The Belief System of Climate Denial

“Climate change is a hoax!”

That was belted out by one of the Republican presidential candidates, Vivek Ramaswamy.

Of course, for those in the know, he is also behind the effort to bring corporations back to the Milton Friedman doctrine of profits only and shareholder primacy. He has been pushing hard against ESG and “woke”.

So, he is not one with a lot of empathy.

At this stage, after a couple of years of ongoing series of extreme weather such as droughts, fires, flooding and hurricanes, it’s hard to believe that there are some people who deny that the climate seems to be changing in a deleterious way. To deny climate change is to refute what has been going on for the last couple of years. It’s a willful blindness to what is going on, like an ostrich sticking its head in the ground.

Hello!?! Did you hear about those fires in Maui?

Hello!?! Did you catch the news about that Cat 5 Hurricane Ian devastating south Florida last year (2022)?

Hello!?! Haven’t you heard about those floodings throughout the Midwest and Northeast? Like Vermont’s second trip to a 500-year event?

Are you awake? Are you PAYING ATTENTION?

They are lying to themselves if they say they don’t believe the earth is getting warmer. I think that deep down inside they know that something is wrong.

It’s getting harder and harder to ignore these extreme weather events.

Now, there is a possibility that we may be facing a period called a “heat” age rather than an ice age because the earth goes through cycles: hot and cold, hot and cold. Maybe… But, then if we are going through a cyclic “heat” age, then the earth is getting warmer, and we should do something to increase our resilience. However, the logic told by the climate change scientists is a LOT more convincing than the logic provided by the climate deniers.

Actually, the climate deniers aren’t providing any logic for what is going on.

The climate scientists talk about the data on the temperature of the ocean, the sea surface and general temperature around the world – all of which has been rising since around 1850. They talk about the history of locomotion and the spewing of CO2 and how those two are in tandem with the rising temperatures. They talk about how plants and the atmosphere handles CO2 and other particles and how all of that impacts the jet stream and other weather atmospherics.

All of that reasoning seems to hang together. And they have been warning for a few decades. What they’ve been warning appears to be coming true.

The climate deniers give…crickets. They don’t give any explanations for the extreme weather. When we do get an extreme cold weather, they say, “See, there is no global warming.”

I go for what seems to be the most logical explanation and right now, with all of the extreme weather happening, it looks like we are in the midst of climate change… actually, we are deep in it. There is no going back. It is too late to go back to the way we were; the extreme weather will keep on coming.

“Climate denial is a fringe belief held by a large percentage of people”. – Hank Green

Here is an interesting rant on a YouTube video that pop up on my feed.

He also thinks the climate deniers are lying and he has some other interesting thoughts. He talks about them having a sliding scale of climate beliefs and they slide up and down that scale. The fact that they slide up and down that scale leads him to believe that they are lying when they deny climate change. You can’t occupy one of these scales depending on what “room” you are in.

The scale is from 1) full on denial of climate change, 2) to climate change is happening but it is not caused by humans, 3) to climate change is happening but is not that big of a deal, 4) to it is not worth the costs to fix or address climate change.

Some of the commenters have also noted the sliding scale.

I haven’t encountered that sliding scale, but then, I don’t go around talking about climate change. At this stage, if full on evidence of extreme weather ain’t convincing them, certainly conversations with me isn’t going to change their mind.

And yeah, he says it is hard to believe that they disbelieve climate change when it is getting harder and harder every year to ignore those weather events. It is just getting harder every year to deny climate change.

The person in the video does bring up an interesting theory of being a contrarian or as he calls it a rogue. That’s an interesting thought and is possible. The idea of there being some people who if everyone goes right, they go left just to be contrarian. And I get that feeling. But they should be a minority or a fringe, and in the US, we have a large number of climate deniers. Climate deniers are not fringe; they occupy mainly one of the parties.

The contrarian would be like the Galileo with earth rotating around the sun rather than the sun and stars rotating around earth. So, yeah, Galileo was contrarian and was right. The difference here was he supplied scientific and mathematical reasoning for his position which later was proved true.

The climate deniers aren’t providing any scientific reasoning for their denial, and they don’t explain what is going on. And it is very likely they will be proven wrong.

He also talks about how we are going to go forth into the glorious future and learn how bad this gets. These people will then learn or maybe they won’t. Maybe they will die before they learn.

My thought has been maybe the climate deniers won’t admit because 1) it would mean facing the fact that they’ve been soooooo wrong despite all of the evidence of the extreme weather flashing in their face. It’s already hard to admit when one is wrong in general, and on a topic of such consequential importance, it becomes so much harder to face the truth of one’s complicity in the outcome. The other reason why it may be hard to admit climate change is 2) they are going to have to face the truth that their quality of life will degrade. We are in the midst of climate change now and every year it is going to get worse until it stabilizes. Life is going to just get harder. All we can do now is to take steps to improve our resilience in the face of disasters and to help prevent it from getting worse in the future. Potentially, climate change could become existential for a lot of us and that is really hard to face.

To admit is to face the fact of their complicity in the unfolding disaster.

The other really interesting point he made is he has seen people flip from one position to another and deny every believing position one. So, if they denied climate change and then flip to believing in climate change, they will not admit ever denying climate change. A couple of commenters have noticed that too. That’s interesting that people will conveniently forget their prior positions. (By the way, the way he physically expressed his frustration with their forgetting was funny – the way he kind of sputtered at their denial of prior disagreements. “Our old selves die and we don’t even notice.”)

“If you haven’t been convinced so far, then I will let the future convince you because the future is going to convince you.” – Hank Green

This past week, Florida had Idalia come ashore as a Cat 3. The original prediction when it popped up in the Caribbean was a landing as a potential Cat 2. I thought, “No way, the waters are too warm.”

And sure enough, Idalia rapidly intensified into a Cat 3 and was for a period of time predicted to land as a Cat 4. Cat 4 is frightening.

And this one began in the Caribbean.

We have one far off in the eastern Atlantic, off the shore of Africa and it is moving west. It could eventually turn north and head off into the waters of the Atlantic and not hit US shores, which obviously is the route we want it to take, or it could head off toward the Caribbean. That second route is a scary one because the storm will have time to intensify into a really horrendous hurricane – maybe a Category 5? The national hurricane center are not saying anything specific because right now the disturbance is too far off for the computer models to produce anything reliable. This thing still has a week to run.

But if it runs across the Atlantic and dives into the Caribbean, it stands to reason that the hurricane will be at minimum a 4 and has a good chance of being a 5. So I’m watching this and kind of freaking out.

The peak of our season is September 10th according to FEMA and weather.com (or maybe it’s the 15th – another news source is saying the 15th). The season runs through November 30th. Even if we pass 9/10, I will not rest easy until the end of October…or maybe end of November because climate change may be extending the hurricane season.

It’s high-octane anxiety for me from now until November 1st.