Tag: Global warming controversy

The counter-intuitive aspect of liberty.

How libertarian ideology is holding back our liberty to change.

Martin Lack, he of the popular blog Lack of Environment is taking a small break from his writings.  In his own words,

I am afraid this may be the last post on this blog for a while because – what with the all the willful blindness and ideological prejudice that seems to stop people from recognising what an Eff-ing mess humanity is in – and my as yet unresolved employment situation – I am feeling somewhat emotionally drained. However, please don’t cancel your subscription (as who knows how quickly I may recover).

So what a pleasant surprise when less than a day after those words in came an email that read, “Since I have told readers of my blog that I am taking a rest, I offer you the text appended below to post on your blog instead (or not – as you see fit).”

On reading the text I most certainly ‘saw fit‘ to publish it!

It is a very interesting approach to climate science denialism resulting from an analysis of conspiracy theories.

So over to Martin.

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Professor Stephan Lewandowsky.
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky.

Libertarian ideology is the real road block

I have recently been catching up on a bit of reading – focusing on the recent work of Professor Stephan Lewandowsky (and others).  Following in the wake of James Hansen, Ben Santer and Michael Mann, Lewandowsky has recently been the target of hate-mail campaigns by climate change sceptics.  Unlike all the others, however, Lewandowsky (formerly at the University of Western Australia but now at Bristol University in the UK) is not a climate scientist.  This is how Bristol University announced his recent appointment.

Steve is an internationally renowned cognitive scientist who has joined us from the University of Western Australia. His research has already revolutionised our understanding of human memory and cognition, and he now stands poised to build upon his impressive body of work with a project as ambitious as it is timely. In particular, Steve’s intention to improve our understanding of how people choose to acquire information, and to use this understanding to help create a more informed populace, is a unique and much needed undertaking. Thus, this research offers enormous benefits in the fields of experimental psychology, climate research and the wider public engagement with and understanding of scientific research.

I must admit that, until recently, I had not sat down to read either of the papers by Lewandowsky et al (  ‘Motivated Rejection of Science’ [PDF]  or ‘Recursive Fury: Conspiracy Ideation in the Blogosphere’ [PDF] ) – I had only read about them.

However, now that I have read them, the thing that strikes me most forcefully is not the stupidity of conspiracy “ideation”, the invocation of conspiracy theories, it is the fact that, as Lewandowsky et al acknowledge, their work confirms the findings of many previous studies; that climate change scepticism is associated with prejudicial adherence to libertarian ideology.  Also key is that climate change scepticism can be predicted by that prejudicial adherence to libertarian ideology.

Amongst many other things, this explains why EU sceptics are climate sceptics and why the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) do not like Wind Farms.  I had understood this for some time.  However, I had not fully realised its importance; it was just one theme among others.  Anyone who has read my blog recently will probably have noticed my post about New World Order (NWO) conspiracy theory, in which I acknowledged that I had not realised just how significant such thinking is, and how subliminal and subconscious it may be.

Although adherence to free-market economics and libertarian ideology were themes I highlighted in my MA dissertation and in my subsequent book, and mentioned on my blog numerous times, everything I have read in the last few days points to one conclusion:  We will not succeed in communicating the urgency of the need for radical changes in energy policy until we can convince people that climate scientists are not trying to perpetuate their research funding or halt human progress.

Professor Lewandowsky’s research shows that little can be achieved by simply telling people they are wrong.  Far better is pointing out to people that Limits to Growth and Peak Oil have already halted the progress of globalised Capitalism, as recent times prove dramatically. In other words conveying facts to people rather than ideology.

I must admit that this has been a tough pill to swallow.  I am not naturally progressive and certainly not naturally “liberal”.  On the contrary, I am socially and politically conservative.  However, the reality of anthropogenic climate disruption is a game-changer. Therefore, unlike members of the Flat Earth Society or Young Earth Creationists (YECs), I do not refuse to accept what scientists tell me simply because I don’t like the message.

We cannot defeat such obscurantism by telling people they are irrational; we can only defeat it by focusing on the evidence that suggests strongly that they are mistaken.  To this end, I think the words of St Augustine of Hippo are an important consideration; words going back over 1,400 years before anyone started to question the Age of the Earth or the Origin of Species!  Words echoed by Thomas Aquinas, (often quoted to those YECs):

“… since Holy Scripture can be explained in a multiplicity of senses, one should adhere to a particular explanation only in such measure as to be ready to abandon it if it be proved with certainty to be false, lest Holy Scripture be exposed to the ridicule of unbelievers, and obstacles be placed to their believing.”
– Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (1273).

In the last 150 years or so, most Christians have now come to reject conspiracy theory explanations for fossils, for example, and have realised that it is inappropriate to treat the Bible as a scientific text book.  Regretably, the main source of ideological blindness today is not conventional religion; it is adherence to free-market economics.

Therefore, it is important that we acknowledge the ideological nature of the communication problem we face. That is that the research by Prof Lewandowsky and others has discovered a tendency for libertarians to prefer conspiracy theories to reality.  Perhaps, therefore, not surprising that he has been attacked; no-one likes to be told they are deluded.

