20130528_JC

Source: Maths of Planet Earth

URL: http://mathsofplanetearth.org.au/john-cook/

Date: 28/05/2013

Event: John Cook: "climate denial is essentially consensus denial, it's denying the scientific consensus"

Credit: AMSI, Maths of Planet Earth, also many thanks to Geoff Chambers for transcribing this

People:

• John Cook: Australian blogger and author
• Stephanie Pradier: Physics student, University of Melbourne

Stephanie Pradier: Hello, everybody. We are here today talking with John Cook. He works at the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland and he also runs a popular website SkepticalScience.com. How are you today, John?

John Cook: Hi Stephanie, good, thanks.

Stephanie Pradier: That's good. Thanks for talking with us today. John is actually speaking at the first day of the conference of Maths of Planet Earth in July which is being held in Melbourne. His talk is called "The Challenge of Communicating the Reality of Climate Change." John has also written several books on climate change and scepticism, I think, and he’s just going to give us a little bit of an intro or a taste of what's to come in his talk, aren't you John?

John Cook: Yeah, I'll give it a shot... So what I'm talking about is just the challenges of communicating climate change, because climate is, in a sense it's like a statistical abstraction. What the ordinary person experiences is weather, so, how hot it is that day, whether it's raining or not, but climate change or climate is weather averaged out over time and space, so it's really what are the long-term changes, what's happening with our planet overall, and people don’t really - I guess it’s not a real concept that people [understand?] in the same sense as weather, and there's a lot of interesting consequences of this. In fact just this morning I found out about a new study which asked people about their opinions on climate change, and they also did this over different days, and they just noted how hot it was on each day, and, as the people were filling out the survey, and what they found was when people filled out the survey on a hot day they were much more accepting of climate change or the fact that global warming was happening, but if it was a cold day they were more sceptical about global warming. So it just shows just how malleable people's beliefs are about climate science, and so that's a challenge, that's a challenge for us as climate communicators and scientists trying to communicate an abstract concept to people who ... whereas the average layperson thinks in a much more concrete manner, and they react more to their local environment rather than the more like global averages.

Stephanie Pradier: Fantastic, fantastic. Now you wrote a book called Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand. Can you sum up for us the thesis, the antithesis and the synthesis of this book?

John Cook: Okay, that’s a mouthful isn't it? Actually I published it a few years ago. I'm going to have to dig through the memory banks to... But really, what we're talking about is, there are three aspects to climate change denial. The aspect that I really focus on the most is literal denial, where people are literally denying the science. They're denying that climate change is happening or they're denying that humans are causing it, or they're denying that it's a problem. Whatever the variation of denial, the end consequence is always the same. They insist that we shouldn't be taking drastic action to mitigate climate change. But there's also implicatory - is that how you pronounce the word? - implicatory denial, which is people who might mentally accept the science but they don't, it doesn't translate to real actions like behaviour change and support for public policy, and that is actually the broader form of denial in the community. There's a lot of people who would accept what climate scientists say, but aren't... I guess there's a lot of apathy towards actually doing something about mitigating climate change.

So I guess that's the thesis. The antithesis I guess is the position of the deniers who, and in my - like, really the central part of the book is looking at the literal denier, and that's really, if I could sum it up in a sentence, I would say that climate denial is essentially consensus denial, it's denying the scientific consensus of climate scientists that humans are causing global warming, and so I guess the antithesis is that either there's not overwhelming agreement among the scientific community or that, if there is overwhelming agreement, which there is, then it must be a big conspiracy among the climate scientists. And really that's the inevitable consequence. If you do deny the consensus, you end up resorting to conspiracy theories, and you see them all over the internet regarding climate scientists.

Stephanie Pradier: Indeed, indeed. You talk about the psychology of misinformation. This is becoming a more widespread or more popularised topic. How would you describe again to the layman what the psychology of misinformation is?

John Cook: If I could sum it up in one word - or not one word, in one sentence - the whole, all the psychology of misinformation which I've been studying for the last few years all boils down to this one practical tip with your debunking myths, and that’s that you fight sticky ideas with stickier ideas. Because what the misinformation finds is, or what the research finds is that misinformation is sticky. It's really hard to dislodge - it’s like a weed, and even if you debunk myths, they come back again. And so researchers have looked at like how do we debunk myths, how do we refute misinformation, how do we reduce the influence of misinformation? And they found that there are a few techniques that communicators can do, because not only do you want to reduce the influence of the misinformation, there's also the danger of backfire effects, where you can actually make things worse, you can end up reinforcing the myth. And so what the research indicates is: firstly you’re, if you’re going to debunk a myth, your debunking needs to be as simple as possible, ideally even simpler than the myth. Because if someone gives a myth, and it's quite simple and then you come back with a super-complicated, you know, mega-long answer, people - it's just too hard to process, and people might end up actually accepting the myth even more than ever. So the consequence to that is that communicators have to work really hard to make their debunkings as simple and as compelling as possible. And the other important aspect is, if, when you do debunk a myth, what you're really doing is reaching into their mind and extracting the myth out of their brain, but then you're leaving a gap in their understanding of how things work, and if you don't fill that gap with something, then the myth will just come back in and...

Stephanie Pradier: I had never thought about it like that, that's, that's...

John Cook: ...and so when you debunk a myth you also have to provide an alternate explanation of the whole situation related to the myth, and that's where that stickier ideas is. Myths are sticky, and so you need to fight these sticky ideas with stickier ideas. You need to come up with debunkings or messages that are more compelling, simpler, and that explain the original situation or whatever the context of the myth is, but in a compelling, sticky way.

