Spending cuts will create a climate of denial

Climate change is a threat. But what sort of threat?



Generally, climate change is described as a threat to our environment and natural resources. With increased stress on already straining global resource systems, the effects of climate change on our natural environment will be measured in reduced crop yields and water shortages.

Climate change is sometimes framed as a threat to our economic prosperity. The Stern report famously argued that in order to maintain economic growth in the face of rapid climatic changes, 1% of global GDP should be spent on climate mitigation now in order to prevent much more being spent later. Although other economists are far less optimistic about the prospect of infinite economic growth on a planet with finite resources, it is now widely acknowledged that tackling climate change will have a significant financial cost.
But while the effects of climate change pose very real, measurable threats to our natural world and our economic systems, tackling climate change will also mean facing up to a less tangible but no less profound threat: the threat of climate change to our identity and self esteem.

In a paper published in the British Journal of Social Psychology last month, Paul Sparks and colleagues from the University of Sussex reported two experiments that suggest that climate change doesn’t only threaten the physical world – it threatens our mental world too.

In the first experiment, Sparks and his co-authors asked students from the University of Sussex to read six short pieces of ‘threatening’ text about climate change taken from newspapers and books. They then indicated their level of agreement with 15 statements that reflected various types of climate change denial – from denial of the severity of the problem, to denial of self-involvement.

Half of the group also completed a task designed to affirm people’s sense of their own kindness by writing a list of kind and compassionate behaviour that they have engaged in recently. The group who had completed the self-affirmation task reported a higher level of self-involvement – that is, the people who felt better about themselves were less likely to deny their personal responsibility for climate change.

In the second experiment, the researchers used a similar method but measured people’s willingness to recycle. The self-affirmed group expressed stronger intentions to increase the amount they recycled in the next month, suggesting that people’s motivation to engage in a specific pro-environmental behaviour is partly attributable to how they feel about themselves – or in other words, how well they are able to cope with the psychological threat of climate change.

It has long been known that people who feel better about themselves are more easily able to deal with threats. For people who do not feel self-affirmed, denial of the reality of the problem – or their role in solving it – is a common response. Paul Sparks’ research helps to explain why climate denial persists despite the evidence for climate change being overwhelming: it poses a psychological threat that we are often ill-equipped to deal with.
If we are to face up to challenge of climate change with a proportionate response, we will need every resource we can lay our hands on. Unfortunately, with the deepest and most extreme public sector cuts for a generation just around the corner, the national mood can hardly be described as ‘self-affirmed’.

On top of our reduced capacity to respond to climate change due to less public money being made available, are we also sapping our precious psychological resources by piling on the pressure to our collective self esteem?

AC

No Pressure: Why the 10:10 film was a disastrous piece of climate change communication

No Pressure & climate communication: what does the research say?

Imagine you were part of a highly successful environmental campaign group, that had spent the best part of the last year enthusiastically building a broad coalition of organisations – from schools, to local councils, to football teams – committed to cutting their carbon footprint. How might you choose to mark such a successful 10 months?

An attention-grabbing stunt of some kind? Great idea. A controversial and challenging video? That could work, yes. A poorly executed ‘joke’ about peer pressure involving the violent deaths of children and office workers who don’t subscribe to your campaign? Err, possibly not…

But yet, bizarrely, this is precisely what the otherwise well-respected 10:10 group opted to do. If you’ve not yet seen the video No Pressure, then you can now only view bootlegged versions as the original was wisely taken down just hours after it was launched. It made the front page of the Guardian Environment section, took a predictable bashing from the far-right conspiracy theorist James Delingpole over at the Telegraph, and sent the, ahem, ‘data libertarian’ blogs into a spin.


