Climate Change Sceptics

Yesterday Rupert Reed , Green councillor from Norwich and lecturer at UEA tweeted that there were more climate change deniers as a percentage of the population in the UK than in any other country including the USA. Now apart from the fact that this is stunningly depressing, it led me to think why do people, some of them educated human beings, doubt the findings of science.

At one level my immediate thought was that some humans are ostriches and just ignore unpleasant facts. Smokers continue to smoke when the medical evidence of it being a major contributor to cancer and heart disease is irrefutable. Some people of faith choose to ignore Darwin's work and bizarrely claim the world is only 10,000 years old. I've felt that many meat eaters choose to ignore famine in the third world because meat production makes feeding the world's population so much harder.

Is this the reason for denying climate change ? It seems clear that those involved in the oil and motor industries have strong motives to denigrate climate science. Their pursuit of profit and power will outweigh any slight concern for the future of the planet. Of course climate change deniers go way beyond that, so what other factors are at work. I'm led to conclude that most politics focuses on the short term, governments are driven to tackle the now in order to get re-elected, and many people only focus on the now because ultimately in the words of Keynes "in the long run we are all dead". Embracing climate change means some unpleasant and inconvenient truths- the need for lifestyles to change, that further prosperity and economic growth will not be able to continue in the industrial world, the fact that less for many may prove to be more sustainable than more.

Now I'm not saying that the these issues dominate the thoughts of the bulk of the population, clearly they don't when they are drip fed a diet of talent shows and reality TV. However I sense that many realise that to tackle climate change requires profound changes and that for many reasons they can not handle it. As a result we are propelled towards ecological disaster.