There is a great deal of cognitive dissonance and it seems to be getting worse, not better.

Good luck on your search for truth, I wish you well.

As a climate apostate (of 2 years standing) I have spent far too many late nights, workdays and weekends trying to understand this issue and whilst clearly (as Geoff and Alex mention) individual psychology is important, I think the sociological aspect (within which there is politics and religion) is the key one.

I only started looking at the poverty issue after Gore and Bono tried to link climate change and poverty at Davos, and from my perspective this was definitely a case of two wrongs don’t make a right. And Easterly was one of the few to make sense on this whole issue.

There are plenty of climate skeptics who think that because, in their view, AGW has become a religion (and it does indeed fit with Durkheim’s definition of religion – “a unified system of beliefs and practices related to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions – beliefs and practices that unite its adherents in a single moral community called a church.”) it is proof that it is wrong, but this is clearly not enough to expose any folly. There are many parallels with religion – heretics, carbon offsets and indulgences, apocalypse etc but what is really needed is a way to explain how the science can be being so distorted by social processes.

There’s a very fruitful area of sociological debate around the social construction of truth which I’ve found interesting. It certainly gets messy, through the ‘science wars’ and the whole “Higher Superstition” thing. In this book, the authors take a swing at ‘left wing academics’ and whilst they proclaim the fraud of climate change (amongst many other issues) they simultaneously decry any form of social construction of truth. This is where I believe they have got it wrong and I hope, in due course, to publish a substantial and robust explanation of this.

One thing is clear is that the cognitive dissonance has already begun and it’s going to get a lot messier before it gets clearer, hence pseudonym.

We haven’t replied yet, as we’re very busy.

I also find of interest this site (http://www.theirc.org) – the International Rescue Committee; their recent survey reveals that…

“Conflict and humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo have taken the lives of an estimated 5.4 million people since 1998 and continue to leave as many as
45,000 dead every month, according to a major mortality survey released today by the International Rescue Committee.”

And: “As with the previous surveys, the vast majority died from non-violent causes such as malaria, diarrhea, pneumonia and malnutrition – easily preventable and treatable conditions when people have access to health care and nutritious food.”

If the AGW proponents were motivated by the desire to do the maximum good for the maximum number of people, they might consider channelling their energies into stamping out the war in the Congo. At over 5 millions of lives per decade, stopping this would surely more than offset the number of lives lost due to sea level rises over several millennia.

As for the psychology, I think there are several aspects to this. Firstly, cognitive dissonance (I haven’t read Leon Festinger’s books yet but have two of them on order at the moment, hope to read and review them soon.) Then there’s middle-class guilt and angst – haves angry and guilty about being haves, haves pretending to be have-nots, haves wanting everybody to be have-nots, haves projecting the evils of “have-ness” (SUVs, patio heaters, meat, cheap air-travel) onto other haves or even onto the have-nots.

And there’s the sort of pessimism and glass-half-emptiness that can settle in when there’s no actual crisis to be fought. I note that exhortations to treat the “climate emergency” like World War II when everyone pulled together and did their bit, etc., seem to have failed, because on the whole, people respond to real problems (such as the fallout from the credit crunch) and not to non-problems. But there’s a strain of “world’s going to the dogs” line of thought that seems to flourish when things are actually not bad, although I think that would quickly evaporate and be replaced by resolve if there was a real emergency, climate or otherwise.

AGW is not the first wrongheaded theory to gain widespread acceptance, and our current ruling élites are not the first to lack ideas or conviction. In normal times, wrong theories are disproved (or go out of fashion) and ineffective politicians are replaced by others. I can think of no other example of the political élite of the entire Western world adopting an idea which is demonstrably false, and making it the keystone of their policies, policies which will almost certainly cause suffering to their citizens.
My reason for appealing for psychological expertise is not because I want to get inside the heads of anyone. (The Monbiots and Browns one assumes are acting from motives of self-interest). I suppose it comes from a foreboding that the normal social and political self-correcting mechanisms which democracies have developed are not working, and possibly cannot work, when an entire society adopts an idea which is totally false. In order to avoid the disastrous social and political consequences of such a situation, you need to understand what’s motivating society as a whole. Your site does a good job of analysing the political and cultural context. I just feel it would be nice to see some psychological analysis added to the mix.

To see what I mean, imagine what would have happened if our witless politicians had latched on to a “rational” environmental concern, such as the elimination of third world poverty. This seemed a possibility a few years back with the Make Poverty History movement, which had overwhelming popular and political support. An inspired politician could have used this issue to win votes, a Nobel Prize and a place in the history books. Of course, it wouldn’t have been plain sailing. There would have been failures, mistakes, scandals, complaints about waste and corruption. A left / right divide would have opened up with competing models of economic development being proposed; elections might even have been won or lost over the issue. The point is, eliminating poverty is not a theory which is true or false, but a policy which may be sensible or misguided, well or badly implemented. If such a programme proved to be a total failure, it would simply be discarded and replaced by some less bad political plan of action (or inaction).

