On November 28th, in Durban, South Africa, a two-week conference about global climate change begins. There’s a lot at stake: the future of the Kyoto Protocol, relations between industrial and developing nations, our global ability to address looming environmental catastrophes before it’s too late. What’s not at stake is the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “Summary for Policymakers” documenting global climate change as a consequence of anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gases.  Unfortunately, in the lead-up to Durban, many conservative commentators are ignoring the problem by participating in “climategate-gate.” They are trying to discredit climate science by discrediting climate scientists with another batch of scientist emails originally stolen in 2009 from East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, the first batch having been previously released in the lead-up to the Copenhagen conference for a similar purpose.

The science produced was subsequently vindicated, even though the scientists were embarrassed for having their humanity made the topic of discussion. If the first email release could be called “climategate” because embarrassing emails were released, now that all the questions about the quality of science produced have been resolved, yet another attempt to use emails from the same stolen batch can properly be called climategate-gate.

Climategate-gate has two immediate negative consequences. First, conservatives whose points-of-view are needed if we are to craft viable solutions are spending their time in a destructive effort to deny the problem. But this batch of stolen emails, like the first batch released, adds nothing new or surprising. All they show, again, is that scientists can be nasty, vain, competitive, etc. What we need are solutions, lots of them from all across the political spectrum, not anti-scientific posturing. It’s time conservative commentators got in the game instead of trying to change the rules.

Second, climategate-gate increases a gap in understanding in which climate scientists who actively research the topic are about twice as likely as the general public to agree that “human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures.” Only about half the general public agree while almost all climate scientists do. In fact, two different sources of data (a survey of scientists and a study linking agreement to the credibility of the expert) converge on the same fact: 97 to 98 percent of climate scientists are convinced by the evidence for anthropogenic climate change. What climategate-gate does is exploit basic features of human psychology to sow confusion precisely where clarity is most needed.

Let’s do a quick thought experiment: Imagine you haven’t been feeling at the top of your game. Nothing consistently terrible, just a low-grade fever you notice now and then and few bad days here and there. You figure it’s just normal aging. But you go to your doctor anyway who runs some tests. You’re told it’s cancer. A really, really bad type of cancer that’s been growing for a long time and is only now starting to make you feel sick. Since you feel basically OK, you don’t believe the diagnosis. You want to ignore the whole situation, even when you’re told that if you wait until you feel sick it will be too late. You have to get treatment now or face catastrophic health changes. Your doctor also tells you that 97 to 98 percent of oncologists all agree that you’ve got cancer and you need immediate treatment. Being careful, you get a second opinion, and a third. And then a fourth from the hospital with the best reputation in your area. They all agree. Finally, you find someone who tells you what you want to hear: don’t worry, it’s just normal aging; ignore all those other doctors, they’re just trying to sell you the treatments they provide.

What are you going to do? Especially given how I set it up, it’s pretty clear almost everyone would seek the recommended treatment after working through their fear (maybe rage, or even despair) and conquering the difficult  challenge of making decisions based on an assessment of risk far in the future.

And this brings me to the obvious question: Why is it any different for human-caused global climate change? And to a non-obvious one: How should we act towards someone denying a cancer-diagnosis and should we treat someone denying anthropogenic climate change any differently?

For those denying either a cancer diagnosis or anthropogenic climate change the psychological start is recognizing that logic and data will fail; you can’t smash emotions with reason. For each, there are powerful emotional reasons not to believe the bad news. For example, consider the anxieties resulting from acting on perceived uncertainty (“it’s not an ABSOLUTE certainty, is it?”); the mistrust of authorities built into how we now relate to experts; the all-too-human tendency to undervalue risks, especially when they are well in the future; the helplessness that comes from feeling out of control; and the non-reflective habits everyone is loathe to notice and change. All these factors suggest there is continuum of climate change denial, from the anti-science rhetoric of climategate-gate to accepting political leaders not committed to solving the problem. Because it’s rooted in our all too human emotional vulnerabilities, we all have a touch of climate change denial, no one is pure.

So, the only way to gain protection against the perpetrators of climategate-gate is to realize how seductively powerful is their “don’t worry, be happy” message, how easy it is to do nothing when change is needed. And that is a message everyone needs to guard against. By all means, send some empathy towards climate change deniers, they’re really under tremendous psychological pressure, take their struggle seriously, just not their message because like it or not they are hooking into the basic human reality that no one likes change, not really. Because we’re facing looming environmental catastrophes the depth of which can still be mitigated with science-based policy prescriptions — however much those prescriptions include the unwelcome side-effect of necessary behavioral change — we need to accept fully that when it comes to climate change denial, we are all guilty of some.

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