Why They Deny
What’s going on in climate skeptics’ deluded heads?
by Paul Dechene
Oh, you climate deniers have been on a tear lately. You’re all puffed up with self-importance. Bloated by a few victories.
Bravo, gentlemen!
Thanks to your efforts, support for climate science is sliding and the hopes that there’ll be any global action in time to slow the planet’s heating are all but lost. Good thing I’m heavily invested in hip waders.
Nice work! But I have to ask: why’d you do it?
Why
do all you climate deniers risk your reputations defending positions utterly at odds with science and reason?
Much has been made of your ties to the oil and coal lobbies, but can you really be doing it just for the money?
George Marshall, the founder of the Climate Outreach and Information Network, the UK’s leading climate communications charity, doesn’t think so.
“To say these people are paid for by the oil industry is rather ignoring the point there’s a lot of environmental organizations that take money from oil companies,” says Marshall.
“The fact that people take money from oil companies does not in itself make them corrupt. There’s lots of reasons why you might want to work
with corporations.”
He suspects your motivations are less venal and may be related to a kind of deranged careerism. Marshall notes that the most prominent of your kind are almost all men — men whose careers weren’t terribly noteworthy until you threw in with the adoring denialist hordes.
Alternately, some of you are men who are nearing (or at) retirement and looking for a way to stay in the game.
“George Monbiot wrote a piece in which he thinks this is related to mortality fear,” says Marshall. “But I think there is a thing that happens with men, especially as they get older. They look back on their lives and think on what they’ve achieved.
“If they are very argumentative driven, very self-willed men, you can see that for some, the appeal of going completely against the flow is very beguiling. Especially when the rewards are quite significant.
“And the status rewards are not to be sniffed at,” he says.
You can start out as a third-rate academic and by taking a stand against climate science, he says, your profile can be suddenly raised in certain well-funded circles.
“You can be in a situation of writing leaders for national newspapers, of speaking at keynote conferences, of dining with powerful and influential people,” Marshall says. “This stuff is very potent for people who in any way feel that their life has not achieved everything they’d have liked it to.”
“You get somebody like Lord Monckton for example,” says Marshall, referring to the climate “expert” the Frontier Centre for Public Policy brought to Regina in October of 2009.
“His life has been marked by a low level of achievement. His life has been one long series of disasters, actually,” Marshall says. “Not the least being a little business he ran selling a game — a puzzle — which almost pushed him to bankruptcy.
“He’s in a category I’d call egotistical, ego-driven denier. He’s a fantasist. He’s somebody who constantly fantasizes about and distorts his own life story based on what he thinks makes the best impression.
“If I was in the world of climate change denial,” Marshall says later, “I’d keep a very safe distance from Monckton because he is capable of saying such huge whoppers.”
Ah, Monckton. The battiest of a bad lot. It’s a pity that the media and public can’t see through this rogues’ gallery of failed men and aging cranks.
But Tim Kasser, a psychology professor at Knox College and author of
The High Price of Materialism and
Psychology and Consumer Culture, sees a psychological explanation behind the public’s willingness to listen to all this climate denial nonsense.
“The very short answer,” says Kasser, “is a lot of it has to do with identity dynamics and how people respond to evidence that conflicts with cherished parts of their identity.”
He points to several foundational assumptions of western society that leave us vulnerable to the climate deniers’ siren song, chief among them being the idea that consumerism and economic growth can solve all our problems.
“It’s clear that, as much as our government seems to be trying to tell us and business is trying to tell us we can green consume our way out of [climate change], it’s obvious that’s not the case.” says Kasser. “That spins in opposition to how we’ve been raised in our culture to believe that our worth as people depends upon how much money we make.”
Further complicating matters, says Kasser, is our desire to believe ourselves to be good people.
“Climate science suggests [people’s] behaviours are destroying the earth,” says Kasser. “If they accept that climate change is real, they also have to accept that they’re engaging in behaviours which conflict with their conception of themselves as good, caring people.”
To overcome all this psychology, Kasser believes scientists and environmental advocates are going to have change the way they communicate with the public — that is, if they’re serious about drowning out the misinformation.
