Last week, amid the cacophony of reactions to Greta Thunberg’s appearance before the United Nations Climate Action Summit, a group of self-proclaimed “prominent scientists” sent a registered letter to UN Secretary-General António Guterres. The letter, headed “There is no climate emergency”, urged Guterres to follow:
…a climate policy based on sound science, realistic economics and genuine concern for those harmed by costly but unnecessary attempts at mitigation.
The group, supported by 75 Australian business and industry figures, along with others around the world, obviously rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. But this missive displays remarkably different tactics to those previously used to stymie climate action.
The language of climate change denial and inaction has transformed. Outright science denial has been replaced by efforts to reframe climate change as natural, and climate action as unwarranted.
However, this is just another way of rejecting the facts, and their implications for us. Denial can take many forms.
Shades of denial
The twin phenomena of denial and inaction are related to one another, at least in the context of climate change. They are also complex, both in the general sense of “complicated and intricate”, and in the technical psychological sense of “a group of repressed feelings and anxieties which together result in abnormal behaviour”.
In his book States of Denial, the late psychoanalytic sociologist Stanley Cohen described three forms of denial. Although his framework was developed from analysing genocide and other atrocities, it applies just as well to our individual and collective inaction in the face of the overwhelming scientific evidence of human-induced climate change.
The first form of denial is literal denial. It is the simple, conscious, outright rejection that something happened or is happening – that is, lying. One Nation senators Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts, among others, have at one time or another maintained this position – outright denial that climate change is happening (though Senator Hanson now might accept climate change but denies any human contribution to it).
Interestingly, former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull yesterday blamed “climate change deniers” in his own government for blocking any attempt to deal with climate change, resulting paradoxically in higher energy prices today.
It is tempting to attribute outright denial to individual malice or stupidity, and that may occasionally be the case. More worrying and more insidious, though, is the social organisation of literal denial of climate change. There is plenty of evidence of clandestine, orchestrated lying by vested interests in industry. If anyone is looking for a conspiracy in climate change, this is it – not a collusion of thousands of scientists and major science organisations.
The second form of denial is interpretive denial. Here, people do not contest the facts, but interpret them in ways that distort their meaning or importance. For example, one might say climate change is just a natural fluctuation or greenhouse gas accumulation is a consequence, not a cause, of rising temperatures. This is what we saw in last week’s letter to the UN.
The most insidious form of denial
The third and most insidious form is implicatory denial. The facts of climate change are not denied, nor are they interpreted to be something else. What is denied or minimised are the psychological, political, and moral implications of the facts for us. We fail to accept responsibility for responding; we fail to act when the information says we should.
Of course, some are unable to respond, financially or otherwise, but for many, implicatory denial is a kind of dissociation. Ignoring the moral imperative to act is as damning a form of denial as any other, and arguably is much worse.
The treatment of Thunberg, and the vigour with which people push away reminders of that which they would rather not deal with, illustrate implicatory denial. We are almost all guilty, to some extent, of engaging in implicatory denial. In the case of climate change, implicatory denial allows us to use a reusable coffee cup, recycle our plastic or sometimes catch a bus, and thus to pretend to ourselves that we are doing our bit.
Almost none of us individually, or we as a nation, has acted as we ought on the science of climate change. But that does not mean we can’t change how we act in the future. Indeed, there are some recent indications that, as with literal denial, implicatory denial is becoming an increasingly untenable psychological position.
While it is tempting, and even cathartic, to mock the shrill responses to Thunberg from literal and interpretive deniers, we would do well to ponder our own inherent biases and irrational responses to climate change.
For instance, we tend to think we are doing more for the planet than those around us (and we can’t all be right). We also tend to think literal deniers are much more common in our society than they in fact are.
These are just two examples of common strategies we use to deny our own responsibility and culpability. They make us feel better about what little we actually do, or congratulate us for accepting the science. But they are ultimately self-defeating delusions. Instead of congratulating ourselves on agreeing with the basic scientific facts of climate change, we need to push ourselves to action.
HT/Clyde Spencer
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I count myself as a Climate Change Denier in as much as nothing in the climate has changed to a condition that hasn’t existed before. I deny that CO2 is at unprecedented or dangerous levels. But I don’t deny the existence of the LIA, Medieval, Roman and Minoan Warm periods. Nor do I deny the existence of the Younger Dryas.
