A nice article I read in the FT:
When you write about climate change, you get even more angry emails than when you write about Muslims. Last time I tried, one reader berated me for mentioning "fictional pompous Al Gore's enriching scheme of global warming" in my "ridiculous article". This man ended with a quote from Einstein: "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." Another reader, whose sign-off cited his PhD, explained to me that all the international summits weren't "about man-made climate change 'science' ... but really about a larger 'global wealth distribution scheme'."
It's tempting to blame "climate sceptics" for the world's inaction on man-made climate change. (The United Nations' latest summit, starting in Durban on Monday, won't save the planet either.) Greens often talk as if the enemy were not climate change itself, but a self-taught band of freelance sceptics. No wonder, because fighting culture wars is the fun bit of politics. However, this fight is pointless. The sceptics aren't the block to action on climate change. They just wish they were. Instead, they are an irrelevant sideshow.
Sceptics and believers quarrel about the science because they both start from a mistaken premise: that science will determine what we do about climate change. The idea is that once we agree what the science says, policy will automatically follow. That's why the Nobel committee gave Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change a peace prize.
Mysteriously, though, the policy still hasn't followed the science. Almost all scientists already agree on the science. An article in the PNAS, journal of the US National Academy of Sciences, last year found that 97 per cent of actively publishing climate scientists believe man-made climate change is happening. Nonetheless, the world hasn't acted.
Clearly then, science doesn't determine policy, concludes Daniel Sarewitz of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes in Washington. Yet the pointless quarrel about science continues.
It's pointless first of all because what most people believe about climate change has little to do with science. After all, hardly any layperson understands it. Rather, people's beliefs about climate change follow from their beliefs about the world. "We disagree about climate change because we have different belief systems," writes Mike Hulme, professor of climate change at the UK's University of East Anglia.
American sceptics, for instance, are disproportionately likely to be conservative white males, say the sociologists Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap. Conservative white males don't like governments interfering with business. They don't like global co-operation. Nothing will convince them that we need global co-operation to interfere with business and tackle climate change, especially not if Al Gore says so.
Conversely, liberals who do like global co-operation and interfering with business are going to believe in climate change, even though hardly any of them understand the science either. "Climate change has joined gun control, taxes and abortion as a form of social identity marker," writes Matthew Nisbet, social scientist at American University in Washington. In this debate, and not just in the US, almost nobody is open to persuasion.
Beating the sceptics around the head with the science just gives them attention. It also allows them to roar in triumph whenever the believers get any bit of science wrong, as when the IPCC exaggerated the melting of Himalayan glaciers. The squabble also creates a one-dimensional argument about climate change: do you believe it's real or not? I've found to my cost that many people can only read articles about climate change as statements of either belief or scepticism. This obscures better questions, such as what exactly we should do about climate change.
The quarrel with the sceptics is additionally pointless because they are a small minority – under a fifth of the 35 million Americans who actively engage in this issue, estimates Jon Krosnick, social psychologist at Stanford University. In a poll sponsored by the World Bank in 15 countries in 2009, "in each country the public believed climate change to be a serious problem," writes Roger Pielke Jr, political scientist at the University of Colorado. He adds: "The battle for public opinion has essentially been won." Admittedly, he cautions, most people who believe that climate change exists feel only lukewarm concern. However, trying to convince them with even more science is probably pointless too.
The sceptics and the apathetic will always be with us. There'll never be full consensus on climate change. But if governments could only act when there was unanimity, no law on anything would ever be passed. The US invaded Iraq, bailed out banks and passed universal healthcare with much less consensus than exists over climate change. In short, the sceptics are not the block to action.
Rather, the block is that the believers – including virtually all governments on earth – aren't sufficiently willing to act. We could do something. But shouting at sceptics is easier.