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Pathologising dissent? Now that’s Orwellian
The idea that ‘climate change denial’ is a psychological disorder – the product of a spiteful, wilful or simply in-built neural inability to face up to the catastrophe of global warming – is becoming more and more popular amongst green-leaning activists and academics. And nothing better sums up the elitism and authoritarianism of the environmentalist lobby than its psychologisation of dissent. The labelling of any criticism of the politics of global warming, first as ‘denial’, and now as evidence of mass psychological instability, is an attempt to write off all critics and sceptics as deranged, and to lay the ground for inevitable authoritarian solutions to the problem of climate change. Historically, only the most illiberal and misanthropic regimes have treated disagreement and debate as signs of mental ill-health.

This weekend, the University of West England is hosting a major conference on climate change denial. Strikingly, it’s being organised by the university’s Centre for Psycho-Social Studies. It will be a gathering of those from the top of society – ‘psychotherapists, social researchers, climate change activists, eco-psychologists’ – who will analyse those at the bottom of society, as if we were so many flitting, irrational amoeba under an eco-microscope. The organisers say the conference will explore how ‘denial’ is a product of both ‘addiction and consumption’ and is the ‘consequence of living in a perverse culture which encourages collusion, complacency and irresponsibility’ (1). It is a testament to the dumbed-down, debate-phobic nature of the modern academy that a conference is being held not to explore ideas – to interrogate, analyse and fight over them – but to tag them as perverse. ...

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It’s not the end of the world as we know it
According to the 100 Months Project, a collection of green groups and charities based in Britain and beyond, in around seven or eight years’ time we will reach the climate’s ‘tipping point’ after which there will be ‘no return’. Unless we severely slash our carbon-use now, and lower our horizons, the world will effectively end. The 100 Months website comes complete with a big red ticking clock counting down the seconds, minutes, hours, days and months to the point of ‘no return’. At the time of writing, there are 93 months, or 2,737 days or 65,688 hours, to save our planet.

It is a powerful illustration of the end-of-world fantasies of many in the green movement and at the top of society. Behind all the PC and seemingly reasonable talk of ‘tipping points’, ‘scientific findings’ and ‘carbon calculating’, this is a modern-day, secular version of the countdown to the End of Days that gripped earlier apocalyptic movements in human history. Yet if we are going to have a serious debate about the environmental issues facing our society, and the political challenges associated with them, then we need to state one simple but currently heretical idea: the end of the world is not nigh and, more to the point, humans are the potential makers of history, not merely its unwitting victims. ...

...However, drawing this kind of social conclusion from apparently empirical facts is not the way that science, or society, works. Just because we can split the atom, that doesn’t mean that we have to drop an atom bomb. Just because ultra-violet light from the sun has been proven to damage DNA, that doesn’t mean we can never venture into the sunlight again. If we conclude that increasing levels of human-produced carbon dioxide are altering the climate, how we choose to respond to this finding is a fundamentally political question; environmental science can tell us precisely nothing about how we ought to do that. ...