I terms of outright denial I think I’m denying less about the climate than the 97% concensus, or Medieval Warm Period Deniers as they should be called.
Those whose views are supported by the facts did not need pop-psychology , those whose views are not find great comfort in calling others ‘evil or stupid’ rather than prove how they are wrong .
It is a curious feature that every phycology paper that’s been presented at WUWT over the years, universally denigrate everyone who doesn’t agree with them, as being stupid.
How does that come out of a phycology department? What are they teaching in there?
Their first mistake is telling themselves they are doing anything akin to science.
Their belief that they are smart and well informed has very little evidence backing it.
All those who worry that human CO2 leads to catastrophic climate change are reality deniers.
Typical liberal projection, as usual, they project their own denial on to others to create scapegoats. Chilling.
I deny that we are seeing any unusual weather or climate.
As others have pointed out, the true deniers are those who “forget” that sea level was much higher during this interglacial. As far as I know, there is no dispute about that.
” … sent a registered letter … ”
Registered! Will they stop at nothing?
The longer the scam continues the more chance for skeptics taking hold. Witness the “climate emergency” meme being generated because they know they are losing ground to logic, common sense, and empirical evidence.
The worst denialists are those who deny that all the predictions made by those prophets of doom dressed in lab coats, aka publicly paid climatologists, have gone wrong. That is the worst denial.
And one definition of madness is: climate scientists tweaking their computer climate models, each time expecting the world to explode.
Charles The Moderator,
The article you have copied above says,
“The group, supported by 75 Australian business and industry figures, along with others around the world, obviously rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. But this missive displays remarkably different tactics to those previously used to stymie climate action.
The language of climate change denial and inaction has transformed. Outright science denial has been replaced by efforts to reframe climate change as natural, and climate action as unwarranted.
However, this is just another way of rejecting the facts, and their implications for us. Denial can take many forms.”
NO1 Absolutely not! That is falsehood.
I am one of the hundreds of signatories who has NOT “reframed” anything, for decades has consistently said climate has always changed, and has consistently pointed out that there is no evidence that human activity is affecting global climate change that has always happened naturally.
For example, this item I wrote a decade ago states all these matters.
http://allaboutenergy.net/environment/item/2208-letter-to-senator-james-inhofe-about-relying-on-ipcc-richard-courtney-uk
Incidentally, nothing in the link has become dated.
Richard
Thank you, but I’ll pass on the bottom line invitation to read the original article. The above summary alone provided enough fluff to last me for the next year or so.
This is article is a good example of one of my principles of pragmatic environmentalists (http://wp.me/p8hgeb-1v): “The more vociferous or louder the claims made by a stakeholder in any environmental issue, the more likely that the stakeholder is guilty of the same thing. Gary (https://rosebyanyothernameblog.wordpress.com/2016/12/21/reprisals-against-doe-scientists/) also observed this: “My experience is that the things people complain about loudly are so very frequently the same things of which they also are guilty. The inability to see oneself realistically is a fascinating human trait.”
Slightly OT, but confirming hypocrisy.
A woman in my neighborhood called me to day for advice regarding using her 6HP gasoline generator to charge her mobile phone and iPad. She has no electric connection to her home. A week earlier she lectured me about the good of GT and that we needed to stop using fossil fuels.
I advised her to sell the generator, buy a solar panel, an AGM battery, a MPPT regulator and eventually an inverter giving genuine sine wave for other appliances.
Response: It is more practical with the generator.
Typical of alarmists. Sacrifices are for other people, how dare you expect them to sacrifice.
They are the righteous ones and we are evil…
GT?
Greta Thunberg maybe?
Denial is simply a lie and propaganda.
Intended to shut down any actual scientific inquiry and analysis that does not agree with their doomsday ideology.
Sorry – we reject your “denial” propaganda. We insist on actual science, not pretend science that is just sheep’s clothing designed to obscure the propagandists’ wolf.
See – we refuse to play your game. You lose.
Science is a malleable concept that bends and kneels to sociopolitical constructs and priorities of quasi-religious choice and social justice.
No – science does not do that.
Fake science, or pretend science, or “political science”, does.
Crap.
1+1=2 always has and always will
1 + 1 = 2 is not science.
.
1 + 1 = 2 is mathematics.
.
1 + 1 = 10 in binary.
They’re are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who don’t…
I thought there were two types.
Those who can complete a thought.
