INCOMPLETE NOTES - intended to encourage research/discussion. Please fact-check before quoting anything

Climate Change Denial

The Status Quo

1. The Fossil Fuels Lobby has a vested interest in surviving as an industry.
   • It can play a critical role in shaping public policy (e.g. in UK and USA)
2. Energy subsidies by governments keep fossil fuels prices artificially low.
   • Fossil fuels received $550 billion in subsidies compared with $120 billion for all renewables (2013).
3. Ideology (n.b. it is a complex term)
   • There seem to be more global warming deniers on the political right than on the left. (Why?)
   • This may be exacerbated, or caused by differences in financial support from fossil fuel companies(?).
4. Disinformation is a deliberate falsification of facts
   • (unlike 'misinformation', which is passing on incorrect information by mistake).
   • Confirmation bias is an easy thing to exploit in communication strategies.
   • Many climate change ‘skeptics’ spend a lot of time on climate change denial sites
5. The Precautionary Principle
   • Some climate change deniers argue that the scientific consensus is only 'scaremongering'.
   • But this seems to put the settling of truth claims above the need to implement the lowest-risk policies
   • Precaution means defaulting to the safer options where significant harm is possible
6. Conspiracy theories
   • These can evolve to incorporate whatever evidence exists against them
   • They can become a closed system that is unfalsifiable,
   • i.e. "a matter of faith rather than proof" (Barkun, M., 2003).
7. Pseudoscience probably works in a similar way.

Cognitive Factors

Fig. 1 - the Idea of Confirmation Bias

1. Confirmation bias
   • We all filter evidence through our pre-existing assumptions and beliefs (see Fig. 1)
   • We tend to seek / interpret / prefer / recall information that endorses and sustains our belief system.
   • The language that we use is also likely to colour what we notice and see.
   • Apophenia is a type of confirmation bias
   • i.e. it is the tendency to find connections and meanings in events and things that, to others, are unrelated.
2. Cognitive dissonance
   • The discomfort experience arising from the presence of contradictory evidence.
   • This discomfort is sometimes relieved by seeking new ways to refresh the information causing the discomfort
   • Alternatively, the sufferer may actively avoid the (social) situations that generate the contradictions.
     • (n.b. Arthur Koestler (1964) cognitive dissonance can produce bisociation)
3. Garret Hardin’s ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ theory (1968)
   • The 'Commons' refers to the shared resources
   • The 'Tragedy' refers to the way individuals see their impact on the commons.
   • E.g. if everyone can let their sheep/goats graze on public land 'I' will calculate 'my' impact in 2 ways:
     • A) this extra sheep will make a big supplement to my family's food supply.
     • B) my negative impact on fishing stocks will only be tiny when averaged out for the total number of neighbours.
   • Hardin suggests that our brains evolved when the world was under-populated and teeming with resources
   • i.e. Nature would always always recover from anything we could do to it.
   • Unfortunately, we are still 'programmed' to understand our responsibility in this context.
4. The Mindset of Large Hierarchies
   • Around 10 thousand years ago Homo sapiens swapped hunting and gathering for farming.
   • Food surpluses enabled us to grow into large trading and warring empires.
   • Five thousand years later we invented unit-based money and alphabetical writing to allow this expansion
   • This began to shift our thinking away from personal 'responsibility' to the bureaucratic mindset of 'accountability'
5. Denialism - the avoidance of a generally accepted truth or fact
   • this is generally assumed to be because it is psychologically uncomfortable (e.g. cognitive dissonance)
   • In a sane person this would appear as an irrational refusal to accept empirically verifiable evidence
6. Dunning-Kruger Effect
   • a cognitive bias in people with low metacognitive skills to overestimate their cognitive abilities
7. Belief perseverance
   • maintaining a belief despite new information that firmly contradicts it.
8. Emotional Reasoning
   • Emotion/s play an important role in how we understand logical principles and interpreting/choosing the options implied by them.
   • see Antonio Damasio
   • Situated, self-managed syntax
9. The backfire effect
   • when new evidence challenging the believer's hypothesis actually strengthens their belief.
10. tribal partisanship
    • Perhaps humans are genetically pre-disposed to adopting peer beliefs(?)
11. Attitude polarisation
    • this may happen after the group meets to discuss the views of its members
12. Group polarisation
    • occurs when a group makes decisions more extreme than the initial inclination of its members