Making the science even stronger isn’t going to cut it anymore.
“What we need to do is pay more attention to the emotional state that people are in when they’re hearing our data,” he continues, “and recognize that this data is scary and when people are scared they’re not more likely to listen to the data but less.”
But Kasser notes that if changing western society’s core values fails, there’s one last way in which people will ultimately be convinced that the climate is changing.
“Once Florida is under water and once we’ve got droughts threatening our food system and all the rest — eventually there comes a point where even the most die-hard identity falls to the data,” he says.
DASTARDLY DENIERS
A study out of Stanford shows that climate change contrarians account for only three per cent of the scientific community. What’s more, the expertise of those climate deniers is “vastly overshadowed” by the scientists who defend the consensus on human-caused global warming. Despite this, climate deniers loom large in the media, achieving a prominence disproportionate to their credibility. Here’s a rundown on five of the most prominent climate deniers you may come across.
/Paul Dechene
Name: Tim Ball
Fame: His bio used to state he was Canada’s first climatology PhD until that was disputed in the letters section of the
Calgary Herald. Ball also vociferously denies being backed by the oil industry despite the fact that most of his paycheques come from oil-industry-backed think tanks.
Game: Proponent of the global-warming-has-stopped-and-the-Earth-is-cooling school of thought, except when he is arguing that global warming will be good for Canada.
Shame: In an April talk at the University of Victoria, Ball claimed Milankovitch Cycles (which measure the Earth’s orbit and tilt) and volcanism are not included in IPCC models. In the audience, climatology grad students who, unlike Ball, actually run climate models pointed out both factors are standard parameters in IPCC models.
Name: Ian Plimer
Fame: Author of many climate-deniers’ favourite tome,
Heaven and Earth. While not a climatologist himself, Plimer is on the boards of directors of three mining corporations.
Game: The Gish Gallop, a rapid-fire debating style that involves evading questions by constantly shifting topics and arguments. Named for creationist Duane Gish.
Shame: Soundly thrashed on Australian TV by
Guardian science columnist George Monbiot. Monbiot showed that, in his book, Plimer was wrong about global warming ending in 1998 and about the CO
2 contribution of volcanoes. Plimer’s response was to squirm, evade and ramble off on digressions.
Name: Freeman Dyson
Fame: Renowned for groundbreaking work in quantum field theory, solid state physics and nuclear engineering. Posited several famous sci-fi concepts such as the Dyson sphere and the Dyson tree.
Game: Considers himself an aging heretic and uses his credentials as a physicist to get a hearing on the climate change issue. He concedes that human activity affects the climate but believes climate models are unreliable and that the impact of human-produced CO
2 is exaggerated.
Shame: While he did some work on climatology in the late 1970s, several climate scientists have politely pointed out that his current proclamations on the subject reveal he hasn’t kept up on climate research much since then.
Name: Steven Milloy
Fame: When he isn’t running the website Junkscience.com, he’s a columnist for Fox News, a paid advocate for ExxonMobil and an adjunct scholar for the Cato Institute.
Game: Either fronts or controls from the background more organizations than you can count — several of which he runs out of his own home.
Shame: Milloy’s connection to the tobacco industry was a big embarrassment for his employers at Fox. In 2006, a journalist reported that Milloy received thousands of dollars from Phillip Morris over the years. He’s also been linked to RJ Reynolds’ Project Breakthrough, a PR effort to link tobacco prevention to alcohol prohibition.
Name: Marc Morano
Fame: Runs ClimateDepot.com. Worked for Senator James Inhofe and was a roving reporter for Rush Limbaugh’s TV show. Morano made his name by leading the Swift Boat charge against John Kerry and used the lessons he learned from that media feeding frenzy to control the message on the Climategate scandal.
Game:
Esquire called Morano “the turd in the punch bowl” when they described his ability to influence media coverage and use the words of climate scientists against them.
Shame: Morano has none. He’s a tireless brawler who dances away from his every misstep and never misses an opportunity for a low blow against an opponent. Morano’s the dirtiest fighter in the climate denier gang. Do not underestimate.
