If global climate change is posing an existential threat to humanity, then why don’t we do something to prevent it from happening? Parts of our planet are already experiencing temperatures that are too hot to sustain normal human activity, and thousands are dying. We are now being plagued with massive forest fires that are decimating critically important carbon sinks, and burning up homes, settlements and even whole towns. Widespread species extinction is endemic. Exotic tropical diseases are migrating northward to unprepared countries. Our oceans are heating, acidifying and rising. Glacier melt will be impossible to stop—just one, the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica, is destabilizing from its underside, threatening a 65 cm rise in the world’s oceans. The collapse of Thwaites would unleash an inevitable collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet and an eventual 3.3 metre ocean rise, likely by the end of the 23rd century, if we’re lucky. Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emission have been consistently going up rather than down. What explains this incongruity?
Two social scientists, Marianne Cooper from Stanford University and Maxim Voronov from the University of Toronto have attempted to provide some insights (“We Can’t Turn Away from Reality”, Scientific American, October, 2024.) “Welcome,” they write, “to the new normal, an age where many things that we used to deem unusual or unacceptable have become just what we live with.” This leads to an obvious question. “But what happens,” they ask, “when overlooking and tolerating greater levels of harm becomes a shared cultural habit? …In the short term, living in a state of peak denial helps us cope. In the long run, it will be our undoing.”
The first part of their complex answer is explained by “desensitization”—we just become accustomed to the unfolding crises. It’s a peculiar response they suggest, “especially in this scientific and technological age, when we’ve never been more capable of understanding and addressing [these crises].”
Perhaps desensitization is partly explained by the plethora of rapid changes that characterize our culture. We have learned to adapt to the continual arrival of the new and the novel. The speed of our adaptation increases to suit the milieu of the times. Desensitization to change is normal, so we employ it to respond to the climate crisis.
A more detailed answer to the dynamics of denial is “neutralization”, or the “evasion of disturbing or threatening information.” By not thinking about the climate crisis, by not discussing or announcing it, a real problem seems not to exist. The truth often needs bravery to be confronted, realized and accepted. Being happy and content is a more comfortable existence, so politicians and the media are reluctant to publicize bad news stories, and public discourse retreats to the position of avoidance. Too much bad news is overwhelming, particularly if it strikes at the foundational assumptions of a culture’s identity. Ignorance is bliss. But it can also be fatal.
Another denial tactic is “minimization”, the tendency to diminish the seriousness of a problem by using less alarming language: the pandemic has become endemic; the dykes have held back the sea; oil companies are spending billions on carbon capture and storage to remove thousands of tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere; the global warming problem can simply be solved by planting a trillion trees; airplanes are installing more efficient jet engines; the loss of Arctic sea ice was less extensive this year than last year; heroic efforts are transporting salmon by truck to their spawning grounds; LNG is labelled a transitional fuel so this fossil fuel is acceptable to use. Each of these statements diminishes the extent and seriousness of the climate crisis by offering the false impression that the situation is not as serious as it actually is.
Another strategy for aiding collective denial is for a culture to reimagine its past in order to avoid responsibility for its present problems. Even though Christianity claims to be the custodian of Creation, its mythology has actually encouraged the exploitation of nature by placing humanity outside and separate from it. The objectors to mRNA vaccines forget that most communicable diseases have been eradicated by immunization—the Black Plague of 1348 killed a quarter to a third of Europe’s entire population but no one at the time had the slightest idea of what was causing it, and 1 billion people died of smallpox in the hundred years prior to the invention of a vaccine. People reimagine the past to suit their own biases. So the same science that designs safe cars and airplanes, that devises computers and cellphones, that sends spacecraft to Mars and Jupiter, that is responsible for the comfort of modern dentistry and the cures of current medicine, is the same science that is doubted when it identifies global climate change.
Skepticism is healthy, but it can also be fatal, particularly when a pervasive denial that infects an entire culture prevents the protective measures that would avoid an unfolding catastrophe.
Ray Grigg for Sierra Quadra