Robyn Williams: This was the dinner speaker at the Australian Academy of Science last week, Lord May.

Robert May: I want to talk tonight just a little bit about some of the aspects of our seeming inability to recognise the seriousness of things. And I will now tell you my one joke. There are two people on an aeroplane. If it were told in Britain they would be either Irish or Polish, if it were told in Canada they would be from Newfoundland, and I guess in Australia they would be New Zealanders.

But anyhow, they are going along, and it is a four-engine plane. One bloke looks out and sees the engine is on fire, but over the announcement...the pilot says, 'Not to worry, we're putting the fire out, we fly perfectly well on three engines, we will just be about half an hour late.'

A little bit later, a second engine goes. The pilot says, 'Not to worry, two engines are more than adequate, we can get by on one, we'll be about an hour late.' A third engine goes. And one of the blokes says to the other, 'This is getting serious. If the fourth engine goes we're going to be really late and I'm going to miss my connection.'

It is a wonderful summary of our tendency to believe the future is a gradual extrapolation of the present.

Robyn Williams: Bob May, Lord May of Oxford, at the Academy of Science.

Plenty who pronounce on climate science are not climate scientists, and a new book launched this week by Bob Carr, former Premier of New South Wales, tackles all the standard lines denying the science. It's called Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand, by Haydn Washington and John Cook. And soon every federal politician will have one. John Cook has been sorting the arguments via his website.

John Cook: I guess building a database of it, it's like putting a puzzle together, and so once I had been doing that for several years I could see all the patterns, and I guess the one common pattern is it is about denying the evidence. And then you could just start to see the different techniques that they use. Cherry-picking is one technique, or conspiracy theories, which is just another way of avoiding the evidence altogether.

Robyn Williams: And was it at all affected by any evidence that came out? For instance, when we are talking about the East Anglia email scandal, there were three, possibly four enquiries, and each one found in favour of the scientists in terms of the scientific evidence. But that seems not to have stopped denying at all.

John Cook: Yes, there has actually been eight independent investigations into it, and they have all found the same results. So it's almost like climate science where we have multiple lines of evidence finding the same conclusion. But conspiracy theories are very popular amongst any group that wants to deny a scientific consensus.

Robyn Williams: So you're saying that rule one, let no level of evidence influence what you're saying.

John Cook: Well, if you can get away from talking about the evidence, then I guess it's a lot easier to deny the scientific consensus.

Robyn Williams: So you're giving me some of the ideas, there is the cherry-picking, and they are suggesting that temperatures have in fact not gone up since 1988. What else?

John Cook: I guess another popular tactic is using fake experts, and the most popular version of that is this petition project from the United States where they list 31,000 names which they say are scientists that are sceptical of global warming.

Robyn Williams: Yes, I've seen that many, many times where 31,000 scientists have been said to come out and say that they disapprove of...exactly what?

John Cook: The actual statement that they signed their name to is generally that human activity can't cause climate disruption and in fact CO 2 is a good thing, something to that effect. But when you look at all the names on the lists, about 99.9% of them are not climate scientists. So it's this raising of fake experts, and that tactic has been used way back to the '70s where the tobacco industry, had this 'operation white coat'. They would have the scientists come out and say there is no link between smoking and cancer. In fact there's even sometimes the same scientists who are saying the same thing now, that there is no link between pollution and global warming.

Robyn Williams: Who are these scientists nonetheless? Are they scientists?

John Cook: Most of them probably are scientists. There are a few funny names there, I think Posh Spice might have been on there or somebody. But what they are, are mechanical engineers, medical doctors, and the point is when you have a technical and complicated subject like climate change, you want to get the opinions of climate experts. So, for example, if you were going to get a heart operation, you wouldn't want a mechanical engineer cutting into you, you would want somebody who was an expert on that.

Robyn Williams: Did you ask yourself why they were signing in the first place?

John Cook: Yes, that was a major theme of our book. I looked into how the tactics mislead, and Haydn's primary contribution to the book was looking into why these people were denying.

Robyn Williams: A perfect cue for Haydn. Why is it happening now?

Haydn Washington: That's the $64,000 question that fascinated us, that the science is getting more and more certain, so this is where you've got to look at what denial is, and in terms of the fact that it is very common. Scepticism is almost the opposite of denial. All scientists should be sceptical, but scepticism is a search for the truth, if you look at the actual definition, and denial is hiding from the truth and running away from it. So people who actually say they are sceptics on climate change, in fact mostly they're not. All scientists should be sceptical, but in fact they are denying it because it's what they want to believe.

