Why are so many people sceptical about climate change? 

August 30, 2009
By: David Walker, Executive Officer

In the talk-back session on local ABC radio a few weeks back, a ‘straw poll’ of listeners who called in showed about two climate-change ‘sceptics’ for every person who indicated that they accept that something nasty is happening to the climate. This is in spite of the fact that there is a clear consensus among climate scientists (more than 90%) that our climate is warming up at an unnatural rate, and that our rapidly increasing level of industrial pollution is the cause.  A check on the scientists who take the contrary view show many of them to be closely associated with industries who continue to profit by causing the pollution that seems to be the problem.

Governments around the world have universally accepted the fact of climate change. So why are there so many doubters?

An interesting piece in a recent eConnect newsletter (eConnect is aimed at educating and communicating about science, natural resource management and the environment), gives a few pointers.

It refers to an article by US risk communication expert Peter Sandman, who suggests that there are three types of sceptic or ‘denier’:

1. Strategic - people who deny climate change to protect their job, business, position, relationship. I suspect that foremost among these are those associated with the fossil fuel industry and lobby, whose jobs and profits depend on their continued freedom to carry on their ‘business-as-usual’.
    
2. Intellectual - people who genuinely disagree with the science through their own logic processes. To my mind, this group probably includes many geologists, whose world view is tied to geological eras, and who point out that climates have changed before. That’s true enough, but as I wrote in a previous column, this view fails to explain the extreme rate (from a geological time perspective) that change seems to be happening currently. 
   
   Perhaps this group also includes many farmer sceptics, who are keen observers of the weather, and who also say “we’ve seen droughts and hot years before, so nothing’s changed”. However, the fact that (according to the NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences) all eight of the hottest years for global temperature have been since 1998, and 14 of the hottest years ever have been since 1990 is hardly “just variability”.
    
3. Psychological - people who deny climate change because it challenges their beliefs or behaviours or because emotionally they just can’t cope with the idea. It certainly is an uncomfortable thought – that our rising standard of living is changing our climate, and therefore the way we live.

Strategic and intellectual deniers get the most press, but Sandman suggests that psychological deniers, especially those in emotional denial, represent a much larger proportion of the population.

If climate change is upon us, and some of its impacts are indeed going to be very hard to turn around, then what should we be doing about it?

The first thing is to try and learn and understand what’s happening and what the implications are. Therefore the 2 aims of communication about climate change need to be:

• help people mitigate / reduce the process of climate change
• help people adapt to inevitable climate change effects

If we as a community are well-informed, then we are better able to respond, and change our activities and behaviour. Then we will minimise our impacts on our own lifestyles, and the world around us.

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