Blog Profile / Climate Denial

REASONS WHY CLIMATE DISASTERS MIGHT NOT INCREASE CONCERN ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE

In the wake of extreme heat, droughts, and Hurricane Sandy, many people are assuming that, at last, there may be the critical mass of extreme weather events that will tip public opinion towards action on climate change. This is based on the long held assumption that extreme climate events will increase awareness and concern- and [...]

Romney Channels Beck

There are curious things happening with climate change narratives.  In this excerpt from his Republican convention acceptance speech last night Romney delivers a line about climate change with mocking pauses that look,  to my British eyes, pure Glenn Beck. What does this say about the way we message climate change? The line is “President Obama [...]

WHY IS THE AERIAL BATTLE AGAINST WEST NILE VIRUS MORE COMPELLING THAT THE CLIMATE CHANGE THAT CAUSED IT?

We know that climate change is hard to accept because it is complex, long drawn out, challenging to our world views and without a clear external enemy. So what happens when a related issue- the West Nile virus – comes along with exactly the right ingredients to motivate public concern, media coverage and an immediate [...]

THE IRRESISTIBLE STORY OF RICHARD MULLER

One of our biggest problems with climate change is that it simply refuses to fit conventional narratives. So when a leading skeptic makes a public conversion it makes a compelling story that calls for our attention.   We are far more inspired by narratives that speak to our social values than data that mumbles to [...]

Coal billionnaire sunk by vast metaphor

Oh what glorious and bizarre irony. Yesterday an Australian coal billionaire, Clive Palmer, announces that he is building a full size replica of The Titanic. This is Clive Palmer who utterly rejects climate science, calls CO2 the ”fluid of life”, says that green activists are a CIA funded conspiracy and sought a high court challenge [...]

HOW TO TALK TO A CLIMATE CHANGE DENIER (DISSENTER)

In this 20 minute video I suggest six strategies for talking to people who do not accept climate science.  I argue strongly that one should avoid a debate about the data and content of the science, and concentrate instead on addressing the values and emotions from which people  construct their beliefs.  The strategies are: finding [...]

THE INGENIOUS WAYS WE AVOID BELIEVING IN CLIMATE CHANGE- A VIDEO PRESENTATION

QATAR WORLD CUP 2022: A COLOSSAL WRECK- BOUNDLESS AND BARE.

Guest blogger, Terence Blacker decries the ‘Ozymandian’ stupidity of holding the 2022 World Cup in air conditioned stadiums in Qatar, one of the world’s hottest  countries and FIFA’s feeble greenwashing of its stupendously destructive choice of host country. If the delegates currently attending the global climate conference in Mexico need any reminding of the magnitude [...]

ONE REPORT- TWO HEADLINES

How does one scientific report generate two entirely contradictory stories and headlines? This is a perfect example of how information on climate change is filtered by the newsmedia and distorted to fit the politics and worldview of their readers. The report on temperature data was released by the UK Meteorological Office on 26th November to [...]

MORE GLARING JUXTAPHOTISIONS

As noted in my posting before last (‘Up in Lights”) it is the juxtapositions of images and messages that are often most enlightening about our mass confusion and denial – I call them juxtaphotisions. Here are three crackers that really require little additional comment. These two posters were sitting alongside each other outside Bristol Parkway [...]

FEAR AND LOATHING IN THE US MID-TERM ELECTIONS

Even with the results still coming in, it already clear that the US elections have been a disaster for climate change. From the perspective of the psychology of denial, the elections contained two important lessons: one concerning the failures of the past, the other concerning the potential failures of the future. The first is that [...]

PHOTOSHOP CLIMATE IMAGES ‘FEED XENOPHOBIA’ AND DENIAL

The desire to stir a debate around climate change is not an excuse for sensationalist images and language that demean immigrants. The effects of climate change are so hard to imagine that we should welcome an exhibition of Postcards from the Future’ that promises “Images that bring ideas to life and frame the climate debate [...]

UP IN LIGHTS

When campaign organisations put their climate change messages up in lights alongside commercial neon advertising the result is a bizarre dissonance that does nothing for their message but says a lot more about our collective confusion and denial. Last week 10:10, the global campaign to reduce emissions by 10% this year, proudly announced that its [...]

10:10 No Pressure Splatter Ad- so how could it have been better?

Last week 10:10, an international network of individuals, organisations and businesses pledging to reducing their emissions by 10% in the year 2010, released a promotion video that has turned out to be a public relations and communications disaster. It showed three different groups – schoolchildren, staff and a football team- discussing what they would do [...]

Collapse Porn?

A movie that is now being launched in the UK called Collapse shows Michael Ruppert chainsmoking his way through visions of social and economic disaster. It is symptomic of the utterly self defeating way that peak oil  and climate change are typically communicated Ruppert is a media generated phenomenon who brings together a cluster of [...]

POSTCARD FROM ISRAEL

Lucy Michaels, our guest blogger, gives an expert insiders view on the threat and the denial of climate change in Israel. Greetings from our little corner of the Eastern Mediterranean. I live in a small kibbutz, in a hyper-arid desert valley on the borders of Israel and Jordan near the Gulf of Eilat, where I am [...]

CARBON SUPPLICANTS ON THE COPENHAGEN PILGRIMAGE

George Marshall argues that the carefully stage managed involvement of civil society in Copenhagen fails to speak in any meaningful way to the people who really hold the balance of power. For many of us Brits the journey to Copenhagen has required the trials of true carbon penitence. We eschewed the £12.50 flight in favour of [...]

SWIFTBOATING THE CLIMATE SCIENTISTS

The theft of 1,000 private e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA) shows that deniers have learned lessons from dirty politics and are running a new campaign to undermine public trust in climate scientists. The feeble response from the UEA and the climate science community shows that scientists are [...]

WHY WE STILL DON’T BELIEVE IN CLIMATE CHANGE

At a recent dinner at Oxford University a senior researcher in atmospheric physics was telling me about his coming holiday in Thailand. I asked him whether he was concerned that this would make a contribution to climate change (we had, after all, just sat through a two hour presentation on the topic). “Of course,” he [...]

GEO-ENGINEERING: DENIAL ON A GLOBAL SCALE

Dr Adam Corner argues that geo-engineered solutions to climate change are ‘capitalism’s ultimate parlour trick….an impressive leap from a desperate denial of the causes of climate change, to a triumphant denial of the consequences’ In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein joined the dots between the commercial manufacture of military weaponry, the marketing of anti-flu [...]