The 3 top difficulties for software engineers are coming up with good variable names and one off errors.
Believing that to be true is what will eventually destroy them.
Regardless of the demands made by pushing sociopolitical constructs, and the priorities of the quasi-religious and social justice warriors, you cannot change natural law. You can issue laws and edicts to your heart’s content giving the elites the right to fly by leaping into the air and flapping their arms, but they will still fall on their asses if they try.
They can claim climates are changing, but unless real change begins, they are not going to be seated at the table of government for long. The public has a short attention span.
A climate of consensus, models (i.e. hypotheses) lacking skill to hindcast let alone forecast without regular injections of brown matter (“tuning”), and other sociopolitical constructs.
Denial, huh. Another wicked solution? Very monochromatic. Where is the diversity, the colorful labels? Surely a planned projection.
This article implies that people fall into one of three categories. However, some people fall into all categories and even more. Here are categories of climate change understandings (I refrain from calling them beliefs as that implies faith where in fact there is data available for understanding rather than belief):
–Climate change is both natural and anthropogenic
–We don’t know what the optimum temperature of the earth is
–We understand that it is impossible to reduce fossil fuel emissions without harming the economy and peoples livelihood.
–We understand that the Wester World cannot cut CO2 emissions sufficient to counter the emissions of 3rd world countries trying to improve their economic situation
–We understand that intermittent power sources are unreliable and actually may not reduce or may actually increase GHG emissions depending on how you account for all factors involved in their LCA
–We understand that the climate of the past was warmer than that projected by the worst climate models and we understand that no one really know if this would be bad for mankind at all.
The list of reasons for not supporting the CAGW viewpoint is long and distinguished.
As I understand it, God’s (of the Bible) will cannot be denied. God has a plan, and that plan will happen, regardless of mankind’s role in it. What we call “Mother Nature” is God’s will for the environment mankind experiences at any given time, including earthquakes, volcanoes, all cyclonic activity, asteroid impacts, etc., etc. God is sovereign in all things. Mankind’s contribution to Mother Nature is dwarfed by Mother Nature, and we can no more change that than we can the orbit of Earth, or save ourselves from death. CAGW is silly talk; but God loves a good laugh, I’m sure. However, I am also confident that He is disappointed that we think it is all about us, when it is all about Jesus.
It’s all about something. It is definitely hubris to the nth degree to think that we are affecting climate in any significant way. There are certainly forces at work controling climate that are far more powerful than puny mankind. Cosmic and earthly forces, of which we only have an inkling.
Well said. Ditto.
The Tower of Babel comes to mind. This time with mankind trying to exceed and knowing better than God.
It didn’t end well then. And it will not end well this time either.
‘Clandestine, orchestrated lying’ – are they referring to Climategate?
X^) +10
Which denier type is the Atlantic Ocean?
and that fusion ball in the sky?
and the Pacific Ocean?
and which denier type observes these charts and cycles relative to agenda science and agenda politics?
“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”
~ Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, Jan 1849 [in Les Guêpes]
Literally “The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.”
In English, a true translation (as opposed to your correct literal one) is:
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
One of the many tactics the Climate Liars use is their use of the phrase “climate change”, which for them can mean both natural climate change, which of course is real, and their mythical, made-up “manmade climate change”. They deliberately conflate the two, inferring that they are one and the same. It’s just another in their miriad ways of lying.
The alarmists deliberately confuse the meaning of climate change.
Most of the time when alarmist talk about climate change, they are really talking about human-caused climate change. So, us overworked skeptics have to continually correct them, or require them to spell out exactly what they are talking about.
Confusion is the alarmists friend. So they sow a lot of it.
I think most are so confused they don’t understand it themselves, just point and shriek, Gretins.
Is there even a generally accepted operational definition of what counts as “climate?” Surely it would need to encompass regions and what counts as a region. The climate at the top of the hill I live on is likely a couple of degrees warmer than that at the pond a couple of hundred feet lower. The forest is different than the cornfields, Hawaii than Minnesota, etc.
How many years of averaged weather does it take to consider a description in a region to be “climate.” 30 you say? Why? Are intervals of climate to be overlapping, that is if 30 years is the agreed length of time to determine climate, shall we count each day, week, month, year, or decade as a new interval to be compared to the previous intervals to determine whether or not their is change?