Stephanie Pradier: Yep. And is that what the driving force was behind your website, SkepticalScience.com?

John Cook: Not initially. I started it just by getting into arguments with family members about climate change, and in anticipation that there'd be future family get-togethers where we'd get into climate arguments, I started building a data base of all the different arguments that I might encounter and then what the peer reviewed science said about each myth, so I was leaving nothing to chance. I wanted to make sure that I could really kick their butts next time we got into a family argument. And then over time this data base grew and I started getting involved in online discussions and I kept developing this resource for myself and I thought, well maybe other people would find this useful as well, 'cause I had a catalogue of each myth, and then a collection of peer-reviewed papers relevant to each particular myth. And so I published it online as a website and...

[Stephanie starts to interrupt.]

John Cook: Sorry, yeah?

Stephanie Pradier: No, you go.

John Cook: ... and it was quite popular immediately because there was a need for that kind of thing, particularly there was a need for peer-reviewed responses to climate misinformation. But I was really operating without any knowledge of the psychology of misinformation, and several years into it, I got an email from a psychology professor who was doing this kind of research, and he said to me: "Do you realise that the way you’re doing it now, there's actually a danger of a backfire effect, you could actually reinforce the myths in people's minds, the way you're structuring your debunking?" And he showed me this paper that found this familiarity backfire effect where you make people more familiar with the myth, and I vividly remember reading the paper and the blood draining from my face as I was thinking "I'm making things worse", and so from that point on I was very determined to read as much of the research into misinformation as possible, to just make sure I wasn't making things worse, and I was doing things as effectively as possible, and after several years I contacted that researcher who I'd been in touch with regularly ever since, and I asked him: "There’s so much stuff out there. Has anyone ever synthesised it into a single practical guide on how to debunk myths, based on all the psychological research?" And there wasn't, so we put together a debunking handbook, which was just like an eleven-page online booklet just summarising it all into a bunch of practical tips.

Stephanie Pradier: Oh, great. I'll have to look that up as soon as we get off here - have some munch-time reading today. Is it just you that looks after the website now? Or have you got a bit of a team going?

John Cook: There's a whole group of volunteers that help out now, and that was like, I ran it for a few years trying to get people to help; and every time someone would email me complimenting the site, or commenting on how valuable a certain part - resource - was, I'd come back with "Thanks, you want to help me with it? Because I can’t keep up with all this misinformation", and never, really - like several years of nagging and trying to - pleading people to help me and then somebody said to me: "“You've got all these rebuttals, but they're quite long and technical. What you really should do is write a short plain English version of every one", and so of course I came back and said, "That sounds a great idea, you want to help me with it?" And he ran screaming as soon as I asked him... So then I put a call to action on the website asking, saying does anyone think they can do a better job of explaining my rebuttals than I have? And a whole flood of people immediately jumped forward and said "Yeah, we think we can do better than you" and so yeah, that was a real turning point for the website because overnight we built up a whole team of people, volunteers who were keen to help explain the science as simply as possible.

Stephanie Pradier: Oh, that's great, that’s great. Talking about explaining things as simply as possible, how would you...or what would be the simplest thing to, for you to utterly convince someone that’s a climate change sceptic that climate change does exist?

John Cook: Yeah, that is really a tricky one, because what the research shows is political ideology is actually one of the strongest predictors of people’s attitudes towards climate change. So that means, whether someone's liberal or conservative has a big influence on what they think about science. I mean, it doesn't make any sense, like science is apolitical. The physics of the greenhouse effect has nothing to do with whether you're liberal or a conservative, but that's how people are. So one of the nasty side effects of this fact is that when you present evidence to people and they think that evidence threatens their ideology, then they end up strengthening their original beliefs. So, if I present evidence for climate change it can actually make a conservative even more sceptical. So there's a real Catch-22 there, like, you’re asking what evidence can convince a sceptic? But if that sceptic’s scepticism is driven by their politics, then the evidence is only going to make them more sceptical. It’s a real Catch-22. And it's a really open research question. Is [sic] there ways to frame the science in a way that makes it not threatening to their ideology? One example is, one study found that if you talked about climate change, and at the same time you talked about nuclear power, that works. That was a lot more effective with conservatives than if you talked about exactly the same science, but then you talked about putting a price on carbon or you talked about taxing carbon or regulating industry. So the same scientific message but with a different framing has a completely different effect on...

Stephanie Pradier: Wow!

John Cook: ...on people. And it's also important who delivers the message. So people are much more trustful of messengers who share their ideology, who share their cultural values. So possibly the answer - it's a very complicated answer but it might be - if you have someone sharing the cultural values of the sceptic, presenting the scientific evidence in a way that doesn't threaten their values, then you might have a crack at it. Even then it might be a long shot.

Stephanie Pradier: Hence the title of your talk "The Challenge of Making Climate Change Reality" [sic].

John Cook: Actually I don't even get to that in.. It's challenging enough even if you don't include the whole political thing, that's a whole other ball game.

Stephanie Pradier: Yeah, well, wow, well, you've definitely opened my eyes to a different way of communicating science and how we should best go about it, so thanks very much, and thank you for spending the time with us today and I really look forward to your talk in July.

John Cook: My pleasure.

Stephanie Pradier: I'll see you soon.