That the video was panned by the usual suspects is unsurprising. Delingpole spluttered that “the environmental movement has revealed the snarling, wicked, homicidal misanthropy beneath its cloak of gentle, bunny-hugging righteousness.” But while Delingpole’s wilfully literal misreading of the video is unremarkable, there is a genuine reason for concern: as a piece of climate change communication, it is disastrous.
At the most general level, the video fails to address basic principles of communication. What is the message? Who are the audience? The video literally doesn’t make any sense – if it is aimed at supporters, what are we supposed to take from it? And if it is aimed at those who oppose the 10:10 campaign – or more pertinently, are not yet aware of or interested in it – then what is the video hoping to achieve?

Beyond these general faults, many of the pitfalls of communicating climate change are gleefully skipped into. It is now well established that using shock tactics to pressure people into caring about climate change is of limited use: while fear of a negative outcome (e.g. lung cancer) can be an effective way of promoting behavioural changes (e.g. giving up smoking), the link between the threat and the behaviour must be personal and direct. Typically, climate change is perceived as neither a direct nor a personal threat – and so shocking people into doing their recycling is probably not the way to go.

We also know that while ‘peer pressure’ can be a remarkably effective way of promoting and spreading environmentally friendly behaviour, this is a process of social comparison that cannot be controlled by ‘outsiders’ to an individual’s social group. People make their comparisons to people who are ‘like them’ – people that they respect, admire, or empathise with in some way. Observing other people engaging in pro-environmental behaviour is a fantastic way of generating a positive social norm. Blowing them up for failing to get with the programme is not…

Of course, its easy to be critical of any attempt to engage the public with climate change – it is a formidable challenge finding the right way of encouraging people to embrace low-carbon lifestyles. But gradually, social scientists and climate change communicators are starting to piece together good evidence on how to effectively communicate climate change. The recent report by the Climate Change Communication Advisory Group (CCCAG), a network of climate communication academics and practitioners, set out seven principles for communicating climate change to mass audiences:

1. Move Beyond Social Marketing
2. Be honest and forthright about the probable impacts of climate change, and the scale of the challenge we confront in avoiding these. But avoid deliberate attempts to provoke fear or guilt.
3. Be honest and forthright about the impacts of mitigating and adapting to climate change for current lifestyles, and the ‘loss’ — as well as the benefits — that these will entail. Narratives that focus exclusively on the ‘up-side’ of climate solutions are likely to be unconvincing.
   1. Avoid emphasis upon painless, easy steps.
   2. Avoid over-emphasis on the economic opportunities that mitigating, and adapting to, climate change may provide.
   3. Avoid emphasis upon the opportunities of ‘green consumerism’ as a response to climate change.
4. Empathise with the emotional responses that will be engendered by a forthright presentation of the probable impacts of climate change.
5. Promote pro-environmental social norms and harness the power of social networks
6. Think about the language you use, but don’t rely on language alone
7. Encourage public demonstrations of frustration at the limited pace of government action

The 10:10 film may yet prove to be a success in terms of the level of attention that is paid to campaign – once people scratch the surface, they will find that exploding children are not actually a part of the plan, and that the aims of the 10:10 campaign are both reasonable and fair. But the danger is that more people will be persuaded that the pastiche of environmentalism that James Delingpole promotes is real.

At such a crucial juncture for campaigning on climate change, with public scepticism higher than a year ago, international negotiations tying themselves into a knot, and the British government taking enormous chunks out of the budget for tackling climate change, don’t those in the public eye have a responsibility to do a better job with their climate change communications?

AC

Climategate: passing judgment on peer review

This is a reprint of a piece I wrote for the Times Higher Education magazine last month, which was the cover story for 22nd July.

With the benefit of hindsight, the firestorm of controversy created by "Climategate" - the illegal release of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the end of 2009 - had been brewing for a very long time. In the highly politicised world of climate science, the accusative chorus of sceptical voices and the increasingly exasperated statements of defence from beleaguered climate scientists had become a deafening cacophony.