What are the determinants of what counts as a “change” in these descriptions? Don’t we run into a problem in that the proxies we must of necessity use back more than even a hundred years in most of the area of the globe are nothing like the measurements we have now? If we don’t know how much variability there was in the past, how do we even decide what counts as change?
Seems to me that these questions and many more need some answers before one gets on a soap box and makes statements about “climate change.”
Climatology is an actual science, climate scientism notwithstanding:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classification
They clearly, undeniably, charge their targets with genocide denial, i.e. Hol-o-caust denial. They use a book about that, as the undeniably clearly state.
When these people are pushing policies to rid the planned of 5 billion people, the optimum as Dr. Schellnhuber CBE often says, that would make Goebbels blush.
Greta’s handler prefers 500 million worthies. Not known if he was awarded a Commander of the British Empire CBE for that.
Now take Bank of England Chief Mark Carney with the Green Finance Initiative, GFI, better called the Task force for murder. Appeared twice around the IMF/World-Bank meetings; the subject of both events looks like global digital currency. At the IMF HQ1 at 10:00 Wednesday morning Oct. 16, Carney, Obama advisor Jason
Furman, and David Marcus (head of Facebook’s “Calibra” investment fund) are speaking on “Big Tech and the Future of Finance.” The second event is at Harvard’s Kennedy School of government: Carney and Larry Summers in “a conversation on the new international order” at 6:00 p.m. Wednesday.
This kind of bankers dictatorship will cause massive population reduction, for polite company, if tolerated. Of course they need bankers boys and girls to carry it out.
Mod: ye seemed to have missed the first post…
For the last 3 million years Earth has gone into and out of ice ages. Sheets miles thick covering the northern continents. To warm periods, warmer than today after this so called Anthropogenic Global Warming period of the last 50 years. In fact, the warming of the previous 50 years and the hundred before it, were identical to the most recent. From 1900 through 1945 the warming slope is identical to the 1980 through 2005 slope. After which it flattens.
Before you can convince me we are causing the warming, you must prove to why 1940 through 1945 and 1980 through 2005 are not caused by the same things happening.
Looking back through the proxies, CO2 rises after temperatures rise. A lag of a couple hundred years. Proven by the very Ice Cores used to prove global warming. The little Ice age ended a couple hundred years ago and we have been warming ever since. The overturning of the CO2 in the atmosphere, as proven by the Mauna Loa observations, again used to prove Global Warming, show that the cycle of CO2 is far greater than the input of CO2 from human activity.
Before you can convince me we are the sole cause in increasing CO2, you have to prove that it is not our coming out of the little ice age and the ocean out gassing the CO2 that is causing the bulk of the increase.
When we look back at historical records, there was a medieval warming period, and before that the Roman Climate optimum, and the Bronze age climate optimum and Holocene Climate Optimum, each one going back in time being warmer that the more recent one.
Before you can convince me that a bit of warming is going to be a disaster, you have to prove that these human flourishing periods of time where the climate was warmer than today were actually disastrous.
Anyways. You have a large amount of work to do, and you are starting from a position of weakness. As I have watched over the years as the global warming believers and scammers have cheated, lied and otherwise lowered their credibility.
Changing past temperatures always in one direction, to show the past cooler than it really was. Changing present temperatures to seem warmer than they really were. Fake warming rate.
Off topic but maybe not.
The Excommunication of Susan Crockford
Polar bear expert purged from the University of Victoria.
“An accomplished scientist and role model for young women has been expelled from the academic community. Like geologist Bob Carter before her, Susan Crockford has been stripped of her Adjunct Professor status by a university with which she has a long history. Why? Because she promotes facts and eschews climate activism.”
https://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2019/10/16/the-excommunication-of-susan-crockford/
“”… blocking any attempt to deal with climate change, resulting paradoxically in higher energy prices today.”
The above is just the beginning. I imagine that as the real price effects of “renewables” on the costs of energy become more obvious (e.g., California, South Australia, Germany, California, etc.) statements like that above will become more widespread. The radical left will of course attempt to get out ahead of any energy price increases in order to convince people that, as stated above, the increases are due to the ‘climate deniers’ fighting climate change, not due to their own policies of installing more renewable.
The radical left have learned well. As stated in ‘The crown of a life’ by Isa Blagden (1869): “If a lie is only printed often enough, it becomes a quasi-truth, and it becomes an article of belief, a dogma, and men will die for it.”