Climate change denial

Climate change denial is easy enough. The current climate claims are for global warming but just a few decades ago fear of a new ice age gripped the press and public opinion. So which is it?

The evidence for climate change is equivocal being circumstantial and reliant on correlations and modelling — even schoolboys know that correlation is not cause.

Deniers prosper in such circumstances. 

The real evidence is for weather, not a change in climate, the normal run of rain, wind and sun that is never the same from one day to the next but, on the average, never really changes. We see weather change not climate change.

Moderate deniers accept that the climate changes but deny that humans either cause or even influence the change.

Deniers simply say no.

Denial is a natural human response. Despite our adventurous spirit that took us from Africa to every corner of the globe in the equivalent of an evolutionary blink, most of us don't like change. We prefer things to be stable and predictable.

This apparent contradiction makes evolutionary sense. We needed to move to find new resources as our numbers grew but, being long-lived organisms, we needed to stay still long enough to exploit them.

So if we lean toward stability, then we are tempted to favour the notion that there is no climate change. There is weather of course, but overall the world is stable.

But this is not the truth.

Everything changes. It always has and always will.

Rivers erode banks and alter their course; the land floods after rain; the current taking the sediment out to the oceans. Slowly and indelibly this process flattens the land.

Change is the driver of evolutionary processes that took life from microbes to plants to insects to dinosaurs to mammals and a whole host in between.

Given enough time, change is just like death and taxes, inevitable.

Consequently...

Climate change denial seems ridiculous

What is worth considering, however, is the rate of change.

Slow, gentle climate change that is imperceptible enough to make its existence deniable, is very different to abrupt climate change.

And this is what drives believers. The worry that climate change will be fast and, consequently, catastrophic.