Initial media reports talked excitedly of the emails as a "smoking gun" showing climate change to be an elaborate hoax, but these were quickly exposed as completely unfounded. A House of Commons inquiry in March found no evidence of systematic deception by CRU researchers. A science panel led by Lord Oxburgh found no evidence of scientific malpractice. And finally on 7 July, after many months of gathering information, the independent inquiry led by Sir Muir Russell reported its long-awaited findings.
The inquiry examined the conduct of the scientists at the CRU and concluded that their rigour and honesty were not in doubt. Concerns were raised over the openness of CRU researchers (and university officials), and reforms of practices and procedures were identified. No evidence of subversion of the peer review or editorial process was unearthed, but the report did include a lengthy reflection on Climategate's implications for peer review by Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet. Horton argued that much of the confusion about what took place at the CRU stemmed from a misunderstanding of what the peer review process can - and cannot - do.

Drawing on Horton's analysis, the Russell report concluded: "Many who are far from the reality of the peer review process would like to believe that peer review is a firewall between truth on the one hand and error or dishonesty on the other. It is not. It is a means of sieving out evident error, currently unacceptable practices, repetition of previously published work without acknowledgement, and trivial contributions that add little to knowledge."

Reacting to the unedifying sight of science's sock drawer emptied on to the floor, however, many commentators have sought to pass judgement on peer review. The processes and practices of science are now in the dock, and non-scientists observing the private correspondence of the peers behind the peer review have found it difficult to escape the conclusion that science is not what it seems.
But for Harry Collins, distinguished research professor of sociology at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, who has for decades studied scientific practices, Climategate told him nothing he did not know already.

"The message that a lot of people seem to have taken from Climategate is far more damaging than it ought to be, because the normal to and fro of scientific practice looks like that. Most of what happened in Climategate was business as usual. People have a misconception of what science is because they are exposed to hero worship about science - stories about Newton, stories about Einstein - it's a sort of fairy tale. But it's disadvantageous to scientists to have science presented in this way, because politicians and journalists ask them for exact answers. Even if science is exact, it's exact only in the long term."

According to Collins, the romantic idealisation of science as a neat and tidy linear path towards greater knowledge is a myth. Science is often messy, sometimes sloppy, and always more complicated than it seems. Tensions can easily arise. Policymakers schooled in the canonical view of science (and battling an electoral cycle that privileges rapid responses over considered contemplation) face enormous pressures to transform the uncertainties of science into political soundbites. Confronted with a politically filtered version of science - clear, certain and precise - it is no surprise that people sense a scandal when things do not turn out to be quite as they expected.

Scientific objectivity goes no further than the circles of expertise that comprise fields of scientific endeavour. Of course, there are any number of "facts" to be objectively recorded in the natural world through experiment or observation. In climate science, the facts unambiguously point to the influence of human activity on the climate. But as the science and environmental journalist David Adam has suggested, the process by which scientists judge each other's work as fit for publication has always been where objective science dashes on the rocks of subjective human opinion. Short of automating the peer review process, the human fallibility of peer reviewers is simply unavoidable.

Arguments such as these are potent fuel for the fire of sceptical claims that climate science has become a self-regarding consensus machine, fine-tuned to keep out the outliers and reinforce the status quo. Three inquiries into Climategate have found no evidence that this is the case. But sceptics have been eager to use the emails as a vehicle for attacking climate science and climate scientists' behaviour nonetheless.
Some have even sought to broaden their criticism to science in general. A.W. Montford, author of The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science, has grandly suggested that peer review achieves very little for society and is "not up to the job". The response of some high-profile environmental commentators has also been surprisingly visceral. Pre-empting all the inquiries, the campaigner and writer George Monbiot called for Phil Jones, who was then head of the CRU, to resign (a call he much later retracted).

