The Best Australian Science Writing 2014 by Ashley Hay Page A

article in the Monthly in August 2012, Robert Manne declared the dark victory of the denialists and tracked how funding of their activities has shifted from mainly fossil fuel interests to include an increasing number of conservative foundations advocating a libertarian, antiregulatory ideology. In the US, the issue has polarised dramatically between Democrats and Republicans just in the past decade, and a similar party-political divide has solidified in Australia.
    In such an adversarial culture, I think that use of the word ‘consensus’ to describe the scientific position can be seriously misleading. The word was generated by the IPCC process which, although founded on the best science, relies on intergovernmental negotiations to produce agreed statements. ‘Consensus’ sounds like politics, not science; it evokes compromiseand negotiation. It suggests that majorities are instrumental and sometimes temporary. It seems to allow for contrary or dissenting opinions, without the need to offer new evidence. It possibly undermines public understanding of the status of an accepted scientific theory.
    Australia has its own band of paid or cynical denialists and, although they are mischievous and dangerously influential, their motivations are so clear and selfish that they are essentially boring. I am more interested in the everyday dinner-table reflex. Doubt is not only the ‘product’ of industries protecting their livelihoods; it is also the natural refuge of humans confronting an unwanted reality. We are all prone to this willing blindness and comforting self-delusion. Overcoming that is our greatest challenge.
    Clive Hamilton is an Australian political analyst who has been steeped in the climate literature and policy debates for years and quickly recognised the political urgency of the issue. Yet for a long time he could not emotionally accept what it really meant for the future of the world. It was only in September 2008 that he finally allowed himself to concede that it is now too late to prevent far-reaching changes in the Earth’s climate and ‘to admit that we simply are not going to act with anything like the urgency required’. That emotional shift induced some relief – relief at admitting what his rational brain had been telling him, relief at saving energy on false hope, and relief at being able to let go of some anger – but it also initiated turmoil. To resolve that grief and disturbance, he wrote a grim book entitled Requiem for a Species . It is driven by a historical quest ‘to explain why humanity failed to respond to the existential threat posed by global warming’. Hamilton’s insight into his own protective, unconscious instinct enables him to find some compassion for his fellow humans as they expertly deploy strategies of denial and dissociation.
    Emotional denialism can take many forms – avoidance, hope, anxiety, even a kind of torpor when people truly begin tounderstand what will happen to the world of their grandchildren. In a book entitled Living in Denial , an American sociologist of Norwegian descent, Kari Marie Norgaard, studied an educated and environmentally conscious Norwegian community of about 14 000 residents (to which she gave the fictional name Bygdaby) during the unusually warm winter of 2000–01. Norway is a country where there has been a relatively high acceptance of the science of global warming, and Norgaard chose a place where climate change will swiftly bring economic challenges. It is also a community where people are ‘sincere in their concerns for the wider world and engaged in so much political activity on its behalf ’. Yet the people she studied ‘lived in denial’.
    Norgaard found that climate change was a conversation stopper. What she observed was a culture of habitual avoidance where people accepted the science but failed to integrate that knowledge into everyday life or to transform it into