need to use renewable energy sources and not pollute.
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