The science journalist Fred Pearce - despite doing an enormous amount of work in challenging the initial media response to Climategate - has repeatedly criticised CRU researchers. "I think the emails raise questions about conflicts of interest apparently tolerated in science that would surely not be tolerated in most other professions," he said. In one email, Phil Jones expresses a desire to "keep out" two papers critical of his work from the Fourth Assessment Report of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The papers were not, in fact, excluded. But according to Pearce, "Phil Jones seemed to relish the chance to 'go to town' against those questioning his work."

In fact, it is common practice for journal editors to send papers challenging a body of work to the author responsible for that work - as experts in increasingly atomised fields, they are often in the best position to review it. The process hinges on honesty: faulty methodology is a reason to reject a paper; a personal dislike of another scientist, however, is clearly out of bounds. The appropriate criteria for making peer review judgements about another's work could - in some circumstances - include inferences about the author. "If some group of activists invent a journal, peer review it themselves, and have no intention of doing the job honestly, then of course this is relevant," states Collins, "but you'd have to set out the reasons - not just make up your mind."

Robert Evans - a colleague of Collins' at Cardiff and an expert in the sociology of knowledge and expertise - points out that these criteria are not fixed and may vary from discipline to discipline. "It depends what kind of publishing culture there is - in some fields, journals publish what are really quite daft ideas, because they feel that people have the right to take these ideas down in public; whereas in other fields, a lot of that work is done in private, in the selection process."

Of course, it is precisely these private selection processes that have come under scrutiny. There's no doubt that science up close bears little resemblance to the brave and noble empiricism of Newton and Einstein. But to claim - as Pearce and others have repeatedly - that the CRU email exchanges revealed some previously unacknowledged fault with the scientific method is hyperbole. "It might have been a good thing," suggests Evans. "Maybe all people found out was what science was actually like. It only seems as if scientists were behaving badly if you had a very idealised view of what scientists were like in the first place."

It's a strange kind of defence - innocence by appeal to mass guilt - but if Collins and Evans' analysis of what science is "really" like is accurate, then it is important to consider the implications. An uncomfortable light has been shone into the inner chambers of science's castle, and outside observers have not been impressed by what has been revealed. So is there an argument for radical reform of the institutional culture of science?
There is a movement in science towards publicly accessible data, and the archiving of databases is now common practice in many subjects. The digitisation of data and the ubiquity of the internet have ushered in a new level of expectation around public access to information - not only in science, but in global society more generally. Reflecting this, the aftermath of Climategate has seen repeated calls for climate scientists' raw data to be made available to the general public.

"I think people should be open about their data and about their methods wherever possible," says Ben Goldacre, the doctor, columnist and author of Bad Science. "If someone is making a public claim about a conclusion they have drawn from a piece of scientific research, they should be ready to be meticulous about showing their work. If someone doesn't, I find it hard to take them seriously."
The move towards open access is not only reasonable but inevitable. But for highly politicised areas of science such as climate change, there may be hidden dangers. "I'm not sure it would solve things in the way people would like," says Evans, "because the data themselves would still need to be analysed in the context of the scientific theories that give them meaning."

Collins is even more direct: "That would be a complete disaster. Analysing data and making sense of it is a very subtle business. Analysing data and getting something out of it is very easy - you can get out of it more or less what you want. There are an infinite number of ways to analyse data, and it would take an infinite amount of time to track down all the things that had gone wrong. If you allow that to happen, then you are saying goodbye to your science."

As with much of the Climategate debate, there is more at stake than climate change data. Although the perceived integrity of climate science seems to need a shot in the arm, it cannot come at the cost of a functioning scientific community. "Scientists would spend their whole lives trying to pick apart what other people had done, and the science would just grind to a halt," Collins suggests.
Throwing open complex climate science databases without due caution could amount to sacrificing climate change data on the altar of public opinion. Faced with dozens of well-publicised and smartly presented pseudo-analyses of climate change data, who other than the climate scientists themselves would be capable of sorting the wheat from the chaff?

