Christmas can be challenging days, as it can become the perfect breeding ground for climate change denialist messages to flutter wildly above the prawns, cutlery, and snacks, leaving many of the people stupefied. diners.
A single person can launch so many denialist ideas per minute that they end up stunning the person in front of them at New Year’s Eve dinner, generating in him or her a feeling of frustration. This is why it is important to try to organize these messages in different ‘drawers’ as they arrive.
Ramón Nogueras, psychologist and author of Why do we believe in shit?explains that, to begin with, we can find “different degrees of denialism in a person: people who have gone further or people who have gone less.” The milder extreme are those people who may be slightly skeptical or prone to skepticism, which, he points out, “at times can be healthy, because institutions or governments are not always right or in the position of truth.” However, “at the other extreme there could be a person who says that the Earth is flat,” he points out.
Many denialist people conceive of themselves as ‘skeptics’, but they ignore that a true skeptical person pays attention to the evidence and changes their perceptions and beliefs as the evidence makes it necessary.
Ramon Nogueras
— Psychologist
He highlights the difference between being a skeptic and a denier: “Many deniers conceive of themselves as ‘skeptics’, but they ignore that a true skeptical person pays attention to the evidence and changes their perceptions and beliefs as the evidence makes it necessary. On the other hand, a denier, when presented with evidence that he is wrong, is not going to abandon his beliefs: what he is going to do is look for a way to twist those beliefs in order to justify his speeches.”
John Cook, researcher of the cognitive psychology of climate science denial, points out in books such as Climate Change Denial: heads in the sand (Climate Change Denialism: Heads in the Sand), or Cranky Uncle vs. Climate Change: How to Understand and Respond to Climate Science Deniers (My Grumpy Uncle vs. Climate Change: How to Understand and Respond to Climate Change Deniers), that climate crisis deniers can be grouped into four categories based on the phrases they carry as their flag. However, some of them can jump from one group to another, even in the same conversation, depending on what ‘suits’ them.
Deny reality
We’ve all heard phrases like “It’s cold, so global warming isn’t real” or “glaciers are rising, so climate change is made up.” These are arguments that completely deny that the planet is experiencing climate change. The expert maintains that it is like saying that “it is dark, so the sun does not exist,” and explains that these arguments are woven through fallacies such as selective selection. For example, selectively singling out a handful of glaciers ignores the fact that the vast majority of glaciers are shrinking.
They also do so through fallacies such as ‘impossible expectations’: Climate change does not mean that there will be no more cold days, but rather that cold events are less likely to occur.
Deny responsibility
The arguments focused on denying human responsibility for climate change are those that assume that climate change is occurring, but defend that it is something ‘natural’, not caused by humans. These ideas can be materialized in phrases like “human activity contributes, but only a little, to climate change.” This is, in this case, the fallacy of ‘lazy induction’: Ignore relevant evidence when reaching a conclusion. It ignores all the research that exists around how much humans have contributed to climate change.
Statements are also made such as “the climate has always been changing throughout history, so this global warming that we are experiencing is just a natural variation.” This statement is constructed through the fallacy of hasty conclusions. Just because the climate has been changing naturally in the past does not mean that the current change is natural. It is like saying, Cook exemplifies, when seeing a dead person with a knife stuck in the back, that since there have been many humans who have died of natural causes in the past, that must mean that this death has occurred naturally. .
Deny the consequences
“CO2, well, look, it is necessary for there to be life. Without CO2 there could be no life.” This is what the politician Emilio del Valle (Vox) said in the Congress of Deputies two years ago. As Cook points out in his research, deniers try to distract from the negative impacts of climate change by carefully selecting the supposed beneficial impacts it has. It’s like saying that because smoking sometimes helps as a weight loss strategy, that means it’s not harmful.
The expert gives other examples in his studies, such as the phrase “hurricanes are not related to global warming” or “CO2 is good for plants.”
Deny science
People who deny science tend to be the most prone to conspiracy ideas: they defend theories such as that climate change is a fraud, an invention. That scientists, through professional or criminal misconduct, manipulate or distort research for ideological or financial reasons, and that there is an ‘elite’ that seeks to suppress ‘dissent’. They can send messages like “climate deniers are like when Galileo opposed the consensus.” However, Cook explains that, in fact, climate deniers are more like those who criticized Galileo, denying science because it threatened their own ideology.
You can also hear statements like “31,000 scientists [estadounidenses] “They question man-made global warming, so there is no consensus.” This is about the false experts fallacy: they use non-climate scientists to give the impression that there is a scientific debate going on when there isn’t. It also commits the fallacy of the magnified minority: 31,000 is only 0.3% of all science graduates in the United States.
“It was warmer in the medieval era” is another recurring statement. It falls into the fallacy of selective selection: although, indeed, the medieval period had unusually warm temperatures in some regions of the planet, globally the planet was colder than now.
When is it worth talking to a denier?
Nogueras lists some things that we must take into account when dealing with a denier. The first is that “we are almost never going to convince the person in a single conversation. It is a process that, if it happens, we will see when.”
When your beliefs become part of your identity, recognizing that your belief is wrong is an attack on your identity.
Ramon Nogueras
— Psychologist
The second thing we must analyze is how much “investment” that person has made in defending those beliefs. Have you put a lot of effort into it? Have you expressed your ideas publicly, such as on your social media profiles? If the answer is “yes”, surely it will not be worth debating with that person, since these ideas will be very integrated into their identity. “When your beliefs become part of your identity, recognizing that your belief is wrong is an attack on your identity,” he explains.
Cook agrees in his research: “When someone rejects science for ideological reasons, the possibility of changing their mind is very small. When we think that science threatens our own ideology, we may react in a biased way. This can occur at a deep psychological level, so many times we don’t even realize we are being biased.”
Inoculation and Socratic dialogue
However, it is dangerous to let misinformation pass. That is why, if we decide to try, we can apply strategies such as ‘inoculation’: “By explaining the technique used by deniers to distort the facts, the conflict can be resolved. This is like exposing the magic trick that is hidden behind a magic trick,” says the researcher. The fallacies that deniers usually use are collected in Skeptical Sciencethe website created by Cook for this purpose.
We must respond to misinformation with three elements: fact, myth, and fallacy. For example: “This decade has been the hottest in history since there are records, but there is indeed a myth that says that, since it is still very cold at times, this implies that climate change is a lie. This is like saying that the existence of night implies that the sun does not exist. It is a fallacy.”
We can also try it, Nogueras proposes, through ‘Socratic dialogue’: “It consists of, instead of presenting statements contrary to what the other person says, acting by making the person feel that we are on their side, that we really are on their side. We want to believe, but there are some issues that stop us a little, and that is why he has to explain it. Ask questions like: ‘How do you know it’s true?’, ‘And if what you say is correct, then how does this happen or not happen?’ So that the person can perceive the gaps in their own belief. In this way we can sow a kind of seed of doubt that can, at a given moment, lead the person to rethink things.” Furthermore, the expert points out, it is important to adopt a neutral or even cordial attitude as much as possible.
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