The widening credibility gap

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The widening gap between those who believe in climate change and those who do not is alarming. The meeting of world leaders in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum last week was like a party on ice, in more ways than one.

I am sorry to refer once again to the enigma that is President Trump, but he is the most powerful politician in the world, and we must, therefore, pay attention to what he says and does.

(As an aside, Barbadian PM Mia Mottley and our PM Dr Rowley’s belief that Trump’s representative cannot be indulged in meeting only some members of Caricom and not all is the right one. Read her speech).

While Pompeo was upsetting Caribbean leaders in Jamaica, President Trump was astounding other world leaders in Europe with his repeated, robust denial that climate change is the threat most of us believe it to be.

He did, however, make the very good point that the end of the world has been forecast many times over and it ain’t happened yet. He gave the likes of Greta Thunberg, the young environment firebrand, very short thrift, double bluffing with the promise of planting one trillion trees.

But he failed to consider that the reason we are still here might be that facing the possibility of extinction makes us take steps to reduce the threat, at least.

Take nuclear disarmament as an example, the starkness of “the balance of terror” was sobering in the years of the Cold War. Only the threat of total annihilation prevented the two super powers – the US and the USSR (the communist Russian states) – from engaging in face to face war. Instead, they conducted proxy wars that many might argue have caused a lot of the mess the world is in at the moment, but that’s another issue.

Locked in that terrible embrace in which neither could go first kept us safe. Preventing other states from getting “the bomb” was critical in keeping the balance. People everywhere joined the nuclear disarmament movement to try to stop nuclear proliferation for ideological reasons, but also to diminish the threat of either accidental or deliberate annihilation by rogue states.

Nuclear disarmament was as hot an issue in the 1960s and 1970s as climate change is today. The lobby was powerful and people put their lives on the line to stop the spread of nuclear arms. An all-out win may not have been achieved but raising public awareness internationally certainly forced democratic governments to be wary of joining the arms race, and international treaties have become a reality.

In the 18th century, Rev Thomas Malthus published his theory that the human population would eventually exceed its capacity to provide feed itself. He advocated controlling population growth rates or face the dire consequences.

It’s the sort of doomsday forecast that President Trump scoffed at in Davos, but Malthusian theory was a warning shot across our bow. It may have taken another 150 years but family planning eventually became a reality and today we are grappling with the problem of finding new ways of feeding an overpopulated planet in which potable water sources are becoming scarce, or at least politics is making it a controversial and endangered resource.

Taking an extreme position has been criticised, as Greta Thunberg signalled in her Davos speech. Still, often that is exactly what is needed to effect change, and for good reason, although it does lead to polarisation. It’s a matter of three strategic steps forward and two very patient steps back, but each time there is advancement.

Much academic research has been conducted into understanding why people do not change their minds when presented with facts, and the general conclusion is that the very way in which our complex societies work militates against it.

We all rely on the expertise and knowledge of others, from how our cars work to sorting out government policy. If, at source, the thinking is faulty or inadequate and the opinions passed on are baseless, then ours are too.

Once we have a community of the ill-informed, we gather strength and very quickly become strident in denying contradictory opinions. “This is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous,” cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach were reported to note in a 2017 New Yorker article. They recorded this obvious but worrying finding: “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding.”

However, their research found that the intensity of disagreement fell once participants were asked to assess the impact of implementation of policy based on their understanding of an issue.

So, it seems that we should be trying to get people to fully understand the possible outcome of their beliefs. This, they wrote, “may be the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes.”

Well, not even NASA’s report of 2019 being the hottest in 140 years impressed Mr Trump, so where do we go from here?

The widening gap between those who believe in climate change and those who do not is alarming. The meeting of world leaders in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum last week was like a party on ice, in more ways than one.

I am sorry to refer once again to the enigma that is President Trump, but he is the most powerful politician in the world, and we must, therefore, pay attention to what he says and does.

(As an aside, Barbadian PM Mia Mottley and our PM Dr Rowley’s belief that Trump’s representative cannot be indulged in meeting only some members of Caricom and not all is the right one. Read her speech).

While Pompeo was upsetting Caribbean leaders in Jamaica, President Trump was astounding other world leaders in Europe with his repeated, robust denial that climate change is the threat most of us believe it to be.

He did, however, make the very good point that the end of the world has been forecast many times over and it ain’t happened yet. He gave the likes of Greta Thunberg, the young environment firebrand, very short thrift, double bluffing with the promise of planting one trillion trees.

But he failed to consider that the reason we are still here might be that facing the possibility of extinction makes us take steps to reduce the threat, at least.

Take nuclear disarmament as an example, the starkness of “the balance of terror” was sobering in the years of the Cold War. Only the threat of total annihilation prevented the two super powers – the US and the USSR (the communist Russian states) – from engaging in face to face war. Instead, they conducted proxy wars that many might argue have caused a lot of the mess the world is in at the moment, but that’s another issue.

Locked in that terrible embrace in which neither could go first kept us safe. Preventing other states from getting “the bomb” was critical in keeping the balance. People everywhere joined the nuclear disarmament movement to try to stop nuclear proliferation for ideological reasons, but also to diminish the threat of either accidental or deliberate annihilation by rogue states.

Nuclear disarmament was as hot an issue in the 1960s and 1970s as climate change is today. The lobby was powerful and people put their lives on the line to stop the spread of nuclear arms. An all-out win may not have been achieved but raising public awareness internationally certainly forced democratic governments to be wary of joining the arms race, and international treaties have become a reality.

In the 18th century, Rev Thomas Malthus published his theory that the human population would eventually exceed its capacity to provide feed itself. He advocated controlling population growth rates or face the dire consequences.

It’s the sort of doomsday forecast that President Trump scoffed at in Davos, but Malthusian theory was a warning shot across our bow. It may have taken another 150 years but family planning eventually became a reality and today we are grappling with the problem of finding new ways of feeding an overpopulated planet in which potable water sources are becoming scarce, or at least politics is making it a controversial and endangered resource.

Taking an extreme position has been criticised, as Greta Thunberg signalled in her Davos speech. Still, often that is exactly what is needed to effect change, and for good reason, although it does lead to polarisation. It’s a matter of three strategic steps forward and two very patient steps back, but each time there is advancement.

Much academic research has been conducted into understanding why people do not change their minds when presented with facts, and the general conclusion is that the very way in which our complex societies work militates against it.

We all rely on the expertise and knowledge of others, from how our cars work to sorting out government policy. If, at source, the thinking is faulty or inadequate and the opinions passed on are baseless, then ours are too.

Once we have a community of the ill-informed, we gather strength and very quickly become strident in denying contradictory opinions. “This is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous,” cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach were reported to note in a 2017 New Yorker article. They recorded this obvious but worrying finding: “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding.”

However, their research found that the intensity of disagreement fell once participants were asked to assess the impact of implementation of policy based on their understanding of an issue.

So, it seems that we should be trying to get people to fully understand the possible outcome of their beliefs. This, they wrote, “may be the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes.”

Well, not even NASA’s report of 2019 being the hottest in 140 years impressed Mr Trump, so where do we go from here?

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