Recently I have noticed something around my relationship with climate change. As the years have gone by I have found it increasingly difficult to read about climate science. Instead of making me motivated it makes me depressed; often having a really negative impact on my mood, and my ability to work and campaign on the issue.
The affect of this has been rather interesting. I haven’t stopped campaigning on the issue. But I’ve stopped reading the science pretty much outright (unless I have to do so for some form of work). And I’ve started actively seeking out, and reading positive stories on the issue; mostly around climate movements, increases in renewable technology, and even sometimes positive science pieces. Finally, at times I’ve actively caught myself thinking about how nice it would be to be a climate denialist.
Now, before you all freak out, I am not becoming a denialist. But despite our demands that all denialists are stupid lunatics, I’m realising that in fact denial is a really natural reaction to climate change. It’s made me directly think about why people may be climate denialists, and how we treat the issue.
Let’s start by thinking about what denial is. Kollmuss and Agyeman provide me with a really simple meaning:
“Denial is the refusal to accept reality. The person lives believing in a ‘bright dream’ and filters incoming information to fit his or her version of reality.”
When you think about it in this way, it becomes really clear why denial is such a natural response to the huge threat of climate change. Climate change is terrifying. It means transitioning to a very different world than the one we currently live in – either a world with a very new climate, or one where our lifestyles and energy systems need to be dramatically changed. Denial, or escaping from this sort of reality is therefore a perfectly natural reaction.
And this sort of reaction happens across a broad spectrum of people. Whilst not quite denial, Kollmuss and Agyeman also describe another denial-like symptom called rational distancing:
“Rational distancing is another way of protecting oneself from painful emotions. The person who rationalises is perfectly aware of the problems but has stopped feeling any emotions about it. This defense mechanism is especially common among scientists and environmentalists who are frequently expose to ‘bad news’.”
Whilst not quite the same as denial, rational distancing (the kind of thing I think I am experiencing) shows that the emotional rationing that leads to denial can be felt in many ways – a natural response to the fear of climate change.
And if you think that emotional response is bad, it becomes much worse when we take the next level into account; that of guilt. As such a broad issue, and one that everyone plays a role in, guilt about climate change is rife – we all feel like we have a role to play. And as Markowitz and Shariff explain, this ‘guilty bias’, directly leads to people reacting in a different way to climate change:
“Although few people are blamed for intending to cause climate change, many are exposed to messages that hold them accountable for causing environmental damage as an unintended side effect of their behaviour and lifestyle.
“To allay negative recriminations, individuals often engage in biased cognitive processes to minimize perceptions of their own complicity. These biases are even more likely when individuals and communities feel incapable of meaningfully responding behaviourally. Such motivated moral reasoning occurs through a variety of processes, including derogating evidence of one’s role in causing the problem and challenging the significance of the issue.”
Think about it in this way; if you feel guilty about something but you can’t do anything about it, you have to do something with that guilt. For an issue such as climate change, this guilt can be huge, and retreating to denial is a natural response.
And, despite our campaigns against denialism, the unfortunate thing is that environment organisations have often played a role in building this denial mechanism. There are probably two key areas where we can see this. First, there are the campaigns that demand that people find out what their carbon footprint is, and then take necessary steps to address it. As, Wolf and Moser explain though, by building into feelings of guilt, the research shows that this can have negative effects:
“More knowledge of a problem does not necessarily, directly, and by itself lead to a change in behaviour, and sometimes can actually hinder behaviour change.”
Secondly, in discussing the use of ‘fear appeals’ to climate change, O’Niell and Nicholson-Cole says that the fear around the issue can have a real impact on people’s engagement with the issue:
“The continued use of fear messages can lead to one of two psychological functions. The first is to control the external danger, the second to control the internal fear. If the external danger – in this case, the impacts of climate change – cannot be controlled (or is not perceived to be controllable), the individuals will attempt to control the internal fear. These internal fear controls, such as issue denial and apathy, can represent barriers to meaningful engagement.”
That’s not to say that either of these approaches are inherently bad, but that we need to be careful about how, and with whom, we approach them, as they can have serious negative consequences.
So, when one of your friends comes to you and admits that they are a climate denialist it may be worth thinking about how you react to that. For many, we think about issues like climate change as if people make decisions on a rational basis; that people should just “read the science” and “get it”.
But the reality is that how we react to climate change is an entirely emotional activity. For many of us those emotions are fear, followed by action. For others though, it is fear, followed by retreat and denial. Both are natural responses, yet for some reason we only treat one response as people are idiots.