Suckers

George Monbiot, author of the highly recommended (by me) and underappreciated (by the world in general) book Heat, has an excellent piece online about the nature of the so-called climate skeptics, Grim reaper’s role in climate change denial:

There is no point in denying it: we’re losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease. It exists in a sphere that cannot be reached by evidence or reasoned argument; any attempt to draw attention to scientific findings is greeted with furious invective. This sphere is expanding with astonishing speed.

A survey last month by the Pew Research Centre suggests that the proportion of Americans who believe there is solid evidence that the world has been warming over the past few decades has fallen from 71 per cent to 57 per cent in just 18 months.

Another survey, conducted in January by Rasmussen Reports, suggests that, due to a sharp rise since 2006, US voters who believe global warming has natural causes (44 per cent) outnumber those who believe it is the result of human action (41 per cent).

…

The debate about global warming that is raging on the internet and in the right-wing press does not reflect any such debate in the scientific journals.

…

I am constantly struck by the way in which people like James, who proclaim themselves sceptics, will believe any old claptrap that suits their views. Their position was perfectly summarised by a supporter of Ian Plimer – author of a marvellous concatenation of gibberish called Heaven and Earth – commenting on a recent article in the Spectator magazine: ”Whether Plimer is a charlatan or not, he speaks for many of us.”

These people aren’t sceptics; they’re suckers.

Such beliefs seem to be strongly influenced by age. The Pew report found that people over 65 are much more likely than the rest of the population to deny that there is solid evidence that the planet is warming, that it’s caused by humans, or that it’s a serious problem. This chimes with my own experience. Almost all my fiercest arguments over climate change, both in print and in person, have been with people in their 60s or 70s. Why might this be?

There are some obvious answers: they won’t be around to see the results; they were brought up in a period of technological optimism; they feel entitled, having worked all their lives, to fly or cruise to wherever they wish. But there might also be a less intuitive reason, which shines a light into a fascinating corner of human psychology.

In 1973 the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker proposed that the fear of death drives us to protect ourselves with ”vital lies” or ”the armour of character”. We defend ourselves from the ultimate terror by engaging in immortality projects, which boost our self-esteem and grant us meaning that extends beyond death.

This is a slightly longer post than those I normally link to, but it’s definitely worth your time to click through and read it in full.

One issue Monbiot doesn’t address is gender. I doubt I’m the only one to notice the very high proportion of deniers who are men. I have no idea if this is because we tend to be more arrogant than women (I call it the testosterone factor), and therefore are more inclined to want to push our opinions onto others. Or perhaps it’s that we still live in a “man’s world”, so the entrenched interests are predominantly male. Combine that with the tendency for many men to be followers, and you have an explanation (or at least an attempt at one) for both the financially and ideologically motivated deniers.

Or maybe it’s something much more obvious that I simply haven’t thought of.

I also feel obliged to mention something a friend said in passing a few months ago. A small group of us was discussing climate change and the phenomenon of deniers, when one person who is a psychologist (or perhaps a psychiatrist?) made the offhand comment that they do it because “it’s fun”. I think this could be the single most insightful comment, and the one with the scariest implications, I’ve heard regarding energy and environmental issues in a very long time.

There’s no denying that a small segment of the US population, as well as that of some other “developed countries”, based on what I read online, define themselves largely in terms of their opposition to widely accepted views. They’re so in love with the mythology of the “little guy with no expert training who sees through the Evil Conspiracy using nothing but common Sense and is ultimately proved right” that they leap from one anti-cause to another, with the same lack of knowledge, the same slavish adherence to crackpot theories bolstered by rampant confirmation bias thanks to their habit of consuming a narrowly selected subset of TV, radio, and Internet outlets.

Ask yourself this: What percentage of people who think President Obama isn’t a US citizen are also climate change deniers? What about the portion of those who think we never landed on the moon, or that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, or that smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer, or those who are dedicated listeners of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, et al.? Think those groups show a higher than normal incidence of climate change denial?

Do you think they’re having fun?

do you think they’re doing any damage to the world your children and grandchildren and … will inherit, by helping to water down and delay meaningful action on climate change?

And the odds are you’re doing nothing more than reading this, tsk tsking over those awful deniers, and doing nothing but occasionally forwarding a link or two to your like-minded friends.

Think that’s enough, with this much at stake? Has it occurred to you yet that if you’re doing that little, then you’re one of the suckers?