TalkClimateChange

A recent comment on TalkClimateChange prompted me to think about and write about something that I have wanted to comment on for some time.

In response to a recent post, Kaishu raises the issue of general public opinion;

Get off the net for a bit and you’ll realise that almost everyone agrees there’s a problem, and we’re the cause of it, they just don’t really know what to do about it.

I think your time spent on the internet, where idiots have a voice instead of being silenced as they are in general society, has warped your views of public opinion.

If you talk to people offline you find a general recognition that human activities are affecting the climate badly, and that our resources won’t last forever, and things have to change. Almost everyone agrees there’s a problem, where the differences are in what our response to it should be. Most just don’t have a clue; the level of disenfrachisement and apathy in public affairs is very high in the West.

When I first started TalkClimateChange, I expected to have a bit of a one sided debate. I was a little concerned about where the ‘talk’ bit might come from, since my limited reading on the subject indicated that pretty much everyone in the world agreed there was a problem, except for George Bush and a few crack-pot ultra right wing loonies.

Since then I have learned a lot, and not only from conversations on-line. Tell people you run a climate change website and you quickly get to hear their opinion on the subject. In the last six months I’ve had a chance to canvas opinions from people from all walks of life, from many different countries and with many different viewpoints.

So here is a summary of my conclusions on the state of play, the opinion of the general public, and of course all of you - the enlightened commentators of TalkClimateChange.

• There are two basic types of people – those interested in Climate Change, and those who couldn’t give a toss.
• The second category makes up around 80% of the population. They haven’t typed ‘climate change’ into Google, and haven’t really given the whole subject much consideration.
• What they have done is read the headlines in the mainstream press, they have shaken their heads at the stories of stranded polar bears on the news, they have agreed that it’s all very terrible and then they have gotten on with their lives. They haven’t gone out of their way to make changes.
• Those who are actually interested are different. These people have looked beyond the headlines, they have done some basic reading, surfed the net, asked a few questions and formed a few, or in some cases a lot of opinions.
• These opinions seem to vary. About 20% are Green Team opinions, 20% are Red Team opinions, and the remaining majority are Blue Team members – somewhere in the middle, fully recognising the enormous complexity of the subject.
• In many cases (but not all) I can tell what opinion somebody will have without asking them, since most opinions seem to be a relatively simple function of geography, age, income and political orientation, education and social principles.
• Most opinions are perfectly valid when tested against the circumstances of the individual. Many opinions fail when applied globally and then extrapolated out over time.
• The complexity is such that there is no single unified solution to the climate change discussion. Very few options manage to generate long term benefits with no short term ill-effects. And even fewer generate short term benefits without long term problems.

So where does that leave us?

The ultimate conclusion is that climate change is complicated. Definitely not the black and white issue that I was expecting in the beginning.

Somebody once told me that they usually voted for the political party that would do the least amount of damage to the country. My personal belief is that we need to apply the same vetting principles to climate change initiatives. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and our environment, economy and social structure all form a tightly connected system. Making big adjustments to any single lever can easily have disastrous consequences further down the line.

Choosing the health of the environment over our economy may seem like a higher goal, but each depends upon the other. It’s only because we are well fed and have many hours of leisure time each week that we can afford to expend energy discussing the finer points of climate change on the Internet in the first place.