Roadblocks to policy change will not be cleared by social and political scientists telling libertarians that they are deluded.  All that will do is confirm their suspicions and reinforce their prejudices!  No, what is needed is for climate scientists to be bolder in stating the facts.

The majority of climate scientists seem content to continue to soft-soap the issue; afraid of “telling it to people straight” because it may induce despair.

No, it is not too late to prevent an ecological catastrophe but I am certain that we are now very short of time and, as everyone from the International Energy Agency, the Pentagon and the IMF agree, further delay will not be cost-effective.

At the same time, I think social and political scientists need to focus on debunking the ‘New World Order’ conspiracy myth and pointing out the logical fallacy in the idea that all Greens are Communists in disguise (the so-called ‘Watermelons’).

The environment has become a political football when it is nothing of the kind.  It is our life support system and we have pushed it near to the point of collapse, as E.F. Schumacher once said, by mistaking Nature’s capital for a form of income.  Therefore, if we do not change course, bankruptcy would seem inevitable.

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Having read and reflected on Martin’s essay, a couple of recollections surface.  The first is Guy McPherson’s book Walking Away from Empire that I reviewed earlier this year then referred to in a recent republication of a George Monbiot essay:

So very difficult to pick out the sentence that carried the most power, for the essay is powerful from start to end.  But this one did hit me in the face, “The impossibility of sustaining this system of endless, pointless consumption without the continued erosion of the living planet and the future prospects of humankind, is the conversation we will not have.“

Finally, I can’t resist reminding you, dear reader, of the point made by Prof. Guy McPherson in his book Walking Away from Empire, which I reviewed on March 6th.  particularly in the first paragraph of the first chapter; Reason:

At this late juncture in the era of industry, it seems safe to assume we face one of two futures. If we continue to burn fossil fuels, we face imminent environmental collapse. If we cease burning fossil fuels, the industrial economy will collapse. Industrial humans express these futures as a choice between your money or your life, and tell you that, without money, life isn’t worth living. As should be clear by now, industrial humans — or at least our “leaders” — have chosen not door number one (environmental collapse) and not door number two (economic collapse), but both of the above.

The second recollection comes most recently; from yesterday’s The story of carbon. A story that showed the power of academic, peer-reviewed, properly conducted, rational science!

I will close with a repeat of the closing words from yesterday:

“By my calculation, we have a 5–10 year window to avoid the catastrophe. It won’t be easy — we’re past the point where any transition will be smooth — but we can make the transition and survive as a civilized species, humans in a recognizable world.”

Nothing counter-intuitive about that!

Avoiding the catastrophe of indifference.

Doing nothing is not an option.

Introduction

So back to non-doggy stuff although I hope the themes of truth and integrity continue to rein supreme though this blog!

In the last couple of weeks, I have devoted a number of posts to the subject of change, as in how do we humans change.  The first post was Changing the person: Me where I started examining the process of change; by process I mean the models of change commonly understood in, say, management change.

The next post was You have to feel it! which drew heavily on research from Ezra M. Markowitz & Azim F. Shariff regarding the psychological aspects posed by climate change to the human moral judgement system.

The final post was From feeling to doing.  In this post, David Roberts of Grist showed that one could put aside all the ‘head stuff’ about change and in just 15 minutes cover all that one would ever want to know about the biggest issue of all facing this planet.

So rather a long introduction to two guest posts that today and tomorrow set out the case for what we all have to consider; doing nothing is just not a viable option.  The first is from Martin Lack of the popular and hard-hitting blog Lack of Environment.

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Avoiding the catastrophe of indifference.

by Martin Lack.

Paul has very kindly invited me to follow-up his recent post regarding David Roberts’ item on the Grist blog entitled ‘Why climate change doesn’t spark moral outrage, and how it could’ followed by a second post in which was embedded David Roberts’ excellent video ‘Climate change is simple – we do something or we’re screwed’.

So my guest post is an expansion of a comment I submitted in response to the first of those two posts, You have to feel it.  However it would be wrong not to first add my voice to all those that have applauded David Roberts for all his excellent work.

Clive Charles Hamilton

In 2010, the Australian social anthropologist Clive Hamilton published Requiem for a Species: Why we Resist the Truth About Climate Change – one of the scariest but most important books I think I have ever read.

Reading Hamilton’s book was one of the reasons I decided, as part of my MA in Environmental Politics, to base my dissertation on climate change scepticism in the UK.

In the process, I read much but Hamilton’s book was one of very few that I actually read from cover to cover – I simply did not have time to read fully all the books for my research. However, because I have a background in geology and hydrogeology, my greatest challenge was learning to think like a social scientist.

I was all for taking these climate change sceptics head on and demolishing their pseudo-scientific arguments or taking them to task for the ideological prejudices that drive them to reject what scientists tell us. Thus, it fell to my dissertation supervisor to mention politely but firmly that I needed to disengage with the issues and analyse patterns of behaviour and frequency of arguments favoured by different groups of people.  In short, I needed to stop trying to prove the scientific consensus correct and start understanding the views held by those that dispute that consensus.