Perhaps the answer is "citizen scientists". The notion that science should seek actively to engage with non-scientists is increasingly popular. At its best, public engagement with science can help shape the values that guide scientific enquiry, construct scientific knowledge and contribute to decisions about science funding. By determining the social and ethical implications of science, engaging with citizens can enhance the role of science in society. The movement towards more public engagement is a hugely positive development.
But are the legions of bloggers and auditors - often, but not always, ideologically motivated to find fault (real or imagined) with climate science data - really fulfilling the role of citizen scientists? Alice Bell, a lecturer in science communication at Imperial College London, has argued that successful citizen-science projects work because they offer collaborative relationships between scientists and the public - not an adversarial auditing of data on the assumption that scientists are dishonest. The bottom line is that open access can never be a panacea for a crisis of institutional trust.

Open access is based on the premise that there are those outside the inner circle of peer reviewers who are competent enough to provide a second opinion on the science. This is indisputably true. But while talk of throwing open the lab doors might be rhetorically satisfying, it would provide only an illusion of democracy. Certainly there are non-academics competent enough with statistics to find errors in a piece of published science. Correcting errors in science would be a valuable service for an auditor to offer. But if several auditors reached conflicting conclusions, then somehow a judgement would have to be made about their respective competence. And who should make that judgement? Presumably a group of suitably qualified, honest individuals with a proven track record in a relevant discipline - in other words, peer review.
Any argument for reform must contain more than just a critique of the existing system - it must also hold out the possibility of something better. Would broadening the group of people who are assigned the task of fact verification resolve the problems of peer review? Sadly, there is very little in the way of guidance for answering this question, as very few systematic studies have been conducted into the merits of peer review. Although its flaws are well documented (and have been for many years), critiques typically focus on the fact that peer review is not perfect, but struggle to identify serious alternatives.

Harry Collins' suggestions for reform include removing the anonymity of reviewers and ring-fencing a proportion of journal space for papers that generate significant controversy among reviewers (as these papers hold an interest of their own). In the Russell report, Richard Horton suggests that "the best one might hope for the future of peer review is to be able to foster an environment of continuous critique of research papers before and after publication".

There is no question that science needs to be proactive in engaging the public. There may be some role for Freedom of Information legislation to play in bringing this about. But processes of dialogue and participatory engagement seem much more promising ways for scientists and the public to interact. Citizens' juries and deliberative workshops are two tried-and-tested methods for achieving this aim.
Perhaps if any good is to come of the Climategate controversy, it will be a renewed interest in smoothing the rough edges of peer review and a greater awareness of the necessary fallibility of the scientific publishing process. However, no one seems to have any suggestions for a serious alternative. For now, like Winston Churchill's famous description of democracy, peer review is the worst option - except for all the others that have been tried.

AC

Climate change: the merchants of doubt will soon run out of steam

First published on www.climatesafety.org

Last week saw the release of three university-led nationally representative surveys on public attitudes towards climate change – two in the US (1, 2) and one in the UK. In line with previous surveys from the last few years, the UK poll shows four consistent findings:

• A large majority of people think the climate is changing (78%)
• A large majority of people are concerned about this (71%)
• A large majority support the use of tax revenue to fund low-carbon policies such as investment in renewables (68%)
• A large majority of people say they are willing to reduce the amount of energy they use in order to tackle climate change (65%)

If this doesn’t sound like the findings you saw reported, or your impression of public attitudes towards climate change, then go and look up the results which are publicly available. The picture in the US is slightly different, but not drastically so, with large majorities agreeing that climate change is happening and expressing support for developing low-carbon energy infrastructure.

But what about belief in whether humans are causing climate change? Isn’t that the crucial measure of scepticism?

Intriguingly, given that the public are frequently portrayed as teetering on the brink of abandoning climate change altogether, one of the US polls recorded an increase in the number of people who believe that human activity is changing the climate (the other had no previous survey to compare with, but found that 75% acknowledged human influence on the climate).

