If you were on a plane with 100 aeronautical engineers and 99 got off saying 'This plane will crash' but one of them said 'No, the other 99 are wrong' would you stay on the plane or get off?
If you had a medical issue and consulted 100 doctors, 99 of whom said 'This is a heart attack and unless you change your lifestyle you will die' but one said 'I think those guys are wrong, carry on as you are’ would you change your lifestyle or keep it as it is?
If you were designing a house and consulted 100 architects, 99 of whom said 'You shouldn't build that second floor without support in this location', but one of them said 'It'll be fine. Nothing will happen’ would you put the support there or not?
If you were handling nuclear waste and 99 nuclear scientists told you it needed to be shielded in lead and concrete or it would kill you, but one of them told you 'stick it in a plastic bag, you'll be fine' would you be looking for a plastic bag or a lead-lined concrete box?
If you were in the Amazon jungle with 100 guides and one of them pointed to a snake and said 'That's a harmless python' but the other 99 said 'Don't touch that it's a boomslang and if it bites you you will bleed from every orifice' would you touch that snake?
So why when 99% of the world's climate scientists tell you this is man-made climate change and we need to do something to sort it out would you continue to listen to the 1% who claim otherwise?
Unfortunately, we live in a world where opinions and facts are both treated with the same amount of reverence. You see it everywhere on social media - and, to some extent, on mainstream media. The platforming of crackpot theories such as flat earth, contrails and anti-vaxxers.
It's a constant pull and push between 'You have the absolute right to say whatever you want in public' vs 'You can't go around telling blatant lies and misleading people on important matters such as this'.
Current technologies have expanded the reach of what used to be referred to as 'conspiracy theorists' to such an extent that people now believe the lies ('The Luton Airport Car Park fire was caused by an EV') over the truth (It was a diesel Land Rover)
While some of this is coming from genuinely misinformed people who don't know what they don't know (The Dunning-Kruger Effect) a lot of this, unfortunately, is coming - via the mainstream media - from people with vested interests and a lot of money.
A recent article from anti-climate-denial publication Desmog highlighted the large number of links between Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper and fossil fuel money in the UK1. Ten opinion writers were board members or academic advisors at the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). They wrote a total of 144 opinion pieces for The Telegraph during the period examined — averaging over 2.5 per week.
GWPF and its campaign arm Net Zero Watch are based in Westminster’s Tufton Street, home to a small but influential network of libertarian, pro-Brexit think tanks and lobby groups with links to climate science denial.
Allison Pearson, a columnist at The Telegraph and a board member of GWPF, penned 57 articles for the publication over the six months.
With this sort of negative PR - alongside the seeming inability of many people to discern facts from opinions and lies - we find ourselves in a situation where we are charging headlong into a climate catastrophe.
The clever part is that many of these disinformation sources are not coming flat out and saying ‘climate change is a hoax’ (although there are several who are doing that). What they are doing instead is denigrating aspects of the solution to either slow down efforts to remedy it or cast doubt on the solutions themselves.
Take things like Net-Zero. It’s quite easy for people to look at certain Net-Zero framings and come to the conclusion that it is a costly, misguided exercise. This leads people to actively move against net-zero initiatives. In turn, this means that climate change continues unabated, and fossil fuels continue to be one of the main causes. Those who are against net zero can be against it without vocalising opposition to climate change. But they are, in fact, exhibiting climate-denier traits.
Climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe has put together a list of climate denier tropes. Each one of these - in some way, shape, or form, actively contributes towards anti-climate messaging. They argue that climate change is not real, that humans are not to blame, that climate change will be a positive force, that it will be too expensive to fix, and that it will be too late to tackle it.
Pretty much any sort of climate denial behaviour can be slotted into one of these five areas. If someone tells you, for example, that ‘We shouldn’t do anything until China sorts itself out’ what they are actually saying is ‘it will be too late to tackle it’, or, even, ‘It will be too expensive to fix’. Things such as arguing against Net-Zero fall squarely into the heading of ‘It will be too expensive to fix.’ I’ve also, recently, heard many people get on the hobby-horse of ‘CO2 is good for the environment. Plants need CO2. More CO2 means more plants’. This falls into the trope of ‘Climate change will be a positive force’. When I spoke with climate scientist Richard Allan on the podcast recently he addressed the very issue2:
“ CO2 is good for plants. It is to some respects, but it's much much more complicated than that because plants obviously take in carbon dioxide through their stomata and use it to build stems or roots, their leaves etc. And so there is known to be a fertilisation effect where you raise carbon dioxide in the air. And plants will grow more strongly in response to that, but only if there's enough nutrients if there's enough water, there's enough sunlight for photosynthesis. So, in actual fact, it's not known in which type of plants or which region, this fertilisation effect will be actually significant. Because stomata can either which taking the carbon dioxide they can either stay open and breathing more carbon dioxide, or they can say, well, I'm, I've got enough carbon dioxide, so I'm gonna close slightly because I'm gonna retain the moisture lost through the stomata. So often plants actually become more water efficient at higher co2 levels. So the overall bottom line is that yeah, co2 can be beneficial for some plants, not all plants and in some regions, but the costs of the plants of more intense drought conditions, more intense heat, more intense precipitation. Other changes in atmospheric conditions do far, far more damage to vegetation than the extra benefit from rising carbon dioxide levels”
This means that while CO2 can benefit plants the associated changes in climate can do far more damage to the plant than the benefit gained from the additional CO2.
But the more I think about this the more it comes down to the fact that we are grossly underestimating people’s ability to deal with change. I think that we could move forward a lot more forcefully, and a lot quicker, if we tried to get people on our side when it comes to things like electric vehicles, heat pumps, removing meat from diets etc. if we remembered that what everyone on this planet is really scared of is change.
By its very definition change means things are different. It means that we will have to do things differently. It means we might have to stop doing things we do now.
And people don’t want change.
I am reminded of the introduction of the mobile phone. We went from having a single phone in the house, hardwired to the wall, to having the ability to speak to anyone anywhere. However early adopters were mocked and criticised. Remember the Dom Jolly character on Trigger Happy TV who had the giant phone and shouted really loudly into it in public places?3 That character epitomised the public’s fear of change in a humorous way. Nobody wanted to carry around a big brick of a thing where anyone in public could listen to your conversation, live! People wanted what they already had - a device which was personal, private and known.
But we gradually moved to mobile phones and people realised they did like them and they weren’t scared of speaking to them when they were in public. Phones got smaller and smaller and better and better.
Then came the iPhone.
Remember when the iPhone was released back in the early 2000s? It was dismissed by none other than Steve Ballmer from Microsoft (remember him?) as being too expensive and not suitable as a business phone.1
In reality, what he was saying was that he didn't want to change from what he had at the moment.
I think a lot of what we're seeing today is people putting up barriers to change.
If we deal with the change management the people will come with us.
1
https://www.desmog.com/2023/11/23/revealed-scale-of-the-telegraphs-climate-change-propaganda/
https://evmusings.com/episode/the-climate-scientist