Climate change deniers - the flat earthers of the 21st century?

Met two climate change deniers in one day and felt something was giving me a nudge to try to address this issue.

One was a lovely person with mystical ideas - someone who picked up every conspiracy theory going. She was a full of ideas but she seemed to have no internal yardstick by which to judge any one theory, or which enabled a comparison between one theory and another. It was as though the romanticism of conspiracies galore appealed to her. They made life a lot more interesting. She struggled to live with the real world as a sometimes boring place, in which what most people say they are doing is actually what they are doing! Fact-based evidence was for the birds, to her.  She wanted us all to be more  positive. She had theories about everything from the roots of physical illness to the international conspiracy of people who want to turn the world to their advantage.

I remarked that I'm not against being positive - who could? That there is a lot we don't know about the relationship between body and our emotional state, and about how the world is governed. I was not disagreeing with her, merely trying to point out that they're all complicated questions to which we don't have all the answers yet. Yes, there is a probable correlation between ill health and mental state but this is a long way from suggesting to someone with cancer that if they'd only had a more positive outlook on life, they wouldn't have developed cancer! Apart from anything else, this is cruel and merely tells a suffering person it's all their fault! While at the same time doing nothing to solve the problem of cancer or any other major illness. I don't want to crush creative theorising, but we do need theories that attach to the real world of human activities, where we can do something practical about what we see as wrong. It's not as though thinking positively is a five-minute decision that you can then carry out over the rest of your life. Job done! If only it were that simple!

Equally, international conspiracies seem to be based on the assumption that a whole group of widely different, highly self-referenced people, with different cultural backgrounds, languages and beliefs, can quite easily get together on some mountain top any time they like and sort out the world to suit themselves. Together! Cooperatively I mean! Happily giving up their individual power, status and money to a cooperative human endeavour... Are you getting my drift? Given that our small country cannot decide between leaving and remaining in the European Union, and families of half a dozen cannot agree with each other on this or any other theme, what makes us suppose that this group of the powerful of various countries can get together to decide how the world should run? My yardstick for accepting a conspiracy theory like this is:  how likely does it sound in the context of human nature as I know it only too well through my work? I accept, no question, that people can be selfish, aggressive and controlling, but I find it hard to believe that all at the same time they can be constructive, cooperative, and follow rational plans through to the end to reach some far off and vast global goal! Not that some people haven't had known plans, historically, to make of the world what they wanted. Ghengis Khan, Alexander the Great, Hitler and Stalin all had such plans to a considerably degree. Their plans were largely individual creations, though. They created dreadful messes and mass suffering, and they all failed in the end.  The reason why Putin is annoying so many people currently with his cyber war on the activities of the West is precisely because the Russians failed to do it by other, more overt political means. And ask yourself, coolly, one day:  is Putin succeeding, in your opinion? Be honest!

The second climate change denier was one who was more practically-minded, as she saw it, and believed in her own individual experience as unchallengeable. She wanted to say that the climate changes regularly within living memory, and it's just part of the way the world goes round. For example, she pointed out that she had memories of snow waist-deep as a child - I refrained from pointing out that the snow would not have to be that deep to reach your waist if you were three feet high at the time! But I agreed that weather changes, and we all have experience of changing weathers - the summers that were hotter than usual, the snowy winters, the droughts and the hose pipe bans followed by the deluges of autumn rain, such as we seem to be getting just now. But climate change is not weather!  This is an important misunderstanding. Weather changes with seasonal regularly and can be quirky in this country, but climate change occurs over centuries, and we have plenty of evidence that this is the case.

I asked her how she accounted for the fact that half a dozen extreme weathers were occurring across the planet at the same time. As we spoke, the Guardian weather watch feature was reporting 1) floods in Venice that were devastating their major artistic and architectural treasures; 2) 600 school closures in New South Wales because of uncontrollable bush fires; 3) major floods across South Yorkshire in which some people say they have lost everything, 4) typhoon Hagibis causing millions of Japanese to be told to evacuate their homes. And this was just November's news! One interesting feature of the Guardian article said that the Pentagon, home of the US military, who do not get involved in political matters, are preparing training for their military in the expectation of 'existential threats to humanity.'

“Climate change is an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources such as food and water,” the Department of Defense (DoD) told Congress in a 2015 memorandum. “These impacts are already occurring, and the scope, scale, and intensity of these impacts are projected to increase over time.”

Are these preparations because the military have nothing better to do? Somehow, I doubt it. This 'practical' person also wanted to point out to me (current urban myth) that Al Gore had built his house on the seashore! She offered this as evidence that climate change was a folk tale. I suppose this idea is part of a conspiracy theory too - though why Al Gore would want to foment a panic about climate change is left unexplained, often the case with conspiracy theory addicts, I find. My news, which I offered in return, was that Al Gore is not responsible for the current concern about climate change, whatever we may think of him. 11000 reputable scientists are however responsible! They all share a common opinion that climate change is not just a little local difficulty, but a major world-altering fact. Gore is simply their messenger. I asked this person whether she placed no weight on what the scientist have to say. She seemed to have nothing to say in reply.

So for denier Number 1, climate change came under the heading of an international conspiracy, while for denier 2, climate change theory disagreed with the evidence of her own limited experience, which was all that she knew or cared about. Presumably, had she lived in Japan or New South Wales, or even Fishlake village, she might have thought differently? But why do I think, while wading through water waist high, that she would have found another 'reason' to doubt climate change?

My question here is, what is denial all about? Psychologically speaking, denial (or disavowal as Freud called it) is the flat refusal to accept evidence that some happening, feeling or historical event actually occurred. When you come upon it, it can be alarming. Max Glatt, a leading consultant on alcoholism of years ago, reported the case of a man with an alcoholic drink in his hand saying, "I haven't had a drink for three weeks!" This is denial. It is about being literally unable to see what is before your very eyes. It is not the same as lying. Lying is knowing what is true and distorting it to suit yourself. Denial is distorting what is true at a deeply unconscious level because what is true is unbearable.

When we feel we have no internal resources left to face reality, we choose the option of deciding not to see it. It can't be that the world is going to hell, can it, because I can't bear to think about that! It's a problem I couldn't solve or even contemplate solving, so it can't be true.

I'd now like to think positively for five minutes, without overdoing it. The scientists are not saying we can't save the world. They are saying we had better get on with it soon! And we must all do the unthinkable, which is to work together to solve it. We must do the thing we have never managed before, which is to get on the same page for the hymn singing!

This is not going to be easy. But you believed it when they told you the world was run by mad people in Outer Mongolia, didn't you? Or from a bunker in Texas?

True, it is asking a lot, maybe more than the world can manage. But we have one thing, one interest, in common, that we have never had before. It is saving the same world we all inhabit together! To do this is not a major mountain to climb. It simply means we must all stop denying climate change, and start thinking about whatever contribution we can make, however small to changing global warming. One small step for you, one giant leap for mankind!

So could you stop purveying conspiracy theories on the internet, and ideas rooted in your own narrow experience, and instead start encouraging others - via the same mechanism - to pay attention to what's important?