Climate change isn’t just an environmental issue

The data from the Met office, NASA and NOAA were released recently, and it’s now official – 2016 was the hottest year ever recorded. Yet it seems that over the last few years climate change denial has increased. The new President of the USA set to reverse the much needed progress on climate change. Unfortunately climate change has become a highly politicized debate, it seems to be considered part of the ‘leftist liberal agenda’ that is now being challenged (heroically it seems) by the right wing in the western world. Terms like ‘politically correct’ ‘communist’ ‘social justice warrior’ ‘hoax’ ‘mainstream media lies’ have all contributed to a furore of anti-left sentiment which has resulted in making scientific facts optional. The subsequent mistrust in institutions isn’t really surprising then, considering the huge amount of misinformation available on the internet. Many people make decisions based on their previous beliefs rather than the science. There will be no ‘oh sh*t’ moment like there was when we realised we had created a massive hole in our o-zone. No, climate change is the slowly warming water and we are the frog never really knowing when too hot has reached us.

The issue of this environmental problem is that it isn’t just an environmental problem. The consequences of climate change, as well as any solutions put forward, change development trajectories, our relationship to nature, geopolitics, trade relationships, how we generate energy, and most importantly global economics (to name but a few). This is important for climate change as greenhouse gas emissions have been, and continue to be, driven by economic growth. This was one of the conclusions of the economists Lord Nicholas Stern whose seminal book “The economics of climate change: the Stern review” outlined the extreme economic impacts of climate change. It is quite irrelevant what your political stance is or your level of empathy towards nature or social issues, climate change consequences go far deeper than saving polar bears from the shrinking icecaps. This extract from the executive summary is quite revealing:

“Using the results from formal economic models, the Review estimates that if we don’t act, the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least 5% of global GDP each year, now and forever. If a wider range of risks and impacts is taken into account, the estimates of damage could rise to 20% of GDP or more. In contrast, the costs of action – reducing greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the worst impacts of climate change – can be limited to around 1% of global GDP each year.”

Climate change denial

There will be many tragic consequences of climate change but one that transcends political opinion is that climate change will have economically adverse affect. It is not a ‘lefty agenda’, it is scientifically factual and will have negative economic, environmental and social impacts. So why is there still so much denial? It has been shown that in many cases that if you present people with scientific facts that contradict their previous beliefs it can actually reinforce their previous beliefs. The University of Queensland is doing research into this “worldview backfire effect” which is simply that people’s ideology is far more important in the denial of climate change than the actual facts, and subsequently people who want to disbelieve in climate change find a way to argue their way out of believing scientific consensus (human-induced climate change is a consensus now in case you didn’t know – this link explains it clearly). If a person holds an opinion or value and this gets challenged by new facts, they either have to overthrow their previous ideological stance or simply ignore the fact. The reasons for this is that holding two different beliefs causes mental stress and people will avoid this at all costs, this is known as cognitive dissonance. This isn’t unique to climate change but the narrative of global warming being a hoax fits in nicely with the current ‘alternative fact’ era we are living in – thanks Trump!

“There is a significant problem presenting scientific evidence to people who think science is a hoax” – John Cook

The characteristics of science denial are summarized by the acronym FLICC (see image). These are tactics employed by groups, companies or people who want to manufacture doubt about the science which would result in more profit for them e.g. fossil fuel companies knowing the science in 1982 but then continued to fund denial groups. This doubt is then used by the general population to prevent them having to change their previously held beliefs, they usually cherry pick examples and ignore the totality of the evidence.

This video explains in more detail the ways in which the denial of scientific evidence occurs. What is most important is to get the facts across, we live in a world where conspiracy and ‘alternative facts’ are becoming the norm. One way of bringing people to the facts that doesn’t make them outright reject them is Inoculation theory. This theory describes a way to get people to be skeptical of the information they receive and look deeper into the issue to find the facts. If you are not a climate scientists it can be hard to identify the ‘alternative facts’ from the scientific facts, the problem is laymen are weighing in their opinion and politicians are given far too much credence in climate change debates. People, for multiple reasons that are too long to list here, have decided climate change is a corrupt agenda. This mistrust in the government and mainstream media results in a mistrust in anything that the official scientific organisations publish. It would be quite ironic if the anti-establishment rhetoric continues and ‘alternative facts’ that are promoted by Trump become the ‘mainstream lie’ and the real scientific facts get promoted as the alternative facts.

One positive to come out of the University of Queensland research is that people who deny climate change are more likely to act environmentally consciously when they read that climate change action makes people more warm and friendly towards each other. Trump and his cabinet just need a hug! Although this may be bitter-sweet as this clearly shows – again – that people’s decisions on climate change are emotional. The science isn’t up for debate but the political, social, economic and philosophical implications of climate change are. We shouldn’t get these confused.