Having said how I read Professor Hamilton’s book in full, I must admit to learning about a load of other equally-scary sounding books since subscribing to Learning from Dogs;  Lester Brown’s World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse being just one that comes to mind!

David Roberts

Then of course there is what David Roberts himself says, which is just as scary. I think we have good reason to be scared. However, as Hamilton points out, we must move beyond being scared, which is simply debilitating, and channel our frustration into positive action.

Because if we do not, there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence to suggest that civilisation may well fail. If that means engaging in acts of civil disobedience, as it has done for James Hansen and many others, well, so be it. I suspect that nothing worthwhile has ever been achieved without someone breaking the law in order to draw attention to injustice – the abolition of slavery and child labour, the extension for all of the right to vote including women, come to mind.

That is the conclusion of Hamilton’s book; that civil disobedience is almost inevitable (p.225). Just as turkeys won’t vote for Christmas, our politicians are not going to vote for climate change mitigation unless we demand that they do so.

So it was the steer from my dissertation supervisor that lead me to read David Aaronovitch’s Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory Has Shaped Modern History, and much more about psychology. All of which guided the Introductory section of my dissertation, which summarised the philosophical roots of scepticism, the political misuse of scepticism, and the psychology of denial; see a recent post on my blog Lack of Environment.   In terms of what I want to say here, it is an elaboration of the last of those topics, the psychology of denial.  Indeed, it formed the preamble to the findings of my research.

To help me research this unfamiliar subject, my dissertation supervisor sent me a PDF copy of a paper written by Janis L. Dickinson in 2009 and published in Ecology and Society.  It was called ‘The People Paradox: Self-Esteem Striving, Immortality Ideologies, and Human Response to Climate Change’ and dealt with a challenging, almost taboo subject, namely our own mortality.

Despite my initial reluctance to learn about psychology, the more I read the more I realised just how central psychology was to explaining why we humans have failed to address the problem of climate change.

I ended up summarising the work of Dickinson, together with other sources of material, in the following manner.

In considering reasons for the collective human failure to act to prevent anthropogenic global warming (AGW), a number of authors appear to have been influenced by Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (1973). For example, Aaronovitch proposed that we try to avoid the “catastrophe of indifference” that a world devoid of meaning or purpose represents (p. 340).  Hamilton suggested that climate disruption “has the smell of death about it” (p. 215).

Janis Dickinson elaborates a little more, exploring what she describes as “…one of the key psychological links between the reality of global climate change and the difficulty of mobilizing individuals and groups to confront the problem in a rational and timely manner”, then referring to what psychologists call terror management theory (TMT) – Dickinson also categorises denial of climate change; denial of human responsibility and immediacy of the problem as proximal responses (Dickinson 2009).

Furthermore, as referenced here, both Dickinson and Hamilton suggest that other distal TMT responses, such as focussing on maintaining self-esteem or enhancing self-gratification, can be counter-intuitive and counter-productive. Dickinson summarises the recent work of Tim Dyson by saying “[b]ehavioral response to the threat of global climate change simply does not match its unique potential for cumulative, adverse, and potentially chaotic outcomes” (ibid).

Based on the evidence of the most frequently used arguments for dismissing the scientific consensus regarding climate change, I collated the findings of my research and which might be summarised as follows:

Having analysed the output of such UK-based Conservative think-tanks (CTTs), along with that of scientists, economists, journalists, politicians and others, it would appear that the majority of CTTs dispute the existence of a legitimate consensus, whereas the majority of sceptical journalists focus on conspiracy theories; the majority of scientists and economists equate environmentalism with a new religion; and politicians and others analysed appear equally likely to cite denialist or economic arguments for inaction.

As I find myself saying quite frequently, the most persistent arguments against taking action to mitigate climate change are the economic ones.

However, as all the authors mentioned have suggested, or at least inferred, I think it is undoubtedly true that the most potent obstacle to people facing up to the truth of climate change is our psychological reluctance to accept responsibility for something that is obviously deteriorating – namely our environment!

Nevertheless, all is not yet lost.  We do not all need to go back to living in the Dark Ages to prevent societal and environmental collapse but we do need to accept a couple of fundamental realities:

  1. Burning fossilised carbon is trashing the planet. Therefore, fossil fuel use must be substituted in every possible process as rapidly as possible. Unfortunately, it is not substitutable in the most damaging process of all; aviation.  That merely increases the urgency of substituting where we can (i.e. power, lighting and temperature control).
  2. Poor people in developing countries have a legitimate right to aspire to having a more comfortable life but the planet definitely cannot cope with 7 to 10 billion people living like we do in the “developed” countries.

Once we accept these realities, we will learn to use less fossil fuels and, if we can become self-sufficient using renewable energy sources, we can have a flat-screen TV in every room and leave them on standby and the A/C on full power 24/7 and still have a clear conscience. However, we must get off fossil fuels ASAP.

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I am indebted to Martin for writing such an insightful analysis of how we all have to change.  Tomorrow, another guest post further exploring the options that face us all as we work towards a sustainable future.  As I opened this post, doing nothing is not an option!