Climate science and epidemiology have fallen victim to denialism probably more than any other area of science in recent decades. I would argue that climate scientists have had to deal with extremely well-funded, well-organised denialism for much longer and that this will leave a more devastating impact on the world in the future. Climate change is still ignored, undermined, or only given lip service by world leaders, and there is still a long way to go. The botched responses to global pandemics such as COVID-19 or HIV offer us a glimpse into a future where we fail to act on climate. It also happens to be the case that climate change and human land use can enable pandemics to become more common and transmissible in the future while introducing new diseases that have remained dormant under permafrost and melting ice sheets for thousands of years.
Climate denialists often frame their denial as healthy, scientific scepticism needed for science to thrive. After all, many scientists have challenged the consensus of their time and been proven correct. This article will (1) explore the political origins of how misinformation has become so rampant and (2) outline the main differences between genuine scepticism and denial, drawing on a research paper published in 2018 by Kirsti M.Jylhä, in the Encyclopaedia of the Anthropocene. In summary, the main difference is that scientific scepticism welcomes a differing opinion that raises questions, while denialism doesn't. Denialists often fixate on their conclusion, cherry-picking and omitting key facts that favour their confirmation bias. This is in direct opposition to the scientific approach to understanding. Given the extraordinary amount of financial and political backing that climate denial has received, it is far more prevalent than other fringe denial movements like flat Earth or the anti-vaxx movement before COVID - which has since made the jump into the mainstream through its politicisation.
Political Divisions and Echo Chambers
The pandemic has shown us how political divides can fuel science denial, taking it from the fringes of society to a cynical divide and conquer strategy used by media, think tanks, and politicians - the result is disinformation becoming more normalised than ever before. A society embracing misinformation correlates to an embrace of fascism, so understanding how to identify disinformation, and where it comes from, is extremely important. People with more conservative views are far more prone to buying into misinformation for several reasons.
Psychological studies have shown that conservatives are more fearful than liberals and left-leaning people, which is surely no surprise to anyone familiar with The Sun or watched Fox News - an interesting question arises from this divide. Do the right-wing outlets prey on those pre-existing fears or create them? Or, how much do each of these contribute to the problem? Many racists, for example, are raised by other racists so racist views are instilled into them as normal, and poor education or media habits either fail to correct or directly reinforce these values. Blues musician and activist Daryl Davis has shown how many racists can be deconverted by simply interacting with someone with prejudiced views and letting them realise how absurd their worldview is. Davis collects the robes of KKK members, who he convinced to cut ties with the group, amassing more than 200 to symbolise the “dent he has made in racism by simply sitting down and having dinner with people.”
In recent years, social media has played a vital role in fuelling this divide, especially through an echo-chamber effect where people are directed to sources more likely to agree with them. This can happen through social groups forming and sharing links, for example, or through algorithms designed to increase engagement - someone is likely to keep coming back if the news shared with them reinforces their own beliefs. Fear of being shunned by their particular in-group, means people are more likely to double down on their views rather than seek sources from media sources flagged as enemies and "fake news."
Everyone knows that Google, Twitter, and Facebook are cesspools of misinformation and that they have profited immensely from it in recent years. It wasn’t until a failed insurrection attempt in America that twitter began to commit to reigning in this misinformation after years of letting rage and irrational beliefs foment. Facebook and Google/YouTube still seem committed to supporting misinformation and turning a blind eye to it. Youtube ads for misinformation sites like the Daily Wire and GB News are frequent and the site offers a platform to people who routinely spread disinformation. Some token gestures have been carried out e.g. banning Alex Jones from the platform, however, this is little more than something for their PR team to point at as long as other sources of disinformation continue to be fully supported.
In his 1995 essay Ur-fascism, Umberto Eco identified 14 key elements ubiquitous to fascism, drawing on his personal experience growing up in Italy during Mussolini's reign. Misinformation lies at the heart of fascism and when it is embraced, fascism often ensues.
To understand how we can come up with solutions to these issues, we have to know how we got here, which is the aim of Jylha’s 2018 study (which focuses on climate change).
