George Marshall
Climate Change Denial
George Marshall’s first exposure to climate change was a newspaper article in 1988. Climate change, said a leading climatologist, has the potential to destroy our society and even threatens our continued survival as a species. Marshall was deeply moved, but what really shocked him was that the article created not the slightest ripple. It may as well have never been written. Something very strange had happened. A highly qualified scientist had calmly and credibly outlined a process which, were he to be believed, made all other news in the paper marginal, if not irrelevant. Yet the story had sunk without a trace. In the following years, as articles, documentaries and news items continued to appear, Marshall realised that people can accept the truth of what is said without accepting the implications.
The capacity to deny a level of awareness is the normal state of affairs for people in an information-saturated society. It involves a fundamental paradox – in order to deny something it is necessary at some level to recognise its existence and its moral implications. It is a state of simultaneous ‘knowing and not-knowing’. This describes our current social response to climate change. ‘Knowledge’ of the problem is remarkably well established at all levels of society. Yet, at another level, we clearly refuse to recognise the implications of that knowledge. Furthermore, there is widespread denial when the enormity and nature of the problem are so unprecedented that people have no cultural mechanisms for accepting them. Similarly, Primo Levi explained the refusal of many European Jews to recognise their impending extermination, with an old German adage: "Things whose existence is not morally possible cannot exist."
In the case of climate change, we can intellectually accept the evidence, but find it extremely hard to accept our responsibility for a crime of such enormity. The most powerful evidence of our denial is the failure to even recognise that there is a moral dimension with identifiable perpetrators and victims. The language of ‘climate change’, ‘human impacts’ and ‘adaptation’ is itself a form of denial - euphemisms that suggest it originates in immutable natural forces rather than in a direct causal relationship with moral implications for the perpetrator.