Is it about the Science?

Is it really about the science?  When it comes to Climate change people continually argue the Science or ‘science’ and it leads nowhere.  A climate denier (and yes I will continue to use the term ‘denier’ because it is accurate) is not a sceptic.  Sceptics are open to new information.  In my experience deniers are not.  A denier finds some graph that shows the earth has not warmed that they found on a denier site, or FOX news, or YouTube and choose to believe it.

This is in spite of, on the ground, real world experiences where ice caps are melting, cruise ships are now able to access parts of the arctic not accessible before, and the Inuit find that their food sources are changing because animals are moving further north for cooler areas as their traditional areas warm up. In response I, or someone else, provides a different graph from a reputable scientist who has studied the field for 50 years showing that the earth has been warming for decades.  They don’t look at it and send back a link to a YouTube video claiming there is more snow now than ever

The point is that this is not about science or even climate change.  It never was, so science is redundant.  It’s about values and fear and it would be very rare that science could beat either of them.

Various advanced societies have all had ‘limiting factors’.  For the Chinese in the Golden Age it was water, for the Plains Indian it was the Buffalo, and for the western world in particular and much of the rest of the world, it is oil (fossil fuels in general).  Fossil fuels are not evil.  If they disappeared tomorrow we would be in a mess, just like the Chinese when the water dried up, or the Plains Indians when the buffalo were decimated.  Fossil fuels got us this far and have been generally beneficial but one of the negative side effects is Global Warming.  We have the opportunity to transition to new forms of power now and obviously it won’t happen overnight (though it needs to happen fairly quickly),  which is why they call it a transition, and this transition frightens many people.

It frightens people because it threatens values.  So what is the main value?  Capitalism and anything that supports capitalism is good.  Anything that might undermine capitalism is bad.  What has always been the biggest threat to capitalism?  Communism.  What is a softer form of communism? Socialism.  Socialism and communism are considered left wing.  Therefore anything remotely left wing in ideology (like universal healthcare) or embraced by the left (climate change) is bad because it’s the start of the slippery slope towards communism and part of a larger agenda to undermine capitalism and destroy the west.  Before you get all technical on me, I am being relatively simplistic here for clarity sake.

What is capitalism? ‘An economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state’. Capitalism and free enterprise are not quite the same but they often go hand-in-hand and people generally make no distinction between them. 

Capitalism has probably improved the lifestyles of a large percentage of the Earth’s population.  Unfortunately through wealth, power and influence a small group of people have managed to increase their wealth astronomically while others slip further into poverty.  That small group, which includes individuals and corporations, have managed to swing legislation in their favour to avoid tax, increase their wealth and spread misinformation in relation to climate change wherever it might directly threaten their wealth or their ideology.  This is not a conspiracy theory, it is simply how humans behave and how they have been climbing to the top of the heap since the early days of civilisation.

As an anthropologist I am more interested in why people believe what they believe which is why I rarely send scientific information to deniers any more (because I know it has no impact), but I am interested in their values. 

In my experience of dealing with deniers over the last five years I have found that in about 85-90% of deniers, beneath the surface of their opposition to the idea of AGW and Climate change, is a belief in a grand conspiracy involving the UN, globalisation, and a variety of shadowy organisations with an agenda of undermining the west, and capitalism, with a left wing agenda which will eventually result in a totalitarian dictatorship.  On the one hand there is some reality to their belief.  Communism has always had a desire to destroy capitalism and has not been secretive about it, but the rest of it is a stretch without much proof (though deniers can find proof anywhere).

But no wonder they believe it when they are constantly being manipulated by misinformation spewed out by right wing think tanks and fellow travellers (libertarians, neoliberalism, etc) who produce edited videos.  One example is where the CEO of Pfizer says he wants to reduce the world population by 50% by 2023.  The reality is that before the video was manipulated he said by 2023 they would reduce the number of people who could not afford their medicines by 50%.  Pointing this out to deniers/conspiracy theorists has no effect whatsoever because the fake information fits their belief system.

A genuine conspiracy of fossil fuel companies deliberately hiding their knowledge of global warming and spending millions to convince people that global warming is a hoax, is dismissed or ignored, in spite of the massive amount of evidence supporting it.

It is interesting that deniers are a spectrum.  At one end you have a small percentage who are dubious about human caused climate change because they see the measures needed to combat it as threatening their livelihood, or the status quo in general, and don’t believe it is affordable.  As you slide along the spectrum you find increasing belief in conspiracies. 

The basic one is as I described above, but further along it gets combined with more and more conspiracies, usually ‘Covid is a hoax’, 9/11 was an inside job, stolen elections, elite paedophiles kidnapping children for their blood, and so on.  At the far end you have the Flat Earthers who believe most, or all, of the above conspiracies as well as believing the earth is flat and we never went to the moon.  I’m sure climate deniers hate the idea of being lumped in with Flat Earthers but there is much commonality, usually based on distrust of government, mainstream media and fear of the future if they don’t speak out about the insidious conspiracy that is coming. They also tend to be religious to some degree.

So what’s to be done?  Though unfortunate the extreme weather that has been occurring around the globe has made a great number of people start to consider the impact of climate change, whether a particular weather event was caused by climate change or not.  Governments, the military, insurance companies, local councils and the UN are taking AGW seriously.  The battle has not been won as yet because the fossil fuel industry, in spite of a certain amount of greenwashing, are still fighting AGW.

But for those people scared for capitalism and the demise of the west, the movement towards green energy is a perfect field for capitalism.  Look at Tesla, look at all the companies poised to make millions from this new economy, the jobs created, the entrepreneurial opportunities for sustainable solutions.  Marx was wrong about most things but one thing he said that was spot on was that Capitalism will always absorb radical movements that are viewed as threatening to undermine it. 

If you consider that Climate Change is a radical movement then that is what is happening right now, so those scared of the way the world is moving have little to fear.  It will likely be business as usual for capitalism (whether that’s a good thing or not), with the demise of some industries and the rise of others.  Instead of hanging on like the horse and carriage people of the early nineteenth century they should be looking to up-skill and take advantage of the new opportunities.  

Though we should have compassion for the fact that the deniers have been lied to and manipulated we should also remember that it’s a choice as to what people believe.  This inability to discern fact from fiction has real world consequences and it is denier type thinking that led to the attack on the US Capitol building.

So even though it has little effect I still encourage people to continue to combat ‘science’ with actual Science, even though it has little impact on the deniers, because, firstly, it may have an impact on fence sitters but more importantly, back in the 1930’s a group of misguided people in jackboots, cherry picked science to create their own ‘science’ and it resulted in a world war and the death of millions.  If more people stood up to them they might never have gotten so far.