True, the number of people who agree that climate change is largely the result of human activity is significantly lower (in the UK and the US) than it was three years ago. But given the four consistent findings outlined above, the big question has to be ‘so what’?

Consider the BBC poll conducted in February, routinely cited as the most damaging of the public opinion polls in the UK. The statistic that was widely reported and repeated was that only 26% of the public agreed that:

“Climate change is happening and is now established as largely man-made”

Seems pretty damning doesn’t it? But a further 38% agreed that:

“Climate change is happening, but not yet proven to be largely man-made”

Even in the BBC poll, at the height of everything-gate, a healthy majority accepted that the climate was changing. In the very same poll, only 11% reported being any less concerned about the risks of climate change. The BBC results are completely consistent with the fact that a majority of people are concerned about climate change – anthropogenic or not – and want something done about it.

That significant numbers of people feel confused about whether human influence is responsible for climate change is unsurprising – a great deal of effort has been expended in trying to confuse them. The parallels between the strategies of the tobacco industry in the 1960s and the tactics of ideologically driven climate sceptics today are now well documented. The tobacco companies knew that if they could create enough uncertainty around the link between smoking and lung cancer, then people would continue to consume their product. But as opinion poll after opinion poll comes in, it is starting to look like the link between belief in human-caused climate change and support for low carbon policies is nowhere near as direct.

There is no escaping the fact that there is a major disparity between the level of certainty expressed by climate scientists and by the general public about the basic facts of climate change. It seems counter-intuitive that people dispute anthropogenic climate change, but are willing to modify their behaviour to prevent it. It seems bizarre that 73% of the BBC poll respondents who had heard about ‘climategate’ and IPCC glaciers error claimed that their views about climate change had not been altered. But this is what the polls are telling us.
The merchants of doubt will soon run out of steam – for all the uncertainty they can generate about human impact on the climate, public support for mitigating climate change remains high.

AC

Pickles’ ‘big society’ recycling scheme is a nudge in the wrong direction

First published on www.climatesafety.org

On the Guardian’s Comment is Free, the Communities Minister Eric Pickles has made some bold claims about ‘human nature’ in introducing the coalition’s household recycling policy. Under the new policy, householders will be rewarded for recycling with points that can be cashed in at ‘local businesses’ such as Marks and Spencer and Cineworld. Bravely summarising decades of behavioural research in just two sentences, Pickles states that:

“There are some basic truths about human nature that the previous government found hard to grasp. If you want people to do something, then it’s always much more effective to give them support and encouragement – a nudge in the right direction – than to tell them what to do and then punish them if they don’t obey.”

He later goes on to claim:

“What’s really important about this scheme is that it treats people like adults. There’s no compulsion to participate, no penalties for opting out. It works because there’s a clear incentive to get involved. You put something in, you get something back. This is the Big Society in action.”

Unfortunately, the one basic truth about human nature that Pickles overlooks is the one that seems most essential for the Big Society: people respond to what others around them are doing, and don’t just behave in a rational, individually beneficial way. If they did, far less people would play the lottery.
Much more important than any individual-level cost/benefit analysis of whether to recycle is whether a particular behaviour is seen as socially acceptable. In several psychological studies, the power of social norms has been demonstrated for environmental behaviours like recycling and home energy management. In a famous example, American researchers showed that energy-hungry households reduced their energy consumption when they had access to information about the average usage in their area. They saw their high-energy use as socially undesirable, and fell into line.
Nobody wants to be seen as the gas guzzler in a neighbourhood full of waste-watchers, so reward or punishment schemes may be missing the point if they are aimed at individuals rather than tapping into the huge potential of social comparisons to generate behaviour change. People are more likely to compete to out-do each other than they are for a few pounds off their supermarket bill, and another recent psychological study showed how important people think it is to be ‘seen to be green’. Shoppers were willing to pay a premium for products with an environmental advantage – although only if they thought that other people were watching.
But there are also deeper reasons for not creating a direct link between recycling rates and financial rewards. Studies by Tim Kasser have shown that people who are highly materialistic are the least likely to act in a pro-environmental way. Paying people to recycle promotes the very value (material gain) that is likely to inhibit more ambitious changes in behaviour, or support for policies that may in fact cost people money in low-carbon taxes.
In short, Pickles’ Big Society recycling plan has no societal component, promotes the environmentally and socially antagonistic value of individual material gain as a reason for recycling, and amounts to paying people to put out their rubbish. Is that the best the Big Society can do?

