Are we all everyday climate change deniers?

In a recent article in the Guardian, Alice Bell asserts that 'we're all everyday climate change deniers.'

To be honest, I get a bit irritated when a journalist asserts we're all anything. Firstly it implies a ludicrously over-simplified homogeneity in society. And secondly how can she possibly know what I am? We've never met. But knowing the ways of newspapers, I am going to give Bell the benefit of the doubt that she may never even have seen that headline - because the message of the article is nowhere near as meaningless.

Bell suggests that by giving in to despair and not talking about climate change, we are de facto deniers. Clearly at the most basic level even this is silly - she is talking about climate change. I am talking about climate change. So how can we all be doing this? And it's also comparable with the tendency to label anyone with political leanings slightly to the right of your own a fascist to give the label 'denier' to everyone who doesn't spend every waking moment talking about climate change. Life does need to go on - or there wouldn't be an issue to talk about. There is more to life than climate change. (Whisper it, there's even more to life than science.) But there is no doubt that in our obsession with the political changes shaking the Western world we have tended to put climate change to one side, so we can concentrate on, say, having fun pointing out the failings of Donald Trump, complaining about Brexit or moaning about Remainers.

So while I think the 'deniers' label is unnecessary and wrong, there is no doubt we need to keep climate change in the forefront. As I've commented several times, human nature is such that we won't take sufficient action until things get significantly worse. And those who deny that this action will require technology to take carbon out of the atmosphere and/or reduce solar intensity arriving at the Earth's surface are just as much climate change deniers as those who pretend it isn't happening. But we should be talking about it, we should be cutting down emissions, we should be flying less and driving less - and we should be investing in the technologies that will enable us to get out of this. That's renewables, nuclear and carbon removal/solar reduction technologies.

We might not all be climate change deniers, but we do need to do more to keep pushing it up the agenda.

This has been a green heretic production

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