Climate Change Misinformation:
Jylha’s paper, titled Denial Versus Reality of Climate Change, breaks the issue down into three main sections assessing the psychology, ideology, and resistance to change that motivate people to deny the science of climate change. Psychologically, it is easy to nudge someone from believing climate change is not something that requires immediate attention i.e. we should focus on more immediate issues in society such as poverty and homelessness. As climate change has unfolded and will continue over many generations it is easy to sweep it under the rug as an issue - fossil fuel interests have benefited immensely from these views.
Another major psychological barrier that fuels denial is that of complexity and lack of scientific awareness, something I believe the scientific community has failed to combat effectively. As scientific calculations often involve error, this can be perceived as a lack of confidence in the conclusions by climate scientists. A more scientifically literate population informed on the basic tenets of the scientific method, the process of peer-review, and the calculation of errors would go a long way in ensuring that there is more trust in the conclusions that scientists make and how they arrived there.
The ideological reasons to deny climate change present another major problem in addressing the issue. Combined with the human tendency to seek information that confirms their prior beliefs and aligns with their political views, it is easy to see why climate change is such a divisive issue, despite the science being so well-understood. Motivated reasoning is a term used in psychology to describe this behaviour pattern where people attempt to work backward from their prior beliefs to arrive at a conclusion that supports their views. It is in contrast to critical thinking and, in my view, highlights an area that the education system fails to address.
Resistance to change and acceptance of inequality are social and psychological elements found more in right-wing individuals and may help explain how misinformation that supports the current system is favourable. Climate change will cause far more devastation in developing countries, compared to the US and UK. This inequality, which will cause poorer people to face the greatest threat (while having contributed far less to the issue) highlights a systemic inequality that is political in nature. Climate change denial results from justifying the existing social hierarchy on a global scale.
The Media and the Fairness Doctrine
One of the main themes in Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s book Merchants of Doubt is the media treatment of scientific reality as an issue where both sides deserve equal representation. This view is derived from the idea of political neutrality but fails to acknowledge that the science underlying climate change is not political. The impacts and solutions of climate change may be inevitably political, but its scientific basis has been well-established for decades. Yet, the media has allowed oil companies to abuse the fairness doctrine to spread propaganda.
Oil companies, in tandem with public relations firms and conservative think tanks, applied the tactics employed by big tobacco to cast doubt about the science of climate change. Academics had less access to the resources that would have ensured proper education on the topic through the media. This gulf in outreach took hold and, as a result, denialists distorted the information to favour their political ideology - tensions around the Cold War made people more vulnerable to disinformation that considered government regulation a slippery slope into Communism. This ideology was also deeply embedded into the education system during the Reagen and Thatcher era and has left its mark on politics and the current media landscape.
Misinformation is nothing new - the media has played a vital role in disseminating false or incomplete information in line with the political party they support or a commercial interest they share.
Generational Divide
Disinformation about climate change that was so prevalent during the cold war and has since waned as people become more accepting of science should leave a start difference in the views, and susceptibility to misinformation, between those who consumed 'red scare' media vs those who are younger. A strange effect where misinformation is more normalised has evolved in recent years, despite society moving in the right direction on trusting scientists. An example of this effect is the rise of Donald Trump, who rode a wave of much older support, to win the 2016 election.
As researchers like Michael Mann argue, the methods used by oil companies to spread misinformation have been an evolving process that has adapted to the science of climate change getting harder to deny outright. Newer tactics emphasise deflecting the blame onto consumers rather than oil companies, hyper-focusing on tech-based solutions rather than renewables that would phase out hydrocarbon use, and doom-mongering. While these tactics are used, the relics of past denial still make up an enormous amount of political capital since policy-makers are usually relics of the past themselves, as the last two presidential administrations have more than demonstrated.
The denial movement is still thriving in many parts of the world so we should not get complacent that it is a relic of the past, while it stifles action during this critical time to correct our emissions paths and transition to a more efficient way of producing energy to meet our needs. I strongly believe in an upper age limit for politicians in order to ensure a demographic that is more in balance with the population itself, which is far more democratic.
Political barriers, the product of a decades-long disinformation campaign against science, have done a lot to delay action. If we are to ensure that climate change policy matches the urgency of the issue, we must galvanise a movement of young people to vote and take power from those who do not care. People like Greta Thunberg have done an exceptional job at sparking this movement, however, it is only the first step in a much broader, systemic political change needed.
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