I’m working on an article about climate change denial, and why one might choose to ignore, or outright disbelieve, the (to me) incontrovertible evidence that anthropogenic global warming is real.

Here’s a few sources for back ground reading:
1. Talking Philosophy -An interesting discussion from earlier this year. In particular, look for the comments made by the post’s author, James Garvey (one of the bloggers featured in my blogroll).

2. An article by James Lovelock (excerpt at the bottom of this post).

3. The Hot Spot, written by a mother and journalist from a social science perspective.

4. Climate Change Denial. A cracker of a website and another one that’s made it into my blogroll. Some of the worthwhile entries include:

Geo-engineering as a sign of denial

What makes climate deniers tick (George Marshall)

Postcard from Israel – Written by a woman living on a kibbutz, explains in detail Israeli views on climate change and reasons for denial.

5. The earth blog – good article on denial.

6. ABC Radio (Australia) – A conversation about the challenge of shifting peoples behaviour in response to the threat of climate change. Discusses the different psychological motivations for change and how well they are understood by governments and opinion leaders.

7.  Australian Psychological Society – Lots of info on the psychological effects of climate change.

I’ll add more as time permits.


From James Lovelock’s article:

Remember, the “I” in IPCC stands for Intergovernmental. That is, the scientific results are subject to political editing before the IPCC reports are published. As to the science, James Lovelock says: It’s a complex story, really; most of one’s thinking that’s worth anything comes not from reason but from intuition. Many of my scientist friends don’t like that – they’re still back in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries where you did everything rationally and the word “irrationally” implied loose or bad thinking. I’m afraid it isn’t like that; all the things that really matter are intuitive. Understanding the Earth’s system is one of those things you cannot express in mathematical terms easily. The climate scientists tried to do it – there was a man called Lorenz, many years ago, who discovered that if you try to model a system containing more than two differential equations – and you need hundreds, thousands of them to look at the Earth’s system – it goes chaotic, as soon as you put real world data into it. So what they tend to do, because they have to model it that way, with hundreds of thousands of equations, they either fudge the equations with linearizing modifications, so that the model never goes chaotic, or they never run it beyond what they call equilibrium conditions, that is they never allow it to behave dynamically as a living thing. Now this is absolutely fatal as far as modelling goes and it applies both to biology and to climate science (geophysiology) and this is why we are finding now that the great gathering of scientists that formed the IPCC – some of the best climate scientists in the world – with the very best of intentions and the most modern and expensive equipment, are failing to predict the climate that is with us today. The most glaring error is that the sea level is rising nearly twice as fast as they were predicting; now this is a serious matter if you live [here] in London and you get an error that big. So to understand the Earth’s system, you can’t avoid approaching the whole problem to a certain extent intuitively and this is where I think Gaia came in because most of the first part of it was intuitive rather than rational. And I think it has some deeper significance in that one of my reasons for being somewhat pessimistic about the future of the present generation of humans is that I think the problem is right beyond us: we do not have the intellectual capacity to solve the problem of living successfully with our planet.

Related posts:

  1. Climate Change Denial Is Dangerous (Medical Observer) This is a copy of a letter to the editor that I sent to Australia’s weekly Medical Observer mag in response to a letter they...
  2. Why people don’t act on climate change – A comment by George Marshall Interesting piece in this week’s New Scientist magazine by climate activist George Marshall on why people don’t believe in climate change despite overwhelming scientific evidence....

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