3 compelling reasons to be a climate change skeptic

Tangier Island is disappearing beneath rising seas, but its mayor is a climate change skeptic, a phenomenon that’s drawn national interest.

On Tuesday, Mayor James “Ooker” Eskridge  appeared on CNN in a town hall with former vice president and climate activist Al Gore. The exchange had the potential to be fascinating, but the canned, quick-hit town hall format was unsatisfying. You could boil the conversation down to the following:

Eskridge: I’ve worked on the water all my life, and I don’t see the sea level rising.

Gore: Um … wouldn’t you like some nice cheap electricity from renewable sources though?

It would have been far more interesting if the whole town hall could have been a longer conversation between Gore and Eskridge, who represents many in this area who are skeptical about the very climate change that’s helping to slowly rub out their way of life.

There’s more going on with this resistance to the idea of climate change than a simple debate about evidence. The evidence is overwhelming. Icebergs break off, float away and melt, sea levels rise, winters get warmer, greenhouse gases easily traceable to human activity continue to skyrocket, and the weather gets weirder — as jarringly illustrated by the new summer tradition of waterspouts and tornadoes on Delmarva.

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Yet people hold onto their resistance as a part of their identity, almost as a religious dogma. Scientists face the same resistance as missionaries would trying to convert people to a new religion.

People are demanding not mere overwhelming evidence, but incontrovertible proof, a bar that’s tricky to reach (did humans cause the Roman Empire? Probably, but who can say for sure?)

Skeptics are able to find and cling to a handful of scientists who back them up, or at least play the doubt card. But that’s the case in any scientific field. It wasn’t too long ago that people who didn’t buy the idea of plate tectonics would have been able to find scientists who agreed with them.

If it were simply a matter of compelling evidence, I believe most people would be convinced of climate change by now. Why all the fierce resistance?

There’s more at play here than evidence. People have all kinds of strong incentives not to believe in climate change, and so they don’t. Humans are adept at this kind of mental gymnastics.

First off, to deal with climate change, humans have to make a major shift in worldview. For millennia, we treated the earth as our personal gold mine to dig up and exploit, and had little idea of the scope of the damage we were causing. The idea that we should accept responsibility for major changes on the planet, and undergo major inconvenience for its health, is difficult to swallow. We’ve never thought that way.

Second, much of what drives greenhouse gases is the industry that makes many of our technology and comforts possible, not to mention provides income for housing and food. Dealing effectively with climate change presents real challenges to our ability to travel, manufacture, and even eat.

If the earth’s warming is our fault, that means it’s our responsibility to clean it up. We’ve made a large mess here. It’s far easier to believe there’s no mess at all than to take painful and disruptive steps to clean up.

Lastly, and certainly not least, is the condescension with which some have propounded the idea of climate change. Sometimes it comes across as “All the smart people believe it, so you should too.”

This is a mistake. Anyone with even a minimal understanding of history knows that just because lots of people believe something doesn’t make it true. This kind of argument immediately alienates the skeptics, and even makes them feel smarter (“Can’t pull the wool over my eyes! I’m not drinking your Kool Aid”).

Painting people as ignorant, shortsighted or fools doesn’t help anything. Asking them to change their minds is hard enough.

So there you have it. All that’s needed is to persuade the skeptics to embrace a belief that will cost them dearly and hurt their pride.

It's no wonder it's an uphill fight.

It may be too late for Tangier Island, but for the sake of the planet, we can't give up.

Email Andrew Sharp at asharp@delmarvanow.com. Find him on Twitter @buckeye_201 and on Facebook @andrewsharp201.

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