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The last time I mentioned manmade climate change I got a lot of comments telling me it didn't exist (or was nothing much to worry about). The reasons given tended to contradict each other, but the sentiment was shared: we can't agree on why, but we know humans aren't disrupting the climate. That strange pseudo-consensus really confuses me.
Having just read Ben Goldacre's latest article, I thought I'd pass along the link he mentions to realclimate.org which contains a refutation of the most common reasons people give for discounting manmade climate disruption. Maybe, if your favourite reason is on the list you might want to read the rebuttal. Or maybe you'd rather not. Really, the whole thing has me perplexed.
As the Goldacre article puts it: "why do roughly half the people in this country not believe in man-made climate change, when the overwhelming majority of scientists do?" And I can't believe the answer is that non-scientists are just better at understanding this stuff.
On the other hand, Dara O'Briain had a much more inflammatory (and amusing) point of view on Radio 4's The Infinite Monkey Cage. He thought that people don't like to be told their opinion isn't valid. They feel they have a right to be heard. And they therefore object to disciplines where the opinion of a partly-informed layman is considered worthless.
I've also heard the view that until Governments take this stuff seriously and start making big changes, non-technical voters aren't likely to believe their empty words on the subject. And Ben Goldacre adds that anyway we don't trust governments to tell us the truth. They sometimes lie about the big stuff (like wars) and they fired Prof. Nutt for voicing the truth out of turn.
Whatever's going on here, I hope that either the sceptics can hurry up and explain to the climate scientists where they've been going wrong or the opposite can happen. Because when the well-informed experts say we're in deep trouble, it doesn't make me feel better to learn that millions of non-experts disagree; it makes me feel much worse.
Comments: 2
It seems to me that the implications of man-made climate change are so profound for each of us in terms of our everyday life that to take a skeptical stance means that we can rationalise the status quo, which is a much more comfortable place to be. 'There are none so blind as those who choose not to see.' When that refusal to 'see' is motivated by convenience, that is bad enough. When driven by greed or political expediency, then that is truly unforgivable.
Posted by: Gary Dolman on December 14, 2009 11:28 AM
The answer is multi-faceted. Climate science isn't always straightforward or intuitive, and science itself with its constant uncertainty is sometimes difficult for non-scientists to grasp. Educators do a terrible job teaching science, and scientists do a terrible job communicating about science...but even if both scientists and educators did great, there is a well-funded spin machine out there that can confuse people when enough money is at stake (why else would people think that a couple of ambiguous e-mails about some proxy datasets falsify a huge area of study, including THINGS WE CAN ALL SEE WITH OUR OWN EYES?).
The crux of the problem is that we all expect science to "tell us what to do" on an issue like this, and by itself it simply cannot (I say this as a scientist myself). So people argue about science instead of about managing risk, which is the real issue at hand.
Posted by: Lt. Cccyxx on December 14, 2009 05:22 PM