How much of what is recorded as scepticism about the scientific reality of climate change is simply a desire for it not to be true – or at the very least, for it not to be as bad as the scientists and politicians say? This is a question that cannot easily be answered.

When people are motivated not to believe something, they are also motivated not to acknowledge that their non-belief is anything other than rational. But two fishy tales shed some light on one type of climate change scepticism, and highlight a major challenge for climate change communicators: how do you persuade someone to believe something that they really don’t want to believe?

Fishy Tale 1

Last month in Doha, delegates at the Washington Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species voted against a ban on fishing bluefin tuna. The decision was widely condemned by environmental groups, and in the Guardian, George Monbiot described the refusal to acknowledge the critically endangered state of the bluefin tuna as:

“Olympic-class denial, a flat refusal to look reality in the face.”

Even the most casual follower of Guardian etiquette knows what happens next – when a writer uses the ‘d’ word, the comment threads fill up with red-faced, indignant micro-treatises on the inappropriateness and offensiveness of the term ‘denial’. But on this occasion, the comments were broadly supportive of Monbiot’s stance. Yes, agreed some of the very same posters who usually follow his pieces with streams of bile (hello CheshireRed), overfishing of the bluefin tuna was a serious problem and should be stopped.

Fishy Tale 2

‘Bottomfeeder’, by Taras Grescoe is a book about the overfishing and ultimate demise of many of the world’s fisheries. Combining barely-believable statistics about the collapse of once abundant oceanic ecosystems (some estimates put European fish populations at 5% of their first-recorded levels) and interviews with countless fishermen and traders in ports and harbours around the world, Grescoe builds up a bewildering picture of the world’s seas.

While the evidence is anecdotal rather than statistical, it is striking just how many of the fishermen (and it is primarily men) that Grescoe speaks to are adamant that climate change is warming their seas and driving away their catch. Their belief that the seas are warming is correct – but the biggest impact on the number of fish they are pulling out of the sea is intensive overfishing. Far fewer of Grescoe’s interviewees acknowledge this – blaming seals, foreigners, and global warming before conceding that perhaps their methods of fishing might be having an effect.

What The Fishy Tales Tell Us

So, notorious Guardian message board climate change sceptic CheshireRed solemnly supports the protestors who seek to prevent overfishing of the bluefin tuna, and accepts that those who are responsible for the overfishing are in denial about the cause of the problem – but does not accept the overwhelming scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. Conversely, the fishermen responsible for overfishing happily accept climate change but doubt that their actions have any impact on the state of the world’s fisheries.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that CheshireRed (and his message board buddies) are not sea fishermen, with a vested interest in underplaying the impact of overfishing. However, like most of us in the developed world they have a personal stake in climate change being shown to be a scam – it would eliminate the need to change our high-consuming lifestyles.   Some people – for economic or ideological reasons – have a more formal desire to reject the science of climate change. Sea fishermen have an obvious and powerful motive for downplaying the importance of overfishing as a cause of lower catches. What seems obvious to the rest of us is difficult for them to admit. We are all fishermen when it comes to facing up to climate change.

Without a sensible grasp of the reasons for scepticism, an awful lot of effort could be expended without any discernible effect.

Not all scepticism about climate change is attributable to a ‘fisherman effect’ – but we urgently need a more sophisticated typology of scepticism. Re-framing the terms of the debate and refining our methods of communication will work for some types of scepticism, but not for others. Without a sensible grasp of the reasons for scepticism, an awful lot of effort could be expended without any discernible effect. There is a great deal of interest in how to communicate cimate change more effectively. But how do you go about persuading a fisherman that he needs to catch less fish?

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It’s a great, simple communication by a veteran climate scientist. It’s not going to solve the climate communication problem, but it’s the sort of thing we need to see a lot more of. Short, punchy, accessible writing (and imagery) that scientists and others can use when covering the basic science and beyond…

A Response to Climate Change Denialism

1. The essential findings of mainstream climate change science are firm. This is solid settled science. The world is warming. There are many kinds of evidence: air temperatures, ocean temperatures, melting ice, rising sea levels, and much more. Human activities are the main cause. The warming is not natural. It is not due to the sun, for example. We know this because we can measure the effect of man-made carbon dioxide and it is much stronger than that of the sun, which we also measure.

2. The greenhouse effect is well understood. It is as real as gravity. The foundations of the science are more than 150 years old. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps heat. We know carbon dioxide is increasing because we measure it. We know the increase is due to human activities like burning fossil fuels because we can analyze the chemical evidence for that.

The foundations of the science are more than 150 years old.

3. Our climate predictions are coming true. Many observed climate changes, like rising sea level, are occurring at the high end of the predicted changes. Some changes, like melting sea ice, are happening faster than the anticipated worst case. Unless mankind takes strong steps to halt and reverse the rapid global increase of fossil fuel use and the other activities that cause climate change, and does so in a very few years, severe climate change is inevitable. Urgent action is needed if global warming is to be limited to moderate levels.

4. The standard skeptical arguments have been refuted many times over. The refutations are on many web sites and in many books. For example, natural climate change like ice ages is irrelevant to the current warming. We know why ice ages come and go. That is due to changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, changes that take thousands of years. The warming that is occurring now, over just a few decades, cannot possibly be caused by such slow-acting processes. But it can be caused by man-made changes in the greenhouse effect.

