Analysis CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL

spending money on climate solutions, saying that it might not be as bad as we think. The problem with this argument is that we do know it’s going to be bad. We know because it’s already bad – people are suffering in floods and droughts, we’re losing species left, right and centre, and over 300,000 people are dying every year as a result of climate change.21 We don’t need the models to tell us that if we keep on pumping out the polluting gases that caused this mess, things are going to keep getting worse.

Other distraction tactics ‘It’s too late, we need to adapt to climate change instead’ We’re already committed to a certain level of climate change, and so some adaptation will be absolutely vital. If we’re serious about climate justice then the nations most responsible for causing climate change should be providing funds and technology to the people on the receiving end, to help them cope with rising sea levels and more serious floods, storms and droughts.

However, adaptation cannot be a replacement for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. ‘Adapting’ to more serious levels of climate change would involve coping with mass food shortages, the loss of dozens of major cities, finding new homes for hundreds of millions of people and countless deaths from starvation, conflict and disease. Runaway climate change could leave us with a largely uninhabitable planet.

Even if it were possible, adaptation on this scale wouldn’t be cheaper or easier than cutting CO2 emissions – even conservative estimates like the British government’s Stern Review place the costs of climate impacts far higher than the costs of prevention. It’s like saying ‘it’s just too much effort to hit the brakes, I’m sure my car can adapt to that brick wall’.

Leading climate scientists are telling us that we still have a decent chance of avoiding runaway climate change, but only if we act fast. Telling ourselves it’s too late is just another form of denial – an excuse to avoid action. ‘It’s all about population growth’ It’s true that the more people there are on the planet, the fewer resources there are to go around. However, birth rates in most Northern nations are low; most population growth is occurring in poorer countries. The current per capita consumption rate in these countries is very small – for example, the average Canadian uses the same amount of energy per year as 20 Tanzanians. The wealthiest 20 per cent of the world’s people use over 70 per cent of the energy. With regard to climate change it is far more urgent

How to talk to a climate change denier If they’re just misinformed, or don’t want to believe it for personal reasons, then you may have a chance of changing their mind. Don’t expect to win them over all in one go – be sensitive, explain the facts as simply and clearly as you can and try not to get frustrated. Remember that the reality of climate change is a huge and scary thing to get our heads around – it’s a complex, decentralized and enormous threat that can’t be easily blamed on any one single organization or person. Accepting it fully means we need to make genuine changes in our lives and start working actively to stop it, which is a significant responsibility to take on. Try being gently challenging rather than staying on the defensive – do they have a coherent argument as to why climate change isn’t happening, or isn’t serious? Most people don’t – they have a collection of soundbites or excuses that they use to justify not thinking about the problem properly. Don’t be too confrontational though – the aim is to make them seriously think the matter through and change their minds by themselves, rather than for you to ‘win the argument’. Be sympathetic rather than accusatory – make it to reduce consumption levels in the North than birth rates in the South.

High birth rates are strongly associated with poverty, hunger and a lack of access to healthcare. They are also connected to a lack of women’s rights and restricted access to health information and contraception. If we want the world’s population to stabilize sooner rather than later, we need to support people around the world – especially women – to claim more rights, greater dignity and full control over their lives. However, we also need to urgently reduce emissions in the North! ‘Scientists exaggerate the risks of climate change to get more funding’ This is completely back to front – if a scientist found real evidence that contradicted the

Quick snippets of falseness #4 ‘CO2 makes plants grow faster, which will slow down global warming’ There’s no sign of this ‘fertilizer feedback’ actually taking place on any significant scale. This is probably because CO2 only speeds up plant growth if the plant also has everything else it needs to grow bigger – water, soil nutrients, light, space etc. Plants are the size they are probably because they’re lacking one of these other factors, not because they don’t have enough CO2 (and climate change is likely to make things worse by reducing the amount of water available to many plants).

2 0 ● N ew I n t e r nat i o nal i s t ● MAY 2 011