History will condemn climate change denialists
Tony Abbott was elected by the right-wing of his party for a single purpose: to destroy any meaningful action in Australia against the threat of climate change
The argument for radical action on climate change– which Australia will soon at least temporarily reject with the shameful decision to repeal the carbon tax – is embarrassingly simple.
For the past 200 years, western culture has granted science pre-eminent cultural authority. A quarter century ago, a consensus formed among contemporary scientists specialising in the study of the climate. The consensus comprised one principal idea: the primary source of energy on which industrial civilisation relied – the burning of fossil fuels – was dangerously increasing the temperature of the earth.
Thousands upon thousands of scientific studies have been conducted estimating the impact of this warming. Hundreds of outstanding books have been published making the conclusions of the scientists available to the general public. To anyone willing to listen, these scientists have explained that unless human beings derive their energy from sources other than fossil fuels, the future that we face over the next decades and centuries involves the rendering of large parts of the earth uninhabitable to humans and other species – through the melting of the ice caps and glaciers and thus steadily rising sea levels, the acidification of the oceans, the destruction of forests and coral reefs, and the increase in the prevalence and intensity of famines, insect-borne diseases, droughts, bush fires, floods, hurricanes and heat-waves.
So far, the warnings issued by the climate scientists have gone largely unheeded. In 1997 the international community that gathered at Kyoto produced a desperately inadequate agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions. In every year following Kyoto, emissions steadily rose. The international community re-assembled at Copenhagen in 2009. Virtually nothing of significance was agreed. Emissions continued to rise. The modest reductions that have been achieved in recent years among the advanced industrial economies – either through market mechanisms, or the economic downturn following the global financial crisis, or the temporary movement in the US from coal to natural gas – have been more than cancelled out by very rapid increases in emissions produced in the emerging economies like China and India now seeking their own place in the industrial sun.
As global emissions increased, something surpassingly strange occurred in the realm of politics in the US – something without parallel in the history of the post-Enlightenment west since the Darwinian controversy. The emergence of a broad-based movement of thought challenging the sovereignty of science in one specialised field.
Anti-science climate change denialism began with money cynically and strategically supplied by the massive American fossil fuel corporations. From there it spread to the powerful US network of neo-liberal “think-tanks” whose purpose was to produce the ideas helping to make the world safe for the wealthiest members of the society – the so-called 1%. And from the think-tanks climate change denialism steadily spread downwards to American society more generally, thanks to rabid right wing media like Fox News, until it was powerful enough to capture, almost in its entirety, one of America’s traditional political parties, the republicans.
As a consequence of the spread of climate change denialism, tens of millions of American citizens now base their opinions on the kind of pseudo-knowledge manufactured by the climate change denialist blogs and disseminated daily by the right-wing media. They have come to treat the questions of whether the earth is warming, and if so why, as political matters concerning which those without any genuine scientific understanding or training are as qualified to form an opinion as professors who have devoted their lives to one of the disciplines of climate science.
Climate change denialism soon spread beyond the US, especially to the countries of the English-speaking world. As Australia is a country extremely sensitive to the cultural winds blowing in from the US, reliant on the export and consumption of coal, and where the denialist Murdoch newspapers exercise enormous unhealthy influence, it is hardly surprising that over the past decade climate change denialism quickly sunk deep roots here.
The impact was seen in late 2009 with the coup inside the Liberal party which replaced Malcolm Turnbull, a rational believer in climate science, by a complacent opportunist, Tony Abbott, who regarded and still regards climate science as “crap”. The anti-Turnbull coup represents the most critical moment in the recent history of Australia. Abbott was elected by the right-wing of his party for a single purpose: to destroy any meaningful action in Australia against the threat of climate change. When the carbon tax is repealed, the leaders of the coup and the fossil fuel interests they represent will receive from a dutiful prime minister their anticipated reward.
The right-wing denialists, now dominant within the Coalition, often call themselves conservatives. They are not. At the heart of true conservatism is the belief that each new generation forms the vital bridge between past and future, and is charged with the responsibility of passing the earth and its cultural treasures to their children and grandchildren in sound order. History will condemn the climate change denialists, here and elsewhere, for their contribution to the coming catastrophe that their cupidity, their arrogance, their myopia and their selfishness have bequeathed to the young and the generations still unborn.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/16/history-will-condemn-climate-change-denialists?CMP=ema_632
~~
Climate scientists try new tack to win over sceptics
Digital image: Judy Green
Findings from the social and behavioural sciences explain how people, given identical evidence, can come to opposing conclusions.
A fascinating report was published early last week by the University College, London. The authors – the Policy Commission on Communicating Climate Science – are a bunch of British academics with specialties ranging from atmospheric physics to psychology. They’ve called the report “Time for Change? Climate Science Reconsideredâ€Â. What needs reconsidering, they say, is not climate science itself, but how it is communicated to decision-makers, and the public at large.
Too many scientists think that if people disbelieve their information, the answer is to give them more information. But the psychologists know better.