The standard skeptical arguments have been refuted many times over… The warming that is occurring now, over just a few decades, cannot possibly be caused by such slow-acting processes. But it can be caused by man-made changes in the greenhouse effect.

5. Science has its own high standards. It does not work by unqualified people making claims on television or the Internet. It works by scientists doing research and publishing it in carefully reviewed research journals. Other scientists examine the research and repeat it and extend it. Valid results are confirmed, and wrong ones are exposed and abandoned.  Science is self-correcting. People who are not experts, who are not trained and experienced in this field, who do not do research and publish it following standard scientific practice, are not doing science. When they claim that they are the real experts, they are just plain wrong.

6. The leading scientific organizations of the world, like national academies of science and professional scientific societies, have carefully examined the results of climate science and endorsed these results. It is silly to imagine that thousands of climate scientists worldwide are engaged in a massive conspiracy to fool everybody. The first thing that the world needs to do if it is going to confront the challenge of climate change wisely is to learn about what science has discovered and accept it.

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John McNeill, in his seminal book on environmental history, Something New Under the Sun (2000), argued that the emergence of ecological concerns represents a fundamental change in human thinking. “Between 1960 and 1990 a remarkable and potentially earth-shattering (earth-healing?) shift took place,” he writes; “Pollution no longer signified industrial wealth but became a crime against nature and society. … This extraordinary intellectual and cultural shift started in the rich countries but emerged almost everywhere.” McNeill concludes: “The full meaning of this new current will take decades, conceivably centuries, to reveal itself.”

A decade since those words were written, environmentalism has embedded itself still further into mainstream politics and culture. Despite their clear shortcomings, the Copenhagen talks received unprecedented coverage in the world’s media, as the graph below from media researcher Max Boykoff shows. Over the Christmas period, James Cameron’s eco-epic Avatar won over audiences and critics alike, going on to smash box office records. Saci Lloyd’s popular teen fiction novel The Carbon Diaries is being considered for adaptation by Hollywood, whilst bestselling author Ian McEwan’s next novel, Solar, due out in March, is about a climatologist.

So whilst it is incumbent upon cynical activists like me to criticize the slow progress made by politicians in tackling climate change, it’s also important to remind ourselves how far such concerns have penetrated popular culture and thought.

Modern ecology challenges us to rethink our world-views to an extent equal to the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions. During the 16^th century, Copernicus and his followers turned conventional Church teachings on their head by showing that the Earth orbited the Sun, not vice versa, thus unseating humanity from the centre of creation. Darwin – whose bicentenary was celebrated effusively by the scientific community last year – revolutionised our understanding of biology, the natural world, and our own origins, with seismic repercussions for European religion and, later, in genetics and medicine. As Thomas Kuhn wrote in his classic text, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1957), the cultural and political ramifications of these developments stretched far beyond scientific circles:

To describe the innovation initiated by Copernicus as the simple interchange of the position of the Earth and Sun is to make a molehill out of a promontory in the development of human thought. If Copernicus’ proposal had had no consequences outside astronomy, it would have been neither so long delayed nor so strenuously resisted.

Ecology, and the understanding that our species has the power to affect biological and chemical processes on a planetary scale, poses a similar fundamental challenge to the way we think about humanity and its place in the world. Not only are we a young species, descended from apes, inhabiting a small rock very far from the centre of the universe; we are also an upstart organism, with a profoundly destructive impact on our fellow species and biosphere, which is undermining our own ability to survive. In honour of Rachel Carson, the American ecologist whose book Silent Spring did much to kick-start modern environmentalism in the 1960s, I propose this transformation of thinking be given a name: the Carsonian Revolution.

Of course, this revolution has not – and will not – sweep through society unopposed. Consider the following statement, made by a man writing in 1980:

One of the most interesting things to have happened in the past decade or so has been the emergence of the so-called ‘ecology’ movement. By the end of the Seventies… [there is] beginning to dawn, all over the world, a new attitude to nature – an awareness that man is inextricably part of some great Whole, that he disturbs the balance of the Whole at its peril, and that somehow he must find the way to restore the harmony between himself and nature.

The author of these words is Christopher Booker, now one of the UK’s most vehement climate deniers. In recent columns in the Telegraph, Booker regularly attacks “warmists” for their belief in global warming, conveniently forgetting his past fondness for environmentalism. In 1980, he was rather more of a fan, declaring his support for green thinker Fritjof Capra, condemning the ‘arrogance of humanism’, and even aligning himself with New Agers (“‘The dawning of the Age of Aquarius’ constitutes part of the most remarkable shift in Western consciousness for several hundred years”).

That someone so seemingly open to new ideas can turn so rabidly against them is a timely warning for the environmental movement. On the one hand, we have clearly come a long, long way since 1970, successfully forcing environmental issues to the forefront of the public consciousness and political agendas. On the other, the Carsonian Revolution is no less susceptible than its Copernican and Darwinian precursors to attacks from opponents. Copernicus and Darwin had to confront the doctrinal might of the established Church and the conservatism of a Christian public when propagating their views; and though ‘flat-earther’ has now become a byword for stupidity, there are still many Creationists. We can expect resistance from the fossil fuel lobby and climate contrarians to continue for many decades yet.

As for the ongoing political implications of the Carsonian Revolution, I leave the last word to a revolutionary famous for thinking in the long-term. When Zhou Enlai, foreign minister of Mao’s China, was asked about the significance of the French Revolution some 180 years after the event, he replied that it was still too early to tell. So it is, after only 40 years, with modern environmentalism.

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