AC

Is there a “new politics” ...? and what can it do for climate change?

The month of May for the UK has been dominated by the general election and arguments about the dawn of a so called “new politics.” Certainly the election results had a different look than the UK parliament has seen for a long time. A hung parliament, a new Green Party MP catch the eye as does the “new” and “historic” they tell us, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats coalition doing a policy debate, sync and regenerate exercise under the watchful gaze of the media.

And so it has gone on…this politics, that sure feels different (if you weren’t a voter in the 1970’s at least) but which hasn't proved itself yet - like a home appliance with a novel Dyson look that comes with an earnestly proffered 5 year guarantee. Post election developments fill the news agenda and the claims continue from No 10, Westminster and from some journos that we are in the grip of a New Politics of cooperation.

Do people like politicians working together? An interesting quirk of the election this time was "The Worm" the instant reaction graph that showed approval of undecided voters as the leader debates ran realtime and The Worm turned favourably for Clegg when he talked about "working together" - Obama in the US and Kevin Rudd in Australia similarly won the approval of The Worm with the same sentiments in leaders debates.  

The question being asked now in the UK is what kind of working together is it? Is it a New Politics of progressive consensus building that will empower government ministers, backbench MP's, public servants and citizens or is it the old style horse trading with a layer of double gloss - blue and yellow stripes – colours for a political marriage that will fade, crack and split beyond the flashbulb honeymoon. New arrangements yes but is it a new culture? Some watching on as Cameron and Clegg share a platform will give an instinctive answer this question, others will pick through the queens speech and sit on their judgment. 

However you look at this it is a sharply relevant question for action on climate change, because primarily of the policy that comes out of the coalition. It is yet also a basic conundrum of politics to which the climate change challenge more than any other needs forward progress. We need stronger consensus building, better working together to meet the challenge of climate change and straight up vested interest horse trading - the Old politics - won't do it, the lack of progress from Copenhagen showed that. 

Nick Clegg is in the public gaze the embodiment of this so called “new politics” (ahead of David Laws still yet as things stand!) and his fate will probably reveal whether May has seen begun a genuinely new phase of progressive politics. And there are 2 persons whose fortunes may reveal how positive or not this new political context will be for action on climate change.

Lib Dem Chris Huhne the new energy and climate change secretary was one of  David Cameron's first coalition ministers to venture into the news agenda. He told us "There are a whole series of compromises which have been struck in this agreement which I think are obviously unpleasant for each of the parties"

A refreshingly honest characterisation of cabinet and coalition politics you could say. He expressed these sentiments in the context of his explanation of the coalition policy on Nuclear power; New nuclear power stations will be built if they are funded by the private sector and Lib Dems can continue to hold to their election manifesto position of disagreeing with nuclear power generation. Huhne reconciles himself to this policy by speaking loud the belief that the private sector hasn't and probably won’t be able to build  nuclear without state support - refreshing or regressive change? Ed Miliband Labour ex energy and climate change minister came up with the memorable line Huhne in his job was like “putting a vegan in charge of MacDonald’s.”

Caroline Lucas is the First Green Party MP in the Uk parliament, cheered on by many sympathizers outside and in her constituency, how can she make a difference in Parliament? Will the coalitions new politics permeate the whole of Westminster’s benches or if she wants to be more than a pressure group with a Westminster head office should Lucas roll up her sleeves harder and faster for a old style fight. Lucas provides the answer that she will be going after change on her own terms

"I passionately hope it is possible to demonstrate that you don't have to get your hands filthy in terms of doing politics."