A useful definition is to split it up into three sorts of denial; literal denial, which is like your denial industry funded by fossil fuel companies and there are lots of people who have written about that. Then there is interpretive denial, which is what we know better as spin, which governments tend to use, much the same as where you talk about collateral damage instead of massacring civilians. And then there is what we became most fascinated with, or I did in writing this section, is implicatory denial, which is the denial...something makes us afraid, if it conflicts with our self image and we have the ability to flick a switch in our brains and deny it. And that's why the science is getting more and more certain but we have dropped at least 20% in Australia in terms of the people who believe climate change is real.

Robyn Williams: So, tease that out. What you're saying is that we like our life, what is being said by the scientists is certainly inconvenient, it means a profound change to the way we do many things, we don't like it, so it's not on.

Haydn Washington: Yes, as far as we know maybe chimpanzees deny things too because they carry around dead infants which is probably a case of denial that was pointed out to me. Denial is a delusion. And what we're pointing out here is that when it's actually threatening the ecosystems upon which our society relies and our whole civilisation, it's actually become a pathology.

Robyn Williams: On the other hand, from my point of view, having done thousands of interviews on this subject, if someone is conscientious, he or she can look up the evidence, as you have in the book, meticulously, and to deny it amounts, does it not Haydn, to lying?

Haydn Washington: Well, it's a delusion, so it's a lie in regard to reality, yes, it's hiding from reality. And one of the chapters asks 'do we let denial prosper?' and we look at various things, like the fear of change, the failure in values, ignorance of ecology, gambling on the future. The media itself has what is being called balances bias where you have all the climate scientists in the world on one side and someone from a right-wing think tank who is into denial are given equal prominence.

Robyn Williams: We have to avoid groupthink.

Haydn Washington: Media loves controversy, and of course most of the media is owned by conservative interests also, and Naomi Oreskes has shown very convincingly through a great deal of research that there is an ideological bent where conservatives believe the market represents liberty, and if you were going to regulate the market due to climate change to try and fix things you are attacking liberty, and therefore these people are opposing denial. So all these things are involved, and the answer is yes, we do let denial prosper, and we have a couple of chapters talking about how we roll back denial. But I think the key part is to recognise that there is denial and it's a major problem stopping us from solving one of the world's greatest issues.

Robyn Williams: Well, Naomi Oreskes of course has written the introduction to your book, and she was on The Science Show on 8th January, and she's coming back for the Sydney Writers Week, funnily enough, in a few days time. But John, how many scientists who are working in the field of some standing have you found who are making a genuine critique of some important aspect of the accepted climate science?

John Cook: I could probably count them on both my hands I guess, maybe a half dozen or so scientists that actually published papers that are sceptical that global warming will be bad in the future. Generally amongst scientists, even sceptic scientists, there is very little dispute that human activity and carbon dioxide is causing warming.

Robyn Williams: I know that there are one or two in the United States, and I have corresponded with them, who are concerned perhaps to criticise the rate of change, the effect of CO 2 , and detail like that, but very few that I can think of of any standing who are saying that the whole thing ain't on.

John Cook: No, I think the general sticking point among sceptic qualified scientists is they tend to hang their hat on this proposition that negative feedback will cancel out the warming that we cause, it's like a get out of jail free card. But the main argument against that is when we look back through Earth's history, that has never happened before, there has always been positive feedbacks of amplified warming.

Robyn Williams: And what about how the CO 2 will have a diminishing effect at higher levels?

John Cook: Well, it does, that is not disputed, and that is taken into account in all the models and all the calculations. There are two really important things to point out about that, one is that we measure the actual effect from CO 2 so satellites and planes observe the heat coming from the Earth and escaping out to space, so they can compare what we simulate or what we expect with what is actually happening. So observations show that CO 2 is causing warming. And I think the whole diminishing CO 2 effect, that's something you'd read on the internet but there is no actual genuine scientists who would make that argument.

Robyn Williams: And then of course there's the argument about computers and modelling, and it's very interesting to see a film that was made by the new president of the Royal Society of London, Sir Paul Nurse, who actually began his term in office by doing a film for the BBC taking on the deniers, and he went to see one of the main people from the Spectator magazine and bailed him up, and also went to a fascinating place where they are actually showing climate models in action. You know, you've got a screen above and a screen below, one is the model showing weather patterns lines, streaming out according to the model, and the other one is the actual weather being shown from a satellite, and they are exactly the same. It's quite remarkable. The models I think have been portrayed as being unsophisticated, bodgy, and computer crunching, in fantasyland, but in fact they are unbelievably exact, aren't they.

