[LINK] The meaning of climate change denial

[David Lochrin]

On 2012-06-26 Stephen Wilson wrote:

> I dip occasionally into the interminable debate between Koltai and the Rest of the Link World. I wouldn't be the only one dumbfounded by the man's obstinancy.  What can it mean that an intelligent person feels SO VERY MUCH IN THE RIGHT to buck science?
> 
> It's an instance of a very worrying and deeply ironic modern phenomenon.  Why is it that so many people feel they have license to ignore science?  [...]
> 
> Why is scientific consensus these days reduced, in so many minds, to what they imagine is mere opinion?  Maybe lay people have lost whatever sense they had for the enormity of scientific effort: the training, the apprenticeship, the research, the peer review, the contest of ideas, and year-on-year sheer bloody hard work of millions of professionals in labs, doing their bit to build civilisation's body of knowledge.  Is that because the person in the street only glimpses science every few months on the TV when a scientist with a bit of research news has to subborn themselves to the sound grab and blandly predict when their work will produce a pill to cure something?

It's easy for those of us with degrees in science & engineering to assume that rationality and logic are the only imaginable guides to reality, and even that the brain is inherently logical in its operation.  But this is not the case.  The brain is an associative neural network and how it leads to consciousness is unknown, perhaps unknowable.

So an individual might have quite irrational beliefs if their brain is "configured" the right way, or even just subject to certain conditioning.  We see this in various psychotic conditions and, less spectacularly, in people who have been traumatised in various ways.

Further down the scale some irrational beliefs are very socially acceptable; disbelief in greenhouse warming is the only way to go in certain circles.  And I'm sure Cardinal Pell has lots of beliefs which I would regard as irrational despite my upbringing (:-).

> It was different when I grew up in the late sixties.  The Brisbane tabloid newspaper carried the "Frontiers of Science" strip, with a vastly superior signal-to-noise ratio that the execrable ABC TV "Quantum".  Back then ABC TV every morning broadcast serious physics lectures and the like for schools.  Non scientists rejoiced in science.

Ahh Stephen, you take me back...  remember Julius Sumner Miller?

I think the conditioning which has created this problem is largely attributable to the continual marketing of attitudes like GW denial simply as opinion changers with no regard to fact.

David L.