Writing in CleanTechnica last week, Michael Barnard summarized the six overlapping conditions that taken together, can explain the existence of climate change denial. While not necessarily presenting anything we haven’t covered before, it’s an illustrative example of why writing that ignores any one of the six elements tells an incomplete story.
The issue is these factors are often portrayed as competing. Is it Daniel Kahan’s cultural cognition theory, that tribalism that prevents Republicans from accepting the scientific reality that fossil fuels drive climate change? Or is it Lewandowsky’s conspiracy ideation that allows for people to accept the wacky alternative explanations? Or is it the fault of decades of industry-funded misinformation? The answer is yes, to all of them.
By thinking about them as an overlapping set of conditions instead of separate phenomena, Barnard is able to distill the complexities of the psychological, political and sociological factors at play into a simple image.
The six interlocking conditions that make one ripe for denial are confirmation bias (the psychological bias towards reinforcing what we already think), conspiracy ideation (one’s willingness to believe conspiracy theories), ideology (your political views about regulation and the market), Dunning-Kruger effect (in which those who know little about a subject overestimate their understanding of it relative to those who are better versed), tribal partisanship (loyalty to one’s “team” or political party), and then overlapping all of those are disinformation campaigns.
Without the disinformation campaign, the five other factors might produce some denial, but it would not be institutionalized and constantly reinforced by advertisements, developed by think tanks, lobbied to politicians, etc. For example, the Flat Earth conspiracy theory engages many of the same conditions, but without the backing of a profit-motivated industry, it’s hardly making an impact in the real world.
Narratives that seek to explain climate inaction, like “Losing Earth,” fall short when they don’t acknowledge all six aspects of denial propagation, particularly the disinformation campaigns that activate and amplify the other conditions.
It’s similar, in many ways, to the discussion around extreme weather and climate change. For certain extreme conditions to arise, the weather needs to provide certain factors--moisture, temperature, winds, etc. Each of those factors influences the weather, but it’s all happening within a climate that is changing.
Climate change creates the conditions for all weather now, and disinformation campaigns have permanently changed the landscape of public discourse. To talk about extreme weather or climate politics without mentioning these factors misses an important part of the story.
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