Disagreement within climate discourse is more to do with differences in values and world-views … than it is about scientific facts.
Writing in The Australian last week, Maurice Newman, banker, stockbroker, climate change sceptic, and the Abbott government’s principal business adviser, informed his readers that “there has been no global warming since September 1996â€Â.
Nice, simple, factual statement. But the climate scientists I know tell me it is drivel.
The problem is that you are not going to persuade Mr Newman, or those who agree with him, by showing them more graphs, or talking about heat transfer to the oceans. Because for all of us, the UCL commission report says, beliefs come first, and science second.
We accept information that confirms our prior beliefs, and reject information that does not. It’s called “my side biasâ€Â, and it has nothing to do with intelligence or education. On the contrary:
the people at greater risk of becoming polarised over climate change are those who perceive themselves as intelligent and scientifically literate.
That’s because the debate about climate science, though ostensibly about facts and numbers and projections, actually engages some of our most fundamental political values: whether we favour big government or small; unregulated or regulated markets; whether we preference individual liberties or the social good – in other words, the very issues which distinguish “right†from “leftâ€Â.
And because it engages these fundamental world-views, says the report:
people’s natural inclination [is] to denigrate those who hold opposing convictions.
So the climate change debate brings out the worst in all of us.
It has of course become blindingly obvious that whether or not you accept the findings of what the report calls “the climate science community†depends crucially on your politics. It shouldn’t, but it does. But what can the climate scientists do about it?
Well, the UCL policy commission is clear about some things that they should NOT do.
They shouldn’t wash their hands of the debate, and bury their heads in their computer printouts.
Our view is that the communication and explanation of results is not an optional role: it should be an obligation.
Still less should scientists (and other advocates) exaggerate the threats posed by global warming, in the hope that they can scare the public and the politicians into action. What the report calls “alarmism†has been counter-productive, it argues.
The failure of specific predictions of climate change to materialise creates the impression that the climate science community as a whole resorts to raising false alarms.
The report doesn’t include even one example of the kind of alarmist predictions its authors have in mind. That’s unfortunate, because the so-called sceptics label “alarmist†anyone who argues that the accumulation of atmospheric greenhouse gases from human activity poses a significant danger. By those standards, the commission itself is very “alarmist†indeed:
Climate science offers a stark message: that to avoid serious future risks, rapid transformative action is required to reconfigure the world’s energy generation system, the economic system and global political practices.
“Time for Change?†outlines the problem facing climate science with great clarity. Sadly, I don’t have much faith that its suggested solutions will work.
It calls for the formation of a global professional body that can accredit climate scientists, and provide “a clear route for engagement between the climate science community and policymakersâ€Â.
That’s roughly the job the Gillard government’s Climate Commission was supposed to do. But it achieved no across-the-board acceptance. It was widely reviled by the sceptics, and the Abbott government abolished it within weeks of gaining power.
The UCL policy commission, with supreme optimism, recommends a more “co-productive†approach by climate scientists – a genuine attempt to work with decision-makers to find ways forward that everyone can accept. But it recognises that “progress will require a willingness and openness on the part of government and other policy stakeholders … to commit to such an approachâ€Â.
Well, if by “other stakeholders†the commission means the sceptics, inside or outside government, don’t hold your breath. The way the report itself has been treated by much of the media illustrates the problem.
News Corporation’s The Times of London published a story last week that focused almost entirely on the couple of pages (in a 150 page report) that scolded climate change “alarmistsâ€Â. That story (republished by The Australian under the headline: “Alarmism hurts climate scienceâ€Â) was gleefully taken up by the sceptical blogosphere. The Spectator Australia published an editorial that utterly misrepresented the report, conflated the “alarmism†the commission condemns with the science it supports, and concluded:
“For Australians to pay the slightest heed to the global warming alarmists is like letting Wayne Swan handle your superannuation portfolio.â€Â
Ho ho. How witty.
The UCL commission says climate scientists should reach out to such people in a search for common ground. That will be tough. It might not be “co-productive†to call climate change sceptics rude names; but it’s a temptation that’s hard to resist.
Jonathan Holmes is an Age columnist and a former presenter of the ABC’s Media Watch program.
Read more: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/comment/climate-scientists-try-new-tack-to-win-over-sceptics-20140701-zsrn1.html#ixzz37ijwVRn8
Robert Manne who I know personally having been a student at Latrobe University is a denialist of the first order. Getting evidence out of him is difficult if not impossible.
He championed the Stolen Generation, and when he was asked by Andrew Bolt to name 10 of them he could not name one.
He no more than a left wing agitator who jumps on the latest leftie bandwagon so what he says is to be taken with a pinch of salt.
When the industrial Revolution took hold the output of man made carbon was far greater than it was now but lo and behold we are still here.
The fact is it is all cyclical but you are not going to accept that if you have built your reputation on scaremongering and fanciful claims.
I remember Tim Flannery predicting that the sea was going to rise 10 meters if we didn’t do something. He obviously didn’t believe his prophecy because he bought a house…by the sea.