 Climate Change has been hungry for a taste of some new politics for a long time and if a progressive partnership ethos is to burst through the left right binary and horse trading Lucas as principled advocate and Huhne as government green light monitor will have to put a shift in, get noticed by us  and most importantly be allowed get things done - if they don’t it may tell us that the new politics is old and the latest dawn for big strides on climate change is false. 

TF

Why Fishermen believe in climate change (and everyone else believes in overfishing)

(Originally published by Adam Corner at www.climatesafety.org) 

 How much of what is recorded as scepticism about the scientific reality of climate change is in fact a desire for it not to be true – or at the very least, for it not to be as bad as the scientists and politicians say? This is a question that cannot easily be answered. When people are motivated not to believe something, they are also motivated not to acknowledge that their non-belief is anything other than rational. But two fishy tales shed some light on one type of climate change scepticism, and highlight an enormous challenge for climate change communicators: how do you persuade someone to believe something that they really don’t want to believe?

Fishy Tale 1

Last month in Doha, delegates at the Washington Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species voted against a ban on fishing bluefin tuna. The decision was widely condemned by environmental groups, and in The Guardian, George Monbiot described the refusal to acknowledge the critically endangered state of the bluefin tuna as:

“Olympic-class denial, a flat refusal to look reality in the face.”

Even the most casual follower of Guardian etiquette knows what happens next – when a writer uses the ‘d’ word, the comment threads fill up with red-faced, indignant micro-treatises on the inappropriateness and offensiveness of the term ‘denial’. But on this occasion, the comments were broadly supportive of Monbiot’s stance. Yes, agreed some of the very same posters who usually follow his pieces with streams of bile (hello CheshireRed), overfishing of the bluefin tuna was a serious problem and should be stopped.

Fishy Tale 2

‘Bottomfeeder’, by Taras Grescoe is a book about the overfishing and ultimate demise of many of the world’s fisheries. Combining barely-believable statistics about the collapse of once abundant oceanic ecosystems (some estimates put European fish populations at 5% of their first-recorded levels) and interviews with countless fishermen and traders in ports and harbours around the world, Grescoe builds up a bewildering picture of the world’s seas.

While the evidence is anecdotal rather than statistical, it is striking just how many of the fishermen (and it is primarily men) that Grescoe speaks to are adamant that climate change is warming their seas and driving away their catch. Their intuition that the seas are warming is supported by sea temperature data – but by far and away the biggest impact on the number of fish they are pulling out of the sea is intensive overfishing. Far fewer of Grescoe’s interviewees acknowledge this – blaming seals, foreigners, and global warming before conceding that perhaps their methods of fishing might be having an effect.

Why fishermen believe in climate change (and everyone else believes in overfishing)

So, notorious Guardian message board climate denier CheshireRed solemnly supports the protestors who seek to prevent overfishing of the bluefin tuna, and accepts that those who are responsible for the overfishing are in denial about the cause of the problem – but does not support measures to curb greenhouse gases which would (presumably) impact on his behaviour. Conversely, the fishermen responsible for overfishing happily accept climate change but doubt that their actions have any impact on the state of the world’s fisheries.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that CheshireRed (and his message board buddies) are not sea fishermen, with a vested interest in underplaying the impact of overfishing. However, like most of us in the developed world they have a personal stake in climate change being shown to be a scam – it would eliminate the need to change our high-consuming lifestyles. Some people – for economic or ideological reasons – have a more formal desire to reject the science of climate change.

Perhaps we need to start asking some more subtle questions about belief in climate change. Combating the increasing level of climate change scepticism is high on most campaigners’ priority lists. But without a sensible grasp of the reasons for scepticism, an awful lot of effort could be expended without any discernible effect. We urgently need a typology of scepticism.

 AC