Climate Scepticism & Denialism

11/17/20222 min read

The impacts of climate change on all communities, human and animal, in land or at sea or in the air, is manifold, affecting all aspects of life on Earth including, food, water, ecosystems, human health, and infrastructure (NOAA, 2021), yet there remain those who question or deny the existence of climate change and/or the need to take adaptive and mitigative measures.

In 2018, two researchers from the University of Tasmania, Australia identified five explanations for lack of climate change concern: “ideological, group-based, religious, self-enhancing and self-protective” (Lucas and Davison, 2018):- ·

  • Ideologically, lack of climate concern appears to be more common amongst those who identify as being on the Right, who tended to exhibit “reliance on existing social systems for security, reassurance and stability”; while group-based sources can be generalised as “conscious or subconscious efforts to retain the benefits of belonging to a social group and avoiding the risks that may come with being excluded”.

  • There is a position by reactionary religious groups that “the existence of anthropogenic climate change is seen to threaten understandings of divine power”.

  • Self-enhancing sources include the prioritisation of immediate day-to-day concerns, opposition to government intervention or regulation, and individualism, while self-protection involves an individual’s defense mechanism against “the perceived enormity of the threat and/or the response required”.

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi posed the following questions in 2019 in relation to racism which, I argue, can be equally applicable to climate sceptics and deniers:

“What if racist policymakers know about the harmful outcomes of their policies?... What if economic, political, or cultural self-interest drives racist policymakers, not hateful immorality, not ignorance?”

Indeed, what if climate deniers and sceptics are acting not out of ignorance, but out of self-interest? For example, in the short-term, some farmers will enjoy longer growing seasons, and the loss of sea ice will open up more shipping routes (NOAA, 2020). Is there any grounds to say that there are groups who benefit from extreme climate events and climate disasters?

Some have gone so far as to call for climate denialism to be made illegal:-

“Climate denialism is not beneficial because its main goal is to produce doubt, and not truth. Climate denialism is not sincerely meant, which is a necessary condition for Mill to accept utterances. Climate denialists bring harm, by blocking necessary action on climate change. Primarily they harm future generations and people in developing countries.” (Lavik, 2016)

For the sake of the more vulnerable amongst us, and in the interests of intergenerational equity, climate sceptics and deniers ought not to be allowed to prevail.

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