I’ve only recently been hearing the term Climate Change Denier for those who don’t believe in the disastrous future scientists are predicting. Harsh rebuke indeed, given the inevitable association with holocaust denial—a reprehensible Orwellian lie about historical fact and insult to the millions who suffered that past, some of whom are still amongst us.
This strikes me as different. Climate change denial (let’s call it CCD) is a denial of a future that for the most part hasn’t happened yet, that exists for most of us as scientific projection, aerial photos of a diminished Arctic ice, reports of distressed polar bears, statistics showing a small rise in world temperature which conflict with the actual experience of many of us (i.e, this harsh winter still lingering as April arrives).
At this point most people are climate change believers in theory. But it seems to me that most of us are de facto deniers in the sense that we simply are not as upset about this scenario as we know we ought to be. We’ve seen the movies about imminent collision with asteroids or the landing of snotty, hostile aliens and we know what a world united in an effort to survive looks like. We know what determined sacrifice accomplished during World War Two.
A pro-wind power activist emails computer maps of what Cape Cod will look like as the ocean rises in coming decades. (Worst case scenario would turn us into lots of little islands.) The Cape should be, along with certain low- lying Pacific islands, among the first casualties of rising seas. Only a small rise would wreak havoc with Wellfleet’s shellfish industry. But Wellfleet’s selectmen have decided not to put on the upcoming town meeting warrant an item that would call for implementation of the co-called “stretch code” which would have required more energy-efficient houses. They cited “too many unanswered questions.”
Probably the majority of selectmen and citizens believe the climate change scientists, but the languid progress toward becoming a “green town” (including our reversal on wind turbines) constitutes a sort of de facto CCD.
De facto CCD: the increasingly virulent anti-wind turbine emails with which I get bombarded daily that fail to mention the context of the wind controversy, the predicted climate disaster. No question, flicker effects, insistent humming, lowered real estate values would all seem a more acceptable price to pay if we truly believed they were the key to averting disaster.
It’s a variety of CCD that in the aftermath of Japan’s nuclear troubles (as well as recent coal mining and oil drilling disasters), the problems of source continue to get all the attention. If we were not in denial wouldn’t we focussing less on developing more and new ways to feed our energy habit and more on reducing the size of the problem through massive conservation efforts, even rationing, as in World War Two.
CCD is bragging about hybrid cars getting 40-50 mpg when we could with existing technology and proper motivation have cars that would get 100 mpg. (Hybrids produce only a l% token reduction of total oil demand, and are not expected to do much better. ) Boasting about a “stretch code” to make house 15 % more efficient when we have been perfectly capable for decades of building superinsulated, supertight houses which cut energy costs to close to zero.
As to why this lethargic response to the crisis, our failure to rise to this unprecedented occasion, clearly some big corporations make money from CCD. No doubt some governments are influenced to underrespond. But part of an explanation may be a radical, possibly hardwired split in most of us between two different sorts or levels of knowing, between the wisdom of trusting the experts and the common sense, also much prized, of trusting the evidence of your senses and “living in the now.”
According to our shellfish warden and harbormaster there has been no rise in local waters. None , anyway, that those closest to and most dependent on tidal status quo have noticed. If local observation were giving more indication of the future shown in those computer-generated maps, would our selectmen be acting with greater urgency?
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