Climate, technology and chaos Blog

I keep reading people arguing that climate change is a hoax promulgated by governments or by the corporate sector.

I guess this shows something about how disinformation works, as the most obvious source for conspiracy would seem to involve those who make money from doing the things which are thought to cause climate change, and who generally have a reputation for ruthless political engagement; that is fossil fuel companies, oil and coal barons etc. In general renewable companies do not have the established connections with politicians, and do not have the money to throw at false research or think tanks. Most of renewable companies also came into being after climate change first seemed to be a highly probable trajectory in the late 1970s early 1980s.

Perhaps because this is implausible, and because people who don’t like corporations will have some awareness of how fossil fuel companies have acted in the past, it is more common to argue that scientists ‘believe in’ climate change because governments pay them to and encourage it.

There is only one minor problem with this argument. There are few governments in the English speaking world who show they are really interested in promoting the reality of climate change, and getting out of fossil fuels.

Republican and other rightist governments often try to forbid people from talking about climate change, they never make it central to their agenda or say the situation is urgent, and they often try to remove research monies from people who study climate change, or gather data. They accuse people of politicising weather disasters when those people point out that these weather events could have something to do with the predicted consequences of climate change. They may appoint people from fossil fuel companies to Environmental Departments, or to enquiries into energy reform. Governments can even try to make it easier for corporations to pollute and frequently actively resist renewables. They can tell companies to continue with coal when the companies do not think it economic. Governments encourage heavily polluting fracking and so on. Even the few relatively active governments are not hostile to increased coal mining and exports, and do their best to protect established corporations, as in India and China. Governments rarely behave as if they actually believed that climate change was a real threat, or as if it was a convenient ruse to increase their power.

There is no real government campaign, which I know of, in the English speaking world, which has promoted climate change and anti-climate change action. If you know of something consistent and coherent, which survived for more than a couple of months until the fossil fuel companies persuaded them otherwise, then please tell me about it!!

The fact that scientists keep being persuaded by the evidence that climate change is real and humanly caused, when this goes against government instruction and bias, could be taken as persuasive evidence that it is real.