The psychology of climate change denial

[garboon]

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/climate-psychology/

Even as the science of global warming gets stronger, fewer Americans believe it’s real. In some ways, it’s nearly as jarring a disconnect as enduring disbelief in evolution or carbon dating. And according to Kari Marie Norgaard, a Whitman University sociologist who’s studied public attitudes towards climate science, we’re in denial.

“Our response to disturbing information is very complex. We negotiate it. We don’t just take it in and respond in a rational way,” said Norgaard.

Wired.com: Why don’t people seem to care?

Kari Norgaard: On the one hand, there have been extremely well-organized, well-funded climate-skeptic campaigns. Those are backed by Exxon Mobil in particular, and the same PR firms who helped the tobacco industry (.pdf) deny the link between cancer and smoking are involved with magnifying doubt around climate change.

That’s extremely important, but my work has been in a different area. It’s been about people who believe in science, who aren’t out to question whether science has a place in society.

Wired.com: People who are coming at the issue in good faith, you mean. What’s their response?

Norgaard: Climate change is disturbing. It’s something we don’t want to think about. So what we do in our everyday lives is create a world where it’s not there, and keep it distant.

For relatively privileged people like myself, we don’t have to see the impact in everyday life. I can read about different flood regimes in Bangladesh, or people in the Maldives losing their islands to sea level rise, or highways in Alaska that are altered as permafrost changes. But that’s not my life. We have a vast capacity for this.


Wired.com: How is this bubble maintained?

Norgaard: In order to have a positive sense of self-identity and get through the day, we’re constantly being selective of what we think about and pay attention to. To create a sense of a good, safe world for ourselves, we screen out all kinds of information, from where food comes from to how our clothes our made. When we talk with our friends, we talk about something pleasant.

Wired.com: How does this translate into skepticism about climate change?

Norgaard: It’s a paradox. Awareness has increased. There’s been a lot more information available. This is much more in our face. And this is where the psychological defense mechanisms are relevant, especially when coupled with the fact that other people, as we’ve lately seen with the e-mail attacks, are systematically trying to create the sense that there’s doubt.

If I don’t want to believe that climate change is true, that my lifestyle and high carbon emissions are causing devastation, then it’s convenient to say that it doesn’t.

Wired.com: Is that what this comes down to — not wanting to confront our own roles?

Norgaard: I think so. And the reason is that we don’t have a clear sense of what we can do. Any community organizer knows that if you want people to respond to something, you need to tell them what to do, and make it seem do-able. Stanford University psychologist Jon Krosnick has studied this, and showed that people stop paying attention to climate change when they realize there’s no easy solution. People judge as serious only those problems for which actions can be taken.

Another factor is that we no longer have a sense of permanence. Another psychologist, Robert Lifton, wrote about what the existence of atomic bombs did to our psyche. There was a sense that the world could end at any moment.

Global warming is the same in that it threatens the survival of our species. Psychologists tell us that it’s very important to have a sense of the continuity of life. That’s why we invest in big monuments and want our work to stand after we die and have our family name go on.

That sense of continuity is being ruptured. But climate change has an added aspect that is very important. The scientists who built nuclear bombs felt guilt about what they did. Now the guilt is real for the broader public.

Wired.com: So we don’t want to believe climate change is happening, feel guilty that it is, and don’t know what to do about it? So we pretend it’s not a problem?

Norgaard: Yes, but I don’t want to make it seem crass. Sometimes people who are very empathetic are less likely to help in certain situations, because they’re so disturbed by it. The human capacity of empathy is really profound, and that’s part of our weakness. If we were more callous, then we’d approach it in a more straightforward way. It may be a weakness of our capacity as sentient beings to cope with this problem.

[Beckysews]

Even before the term "global warming" became common I have been telling folks that the Earth is getting warmer. 

My proof is anecdotal:  When I was a little girl in the 60's I always got a new sweater or two for my birthday on September 17th.  I would wear it that very day.  We're talking some sort of warm wool blend sweater.  The kind that is perfect for Fall weather.

By the 80's I was still getting a sweater in September but didn't need to wear it til maybe October, at night.  No one would listen to me back then but I told folks "I swear the earth is going through a weather change!"

[Silk_Hope]

The weather does change, there have been ice ages and warmer ages. The whole question is what effect if any does man have on the environment. Curiously though water vapor holds heat in the environment yet it is not considered harmful.

[wolfpat]

Do articles like this remind you of the justification for the Soviet Gulags? I mean, the only people who could question the Glorious Soviet Worker's Paradise would be the insane, right? /sarc

[RJLeeb]

Hmmm...

Global warming is the same in that it threatens the survival of our species.

Global warming is the same as the threat of a nuclear holocaust?  Something tells me "Kari Marie Norgaard, a Whitman University sociologist" is a few scoops short of a sundae.

[Beel]

Regardless of what you think of Norgaard, there is a psychology of denial at work.  That is, it's pretty clear that a lot of people yearn to deny this part of scientific knowledge.  I'm still convinced that mostly what's driving the denial phenomenon is vested interests, both political and economic, but certainly we do understand that denial, per se, is a psychological issue.  Moreover, I find that being subjected to endless blanket skepticism on an aspect of scientific knowledge actually generates a weird skeptical attitude towards other scientific assertions--something which is actually unhealthy given what we do know about scientific enquiry--that it yields important information.  Last night I was watching some medical researcher explaining how iron works in our blood chemistry--it was just as mystifying as some other scientist telling me that some complicated graph shows the earth is, indeed, warming--or that water vapor "amplifies" the green house properties of CO-2. 

Even though I'm convinced that we are losing the arctic ice sheet (as Mr. Gore stated yesterday to Andrea Mitchell), Mr. Limbaugh's derision of this true statement for three hours yesterday (what else ya gonna listen to at work) was almost effective in generating a skeptical mood in my mind.  That's the psychology of denial at work. 

