Political response to Climate Alarm shows progress on 7 Stages of Denial
The chorus of alarm about climate change is growing. This week it was in the headline news due to the just released National Climate Assessment. In today’s Los Angeles Times, Doyle McManus has a very good piece describing the Republican response. “The GOP does the climate Change Dance”.
The stages of “climate change denial” have been described by several writers in recent years, listing five or six stages in roughly similar terms. (Joe Romm, Daphne Wysham, Michael Mann, and Steven Running are several that I am aware of who deserve credit.)
My version would be “7 Stages of Climate Denial”
- Global Warming is not happening. This is all a hoax.
- Climate Change is happening, but it’s natural. Humans have no impact.
- Perhaps we are having an impact, but what can we do?
- Addressing climate change as ‘Problem #1’, would hurt our economy.
- The government should provide more subsidies, emergency relief, and compensation.
- We need to do something drastic, regardless of the cost attempting to correct the problem. It’s a question of survival.
- Economic, agricultural, weather, and human health impacts are so catastrophic, that government and economies have collapsed.
As noted in the Los Angeles Times column today, even the knee-jerk reaction by Senators Mitch McConnell and Marco Rubio, seems to indicate they are at now stages 3 and 4. Unfortunately, in this situation, we can’t really consider this “progress.” Still, it is worth noting that their abandoning stages 1 and 2 is a good thing.
With the likely increasing weird weather and continuing impacts from record level droughts, rain, snows, storms, and flooding streets as our climate destabilizes, we can expect to see more of the skeptics advance through stages of denial. (For a short perspective on “climate destabilization” that explains the surprising conflicting manifestations, see “3 Reasons Why Global Warming Yields Record Snows“) Hopefully we will not get to stage 7 when there is a true breakdown of our institutions, creating anarchy and chaos.
We still have time to avoid that. It is just a question of political will.