John Cook: The models are getting more and more sophisticated, and they can calculate the whole global trend quite accurately, and now they are getting better and better at working out regional trends as well, which is where they get useful because then different areas can work out how climate change is going to affect them. But it is also important to realise that the case for global warming isn't purely based on models, it is also based on many lines of evidence, and that is the evidence that climate deniers are trying to deny. By focusing an attack on models, they are trying to deflect attention away from all the evidence that we have.

Robyn Williams: Haydn, there has been a trend, has there not, as the science has become more and more powerful, for some elements, for instance Bjorn Lomborg, the sceptical environmentalist, to say that, well, yes, it's happening, but suggesting adaptation is more important than doing what's mainstream.

Haydn Washington: An interesting phenomenon, what they call non-denial denial, so you get people who are saying yes, we accept climate change is happening, however when we look at all the things we should be solving around the world, whether it's malaria or HIV or the suggestion that you are going to focus with adaptation, well, if you are living in Bangladesh where 20% of the population could go under with a one-metre or two-metre sea level rise, then they are not going to be able to adapt very effectively. Or if you are looking at 35% of the world's species probably being in danger of extinction, or as James Hansen has pointed out, to talk of 16 of the world's major cities on sea level, to talk about adapting to what could be a five-metre sea level rise in the next couple of centuries is insanity because you can't adapt to that, it is an economically huge impost we are talking about. So yes, it is easy to talk about adaptation, but it's a way of allowing business as usual to continue as long as possible.

Robyn Williams: So you're suggesting they are adapting their argument to have the same effect but differently.

Haydn Washington: In the face of this overwhelming scientific evidence, you don't actually try and deny any longer that climate change is happening, what you try and do is sort of say yes, it is happening but unfortunately it's uneconomic for us to do anything about it.

Robyn Williams: And you shouldn't be alarmist because it's not going to be as bad as you think.

Haydn Washington: Yes, that's the other side of it, that yes, possibly we can adapt because humans are adaptable, but of course we have evolved...our civilisation evolved in 8,000 years of stable climate, so we have never had to adapt to a rapidly changing climate.

Robyn Williams: I want you to make a value judgement now, Haydn, of the ones you looked through with those sorts of social trends you've been examining. How many of the people you're talking about are doing so out of goodwill, and how many do you think are doing something of a put-up job?

Haydn Washington: Yes, that's a fascinating question. When you read some of these denial books you keep asking yourself is this person for real or are they actually doing it deliberately to try and confuse the issue. And I think it's interesting that Naomi Oreskes in her book looks at this same thing to try and ask yourself what is going on. Is it actually that these people have been bought out by big money, or do they actually believe it? And I think probably a lot of them actually do believe it, that it is an ideologically driven belief that they think they are actually doing the right thing rather than...and I think there are also some people who are in the denial industry who know very well that they are doing it because they want to keep reaping massive profits out of fossil fuels for as long as they can.

Robyn Williams: John, what is going to happen to your book, is it going to politicians and so on?

John Cook: Yes, we are printing a special parliamentarian copy which will have a statement in the front of the book which has been signed by John Hewson and Bob Carr and seven climate scientists, and we are sending that out to every federal member in Canberra.

Robyn Williams: Will you give a personal one to Nick Minchin?

John Cook: I'll be happy to sign a copy for him, yes.

Robyn Williams: Because he used to be a minister for science and he says the arguments about climate change are wrong.

Haydn Washington: Clearly those who are really strongly in denial who know the truth are not going to get much out of it, they're not going to believe it, they're not going to question their own denial. We are really writing to those people who are not that far gone, they are genuinely confused about what is going on, because if you are not a scientist who has done a lot of research on this, if you look at the media you could be forgiven for thinking it was 50-50 in the scientific community in regard to whether climate change is happening rather than 97.5% amongst practising climate scientists and every academy of science in the world believing that human-caused climate change is real. So yes, obviously not everyone is going to realise that they're in denial, but there are a lot of people generally out there who are confused and trying to make headway. And I think what needs to be pointed out is Australia is tremendously at risk. I know that what a lot of climate scientists are depressed about is that the scope of the impacts that are going to occur is far greater than the cost of doing something abut it.

Robyn Williams: Haydn Washington with John Cook. Their book is Climate Change Denial, and it's very readable and a handy reference to look up debating points and facts, launched this week by Bob Carr.