Of course it would be easier to just say, like Reagan did in 1980 re Jimmy Carter's efforts to moderate energy consumption in the US--piffle, we are Americans, we can turn the heat up if we want.  The solar panels came off the White House.  Reagan was elected in a landslide the second time around too, and SUVs became the symbol of middle class success.  Americans very much enjoy their "lifestyle," and do not want anyone to rock their boat.   There's a psychology involved.  Denial is comforting, and keeps change at bay.  Often until it is quite too late. 

As far as quantifying the threat of global warming versus a nuclear holocaust--well obviously the two disasters are different in style--the frogs sit in the frying pan in the global warming case.  In the nuclear case, they "duck and cover." 

[wolfpat]

But this is NOT scientific knowledge. You deny the obvious fact, as evidenced by the leaked emails, that the conclusions of the "Climate Change" advocates are derived from cherry picked data. And to preclude any other conclusions, the "researchers" destroyed the raw data to cover up their misdeeds. If you want to see problem psychologies over this issue, you ought to look in the mirror first.

[Beel]

There is a great deal of rational rebuttal, wolfpat, to your assertion that the entire body of evidence regarding human assisted global warming is a cherry picked hoax.  I have posted a number of good pieces which explain what the emails and supposed destroyed data amount to--and what they don't amount to.  The evidence concerning human assisted global warming is vast and, more importantly, very broad in scope.  It does not come from just a couple of scientists, or from an arguable interpretation of their emails. 

The so-called scandal now termed "climategate" is PR.  As far as argument within the scientific community--of course there are disagreements, that's how scientific knowledge proceeds.  If you want to at least look at the rebuttals to the "climategate" way of looking at things, I've posted a number of them in the various threads about global warming that have started here in the last few weeks.  What you stated is extremely simplistic and mostly mistaken--in my humble opinion.  Just look at the more serious rebuttals, don't just believe or disbelieve me. 

[RJLeeb]

There is a great deal of rational rebuttal, wolfpat, to your assertion that the entire body of evidence regarding human assisted global warming is a cherry picked hoax.  I have posted a number of good pieces which explain what the emails and supposed destroyed data amount to--and what they don't amount to.  The evidence concerning human assisted global warming is vast and, more importantly, very broad in scope.  It does not come from just a couple of scientists, or from an arguable interpretation of their emails. 

How many data sets are there regarding temperature?

If you read what Beel writes, you might get the impression that there are thousands of them.

There are 4.

GISS – Goddard Institute for Space Studies and home of James Hansen,
Hadley Centre – British Meteorological Office research centre
UAH – The University of Alabama, Huntsville, home of Roy Spencer with his colleagues including John Christy of NASA and
RSS – Remote Sensing Systems in Santa Rosa, California, a company supported by NASA for the analysis of satellite data.

So when problems are found with NASA's climate data sets...that's an issue.  The warmers try to mitigate the damage by claiming that there are many more sources of data than there really are.

[cccoach]

For clarification there are 4 "official" data sets. There are indeed hundreds, if not thousands, of data sets regarding temperature.

[RJLeeb]

For clarification there are 4 "official" data sets. There are indeed hundreds, if not thousands, of data sets regarding temperature.

By "official" I suppose you mean the ones that supposedly concern a very long period of time as opposed to those that cover surface temperature from say, 1960 until the present?

Those 4 sources comprise the data sets that are most often referenced.  As a result, when one of them is shown to have problems...it is a big deal.

[cccoach]

nope, I mean the ones that as you said, comprise the data sets that are most often referenced. Although multiple data sets track historical temperatures over even longer stretches of time and reinforce that climate change is real and accelerated by human actions. I'm uncertain what problems you are referring to, data is never the end game but merely the starting point. The data was accurate the "inerpretation" of the data was subjective and peer reviewed,  which is why data is interpreted. The discussions about how NASA is being "sued" is a little humorous considering that Chris Horner is part of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an organization that clearly does not believe that climate change is real. I also find it interesting that Horner doesn't just go ahead and sue, it seems that ranting about NASA not releasing data is far more powerful than actually receiving data and being mercilessly ridiculed when he releases his interpretation.

[RJLeeb]

nope, I mean the ones that as you said, comprise the data sets that are most often referenced. Although multiple data sets track historical temperatures over even longer stretches of time and reinforce that climate change is real and accelerated by human actions. I'm uncertain what problems you are referring to, data is never the end game but merely the starting point. The data was accurate the "inerpretation" of the data was subjective and peer reviewed,  which is why data is interpreted. The discussions about how NASA is being "sued" is a little humorous considering that Chris Horner is part of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an organization that clearly does not believe that climate change is real. I also find it interesting that Horner doesn't just go ahead and sue, it seems that ranting about NASA not releasing data is far more powerful than actually receiving data and being mercilessly ridiculed when he releases his interpretation.

If what you say is true, I wonder why there was so much hesitancy to release data on the part of Mann et al?

For the record, I don't know of any organization that doesn't believe "climate change is real".  I think that is an incorrect and misleading statement.  People disagree on the cause of the change (whether it is influenced significantly by humans or not) in climate and the impact it may or may not have on us...not the fact that it either happens or doesn't happen.

[wolfpat]

All this talk about Carbon Dioxide is moot until we do something about the most dangerous chemical known to man, and the #1 cause of the Greenhouse Effect: Dihydrogen Monoxide. This chemical kills millions of people EVERY YEAR. The gas can strip the flesh from your bones. They use this stuff in nuclear power plants, and it's the major component in Acid Rain.

Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide NOW!

[cccoach]

OH MY GOSH! I Agree so much! Especially in plastic bottles and swimming pools!

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