Author: Matthew Davis / Source: Big Think
- Climate change is easily one of humanity’s greatest threats, and a mountain of data and evidence support this assertion.
- Despite the evidence, only 71% of Americans believe that climate change is real and primarily driven by human activities.
- People can and do change their minds about climate change. Trying to convince people to change their minds is often more about picking the right target than it is providing the right arguments.
Do facts matter? In an objective sense, yes, of course they do. It’s a fact that the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West, and no amount of hemming and hawing will change that. A better question might be: Do facts matter to people?
When we look at topics with seemingly straightforward, fact-based answers, the disheartening conclusion is that no, facts do not matter to people, at least not more than belief. The rate of deadly diseases dropped precipitously after the introduction of vaccines, but a highly anti-vaccination community in North Carolina just had a sizeable outbreak of chickenpox. Eratosthenes used some fairly simple math to demonstrate the Earth is a globe 2,000 years ago, but plenty of people still believe the Earth is flat. Through multiple discrete sources of evidence, 97% of climatologists agree that the Earth is warming, and human behavior is to blame, but only 71% of Americans believe that global warming is happening at all, let alone human-driven global warming.
Reality doesn’t care about people’s beliefs; it will continue to behave as it will regardless of its polling numbers. So, part of the necessary work in preparing against reality’s variety of risks and threats is convincing people that those risks and threats exist in the first place. Can you change the mind of a climate change denier? And if so, how?
Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images
Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine, recently changed his mind about climate change.
Reconsidering the evidence
To answer the first question, it does appear that people’s minds can be changed. Maybe not everybody, but some people certainly do. The 71% of Americans who believe in climate change is a record high—it may be troubling that the number doesn’t match the 97% of climatologists who believe in climate change, but at least its moving in a positive direction.
As the founder of the Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer makes his living debunking bad science and educating the public on scientific skepticism. Like any good skeptic, Shermer was initially uncertain of climate change, especially the idea that humans were its primary driver. But he changed his mind.
“What turned me around on the global warming issue was a convergence of evidence from numerous sources. […] Because we are primates with such visually dominant sensory systems, we need to see the evidence to believe it, and the striking visuals of countless graphs and charts, and especially the before-and-after photographs showing the disappearance of glaciers around the world, shocked me viscerally and knocked me out my skepticism.”
Richard Cizik, an evangelical reverend, also changed his mind after attending a climate change conference:
“I heard the evidence over four days, did a fist to the forehead and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, if this is true, everything has changed.’ […] I liken it to a religious conversion, and not just because I saw something I’d never seen before — I felt a deep sense of repentance.”
A Reddit thread titled ‘Former climate change deniers, what changed your mind?’ offered a variety of different reasons, including a sense of responsibility for the Earth (“I’d rather unnecessarily make the world a nice place to live than unintentionally contribute to making it less livable for many”), noticing weird weather (“Winters have been unusually warm, with flash major snow storms scattered throughout, and…
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