"Climate change is a hoax"

Something that I’ve heard said over and over again is that climate change is a hoax, and it perplexes me so much because of all the data out there… all the images of ice caps melting...all the obvious, visual evidence that depicts how our world has been affected by changes in our climate. There are numerous reasons why I can see people believing that it is a hoax:

One reason is that adherents to this notion like to believe in their own invincibility. They do not like to see themselves as being vulnerable and endangered by a force that is not so readily perceptible, as something like a tornado or an earthquake. To them, it lies as a force that is too insidious and seemingly innocuous that it is not there. Another is the belief in the perfection of the world. This might tie into religion in the sense that people may not want to belief that their god could have created an imperfect world that allows for something as grave as climate change. I mean, how could the world possibly operate in a way that will end itself and even us? *Please note my sarcasm.

Moreover, adherents to this notion might also be refusing to take responsibility for their actions and adjust their own lifestyles to be in accord with this belief in climate change. They don’t want to agree with the need for sustainable energy because of the fact that possibly people close to them, working in coal for instance, will lose their jobs . It’s like if scientists told someone that blueberries were actually bad for them, and blueberries were their favorite snack; they would do anything to convince themselves, including pulling up whatever sources that there are—credible or not—so that they could, without guilt, continue eating blueberries. A non-climate change inclusive world is the blueberry here.

Next up, there is the factor of distrusting the left and not wanting to agree with anything that scientists or the left say. Most of the time (at least through my experience with what I’ve noticed) many people who are climate change deniers are on the right. And what kind of right-wing person would they be if they agreed with anything that the left said?! In this case, we can clearly see how science has been politicized… truth has been politicized… which is very dangerous because of occasions like these when the right, for the sake of being good, faithful right-wingers, would deny what is true just to be against what the left believes.

This anti-science rhetoric also leads to my last point about how we’re living in a postmodern reality where the institutions and pillars of the modernist world that we upheld as trustworthy and authoritative have now been destroyed. We’re living in a hyperspace where we form our own knowledge; in a sense, we create our own space and govern how we situate ourselves within it… so, we make it up to ourselves what we take as true and what we don’t, depending on what conveniences us. This is very interesting because, in a way, this “post-truth” society that we now live in has allowed us to create our own realities and space based on the “truths” we tell ourselves.