The ‘Alice in Wonderland’ mechanics of the rejection of (climate) science

Science strives for coherence.

For example, the findings from climate science form a highly coherent body of knowledge that is supported by many independent lines of evidence: greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from human economic activities are causing the global climate to warm and unless GHG emissions are drastically reduced in the near future, the risks from climate change will continue to grow and major adverse consequences will become unavoidable.

People who oppose this scientific body of knowledge because the implications of cutting GHG emissions—such as regulation or increased taxation—threaten their worldview or livelihood cannot provide an alternative view that is coherent by the standards of conventional scientific thinking.

Instead, we suggest that people who reject the fact that the Earth’s climate is changing due to greenhouse gas emissions (or any other body of well-established scientific knowledge) oppose whatever inconvenient finding they are confronting in piece-meal fashion, rather than systematically, and without considering the implications of this rejection to the rest of the relevant scientific theory and findings.

Hence, claims that the globe “is cooling” can coexist with claims that the “observed warming is natural” and that “the human influence does not matter because warming is good for us.”

Coherence between these mutually contradictory opinions can only be achieved at a highly abstract level, namely that “something must be wrong” with the scientific evidence in order to justify a political position against climate change mitigation.

This high-level coherence accompanied by contradictory subordinate propositions is a known attribute of conspiracist ideation, and conspiracism may be implicated when people reject well-established scientific propositions.

Read the Synthese paper by Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, and Elisabeth Lloyd - “The ‘Alice inWonderland’ mechanics of the rejection of (climate) science: simulating coherence by conspiracism.”

Presenting the facts, exploding the myths

Writer, Dana Nuccitelli.

When I give a presentation and mention the 97% expert consensus on human-caused global warming, I’m often asked, “what’s the deal with the other 3%?”. These are the publishing climate scientists who argue that something other than humans is responsible for the majority of global warming, although their explanations are often contradictory and don’t withstand scientific scrutiny.

A few months ago, the world’s largest private sector coal company went to court, made its best scientific case against the 97% expert consensus, and lost. One of coal’s expert witnesses was University of Alabama at Huntsville climate scientist Roy Spencer - a controversial figure who once compared those with whom he disagreed to Nazis, and has expressed his love for Fox News.

Last week, Spencer wrote a white paper for the Texas Public Policy Institute (TPPI) outlining the contrarian case against climate concerns. TPPI is part of the web of denial, having received substantial funding from both the tobacco and fossil fuel industries, including $65,000 from ExxonMobil and at least $911,499 from Koch-related foundations since 1998, and over $3 million from “dark money” anonymizers Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund.

Read Dana Nuccitelli’s story in The Guardian - “These are the best arguments from the 3% of climate scientist 'skeptics.' Really.”

A life loaded with contradictions

Life of the climate activist is loaded with contradictions.

Much of what they do is about helping people better understand the dynamics of our climate’s disruption and within that explain that effective mitigation of atmosphere damaging emissions arises from human behaviour.

That behaviour of the activist is strangely contradictory. Simply doing what they do is the behaviour of which they are critical.

Living and working within the modern living is energy intensive and to reach a point where a person’s life is effectively carbon-neutral, they are forced to become remote to the lifestyle they really want to change.

That person may live a wonderfully environmentally benign life, but buried in their bolthole, they have little influence on the wider society, except for a small circle of friends and acquaintances.

The idea that we should live the life we want to see others pursue is a wonderful ideal, but to live an absolutely carbon-neutral life could only be achieved by abandoning modern life completely.

Most climate scientists and other eager to broadcast their message far and wide employ the carbon-costly benefits of modern life to engage with others in the hope that humanity, generally, can reach some sort of conclusion about how the world can, and should approach this rapidly unfolding difficulty.

An ABC story headed: “Rocket blasts off with NASA satellite to help track climate change” tells of how NASA has launched a satellite to help with weather forecasting and tracking global climate change by measuring how much water is in the Earth's soil.

That in itself is a weird contradiction – everything about a rocket is energy-intensive from the embedded energy to the massive amounts of fossil fuels it takes to get the satellite into orbit.

So the contradiction dilemma continues – we know climate change is real,, we know is happening and we know it has the potential threaten life on earth, but yet a little like the Easter Islanders who built and worshipped the very idols whose creation threatened them, we continue to build and employ the technology and ideas that has taken us to where we are now.

It was Einstein who said something about insanity being found among those who used the same ideas repeatedly while expecting a different result. The technology that gave us rockets is what disrupted earth’s climate system and yet will still employ it as we search for answers.

Wrestling with an implacable enemy

Climate change is an implacable adversary.

Professor Stephen Howes,
director of the Development
 Policy Centre at the
ANU has a different view.

More than two centuries of doing what it is we do, has left nature a rather angry beast.

Acting with little interest in or care for the consequences, we raided nature’s pantry with abandon and considered warnings about depletion and atmospheric damage caused by the use of fossil fuels as unimportant and not worthy of our interest or further research.

Now, as we tick through the years of the 21^st Century, the legacy of reckless and almost decadent use of fossil fuels has emerged as humanity’s most pressing dilemma.

Many around the world broke into a strange muted applause when it was announced the China and America had agreed, after months of secret negotiations, to each to take positive steps to mitigate and so slow greenhouse gas emissions.

Suddenly, there was joy as the as the world’s two largest economies decided to take positive steps to slow the causes of climate change.

An ABC story headed: “Climate change academics call for Australia to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 15pc by 2020” tells us that the U.S. and China decision has increased pressure on the Australian Government to do more.

It says: “But a growing chorus of climate change academics are calling on the Australian Government to concentrate first on what it is doing before 2020.

“They want the Government to lift its greenhouse gas reduction targets from 5 to 15 per cent by then”, the story reports.

However, what is happening and what is needed are contradictory.

Although any move that ameliorates the world’s emissions is to be applauded, any move the falls short of the total abolition of greenhouse gas emissions is sadly inadequate.

To have any real chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change, the world’s carbon dioxide emissions need to be zero by 2050 and then go into a negative stage, meaning we need to be taking greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.

Arriving at zero emissions is problematic in the extreme and then achieving a negative stance seems, from here, nigh impossible.

Celebrations about the U.S./China agreement are reasonable, but they must tempered by the reminder that they are only the first of many processes which we don’t understand, either technically or socially.