When the Reserve Bank
announced recently that it was factoring climate change into interest rate
calculations, it underlined a mainstream acceptance of potential impacts for a
warming planet.
Climate change now had
economic consequences.
But resistance to the
premise of human-induced climate change still rages, including in regional and rural
communities, which often are the very communities already feeling its effects.
"When you look at
the results of different surveys going back a few years, farmers were four
times more likely than the national average to be climate change deniers,"
said Professor Mark Howden, director at the ANU's Climate Change Institute.
"That was about 32
per cent versus about 8 per cent for the population average."
So, why do so many
people in regional and rural areas not believe in climate change?
ABC Central West's
Curious project put that question to some experts, who say the answer has more
to do with human nature than scientific reasoning.
Professor Matthew
Hornsey from the University of Queensland has dedicated his academic career to
understanding why people reject apparently reasonable messages.
"The metaphor
that's used in my papers is around what we call cognitive scientists versus
cognitive lawyers," he said.
"What we hope
people do when they interpret science is that they weigh it up in an
independent way and reach a conclusion.
"But in real life,
people behave more like lawyers, where they have a particular outcome that they
have in mind and then they selectively interpret the evidence in a way that
prosecutes the outcome they want to reach.
"So you selectively expose yourself to
information, you selectively critique the information, you selectively remember
the information in a way that reinforces what your gut is telling you."
This is known as
motivated reasoning — and online news source algorithms and social forums are
only enabling the phenomenon, allowing for further information curation for the
individual…..
Professor Hornsey says
there is another force fanning the flames of distrust between the scientific
and non-scientific communities.
"One thing that can
be said without huge amounts of controversy is that there is a relationship
between political conservatism and climate scepticism in Australia," he
said.
To better understand
this, the professor's research took him to 27 countries and found that for two-thirds
of these, there was no relationship between being politically conservative and
a climate science sceptic.
But Australia's
relationship between the two trailed only the United States in strength of
connection, he said.
"What we were
seeing was the greater the per-capita carbon emissions of a country, the
greater that relationship between climate scepticism and conservatism."
Professor Hornsey argues
that per-capita carbon emissions is an indicator for fossil fuel reliance,
which in turn creates greater stakes for the vested interests at play.
"When the stakes
are high and the vested interests from the fossil fuel community are enormous,
you see funded campaigns of misinformation, coaching conservatives what to
think about climate change," he said.
"That gets picked up by conservative media and
you get this orchestrated, very consistent, cohesive campaign of misinformation
to send the signal that the science is not yet in."…..
Professor Hornsey
believes current discourse can make farmers feel as though they are at the
centre of an overwhelming societal problem, triggering further psychological
rejection of the science.
"I feel sorry for
farmers around the climate change issue, because this is a problem that has
been caused collectively.
"Farmers are only a small part of the problem but
they are going to be a huge part of the solution, so I think they feel put
upon.
"They feel like
they are constantly being lectured about their need to make sacrifices to adapt
to a set of circumstances that are largely out of their control."
In 2010, in response to
a drought policy review panel, the Commonwealth initiated a pilot of drought
reform measures in Western Australia.
John Noonan from Curtin
University led the program, which went on to have staggering success in
converting not only participating farmers' attitudes to climate science, but
also in restructuring their farm management models in response to a changing
climate.
"First of all, when
talking with farmers, we didn't call it the drought pilot — we used the name
Farm Resilience Program," Mr Noonan said.
"If you go in to beat people up and have a
climate change conversation, you get nowhere.
"We got the farmers
to have conversations about changing rainfall patterns and continuing dry
spells, rather than us telling them what to do.
"And they told us
everything that we needed them to tell us for us to reflect that back to them
and say, 'Well, actually, that's climate change'.
"If you take a very
left-brain, very scientific approach to these matters, you are going nowhere,
and what we used was very right-brain, very heart and gut-driven — and it
worked."
Mr Evans agrees,
underscoring the deeply personal connection farmers have to the land, its role
in their business approach, and why the message must be managed psychologically
rather than scientifically.
"Ultimately, for a
farmer to confront the reality that this new climate might be permanent,
requires them to go through the five stages of grief: denial, anger,
bargaining, depression and acceptance."
The full
article can be read here.
