Many commentators advocating strong measures to control Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) criticise ‘deniers’, and wonder how they reach such a conclusion. The commentators will then produce purported reasons how such ‘deniers’ reach their conclusion. Mostly these reasons are laughably inaccurate and naïve.
But this response has a resonance elsewhere. It is exactly the same tone taken by Christian believers, sometimes even by agnostics or academics, to describe atheists. There is a fundamental misunderstanding of the atheists’, or deniers’, philosophical position, and this arises out of the separate worlds that these antagonists inhabit. One is that of a believer who feels s/he knows the truth, the other of a sceptic who sees things not just in infinite shades of grey, but also the shadows behind.
A case in point is Lord Anthony Giddens (sociologist, author of The Politics of Climate Change, and creator of the Giddens Paradox) who give three superficial reasons that AGW sceptics use – denying it is happening, that it has nothing to do with human activity, or that it’s not very dangerous. As ever, reality is more complex.
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