Eliminating or avoiding global warming is treated in the media as if it were a policy similar in kind to eliminating poverty, ignoring the fact that we don’t know if it exists (over the long term), and if it does exist we don’t know what causes it, what effects it will have, and if it will continue in the future. But more important than the difference in certitiude between the two issues is that they are diifferent in kind. The assumption that they are similar problems, treatable by similar methods, is what philosophers call a category mistake. Simply put, poverty happens to people, global warming happens to thermometers.

Over the larger part of the earth’s habitable surface, temperatures rise and fall ten or fifteen degrees every twenty four hours. Every year average daily temperatures rise or fall by maybe thirty degrees. We don’t die of it. Species don’t become extinct. We put on more clothes or take them off. Birds migrate. We take cheap flights to somewhere nicer (often warmer in the summer, colder in the winter, but who says we have to act rationally, temperature-wise?) We adapt.

So treating a hypothetical 2-4°C temperature rise over the next century as a menace to the existence of mankind is – madness – what other word is adequate? I know it’s bad debating tactics to question the sanity of your adversary, and it’s bad politics to accuse voters of being stupid, but I’m not interested in winning a debate or an election. I’m interested in trying to understand a situation which seems potentially dangerous politically and socially. Psychologically, I’ve probably got exactly the same profile as your average GW activist. I’m a worrier. They’re worried about the future of mankind, I’m worried about them.

When I try to envisage what will happen when the Global Warming movement confronts reality, I experience a serious failure of imagination. If global mean temperatures continue to fail to rise, will Monbiot apologise and be demoted to gardening correspondent? Will a British government provoke an international crisis by refusing to implement EU renewable energy guidelines? What kind of political movement could arise to challenge the present all party consensus? I too find Jeremy Clarkson sympathetic, but I wouldn’t like to be ruled by a party made up of his fans. It would be anti-establishment, anti EU, anti UN, anti-intellectual, a party of irate overtaxed “little people”, sabotaging wind farms, a mirror image of Ms Jasiewicz’ s anarchists.

Of course, in the absence of steeply rising temperatures, it would be nice to think people would turn to the internet, read Alan Watts and McKintyre and others and make up their minds. My personal experience is that it just doesn’t happen. When I express doubts about global warming to friends and colleagues I get sidelong glances, as if I’d expressed an interest in UFOs or creationism. I’ve mentioned the subject to an entomologist, an epidemiologist, and an engineering student, among others. Not one has expressed the desire to go on the internet and find out for himself, not because they’re true believers in AGW, but simply because they can’t imagine that the scientific and political consensus could be so completely mistaken. They will no doubt become agnostic if temperatures fail to rise over a decade or so, but where is the movement which could channel rational doubt about a scientific theory into political action? How do you turn agnosticism into votes? Are these political questions, or psychological ones? Thanks for your patience

A couple of points. We have been very critical of the environmental movement’s attempts to reduce ‘scepticism’ and ‘denial’ to psycho-pathology, because it represents a way of explaining their failure to engage the public. See here here and here for example. Therefore, we would be reluctant to agree with you that psychology explains the debate.

We don’t need to investigate psychology to understand why Oxfam, which was established in order to provide famine relief, now, like many agencies, overlooks the many problems that JN lists. The problem lies in the understanding of development, and their role that the likes of Oxfam have developed over the last couple of decades as it has become closer to the establishment, and increasingly involved with dictating policy towards and within the developing world.

If Oxfam were to say that what the developing world lacked was… err… development, then it would find itself unable to distance itself from the agencies and organisations it once criticised. Now Oxfam has to celebrate primitive lifestyles, and encourage them, partly because the understanding of progress has been relativised, partly because the development agenda more generally has also been degraded by absurd notions of ‘sustainability’, and partly because Oxfam knows full well that it cannot deliver the massive investment in infrastructure that is needed to confront the problems JN has pointed to. And to create the idea that it is not unreasonable for people in the Third World to expect Western standards of living, and are capable of organising themselves to achieve it, would mean undermining Oxfam’s own role. And as we can see, Oxfam’s thinking secures a role for itself. Just as governments in the West absorb environmentalism in order to make themselves seem to be responding to the right things, so too Oxfam respond by framing their agenda in environmental terms. Actually, all it serves to do is remove Oxfam, and governments from their responsibilities; the priority becomes ‘saving the planet’, rather than focussing their efforts on people.

Furthermore, we have argued that the politics of environmentalism are prior to any ‘science’, and that by the time scientific research has been processed by those using it to arm political arguments (i.e. stripping it of caveats, and proportionality), it has lost any meaning whatsoever. The influence of environmentalism stems from a disconnect between the public, and politics. ‘Science’ has been used to try to connect with the public by creating terrifying ideas about the future. It fails. But as long as there are still scare stories in circulation which plausibly create a legitimate role for public profiles, people will continue to take advantage of them.

Rather than looking inside people’s heads, we think the best way to approach things is to call them to account. That means being as relentlessly critical as they are relentlessly engaged in producing an unmitigated stream of guff.