The ongoing climate science furore, largely cooked up by the media and dinosaur lobby groups, has revealed how much people desperately don't want the facts to be true, argues Toby Webb
Quite a few people I know, some senior executives, have recently asked me what I think about the climate change science debate happening right now.
Usually they ask if it means climate change predictions are untrue. I can see it on their faces. They are hoping what they have been hearing for years will be revealed as a fraud, or a gross exaggeration, so that life can stay the same.
This my theory anyway. That most people just don't want their lives to change that much as a result of climate science.
This fear of change means they read vaguely about the recent 'climate gate' scandal, over leaked emails and Himalayan glacier predictions, and try to breathe a sigh of relief that not much has to change, after all.
What worries me is that quite a few of the people I've spoken with haven't grasped that a couple of errors and some scientific infighting doesn't change the facts, the worrying predictions around climate change.
Or maybe they have grasped it, at least initially, but then have pushed that to the back of their minds and just kept thinking that they don't want it to be true, then selectively only remember the media commentary or reports about science being in doubt.
This desire for the status quo is far more dangerous than the climate deniers themselves.
People seem to be becoming sceptical as a defence mechanism, and are eagerly spurred on by the deniers, whose credentials the media don't question in their search for credible sounding opposing views to 99.99% of climate scientists.
This article about Patrick Michaels, for example, shows how the media fails to dig into the background of climate deniers and hardcore sceptics.
As a result, their comments, packed full of conflicts of interest, help people convince themselves that they won't have to deal with the society-changing consequences of climate change.
The result of the sloppiness in the media? Results like this:
So whilst we fight back against the paid climate change deniers, we also need to think about how we tackle fear of change in the average voter too.
That, surely, is the biggest fight to win.
Toby Webb is founder and managing director of Ethical Corporation, and a lecturer on corporate responsibility at Birkbeck College, University of London.
This article is from his blog, reflections on ethical business, which is online at: http://ethicalcorp.blogspot.com