Why Do People Continue to Deny Climate Crisis

Our planet is facing climate crisis and it is an undeniable fact. It clearly affects every corner aspect of our life, starting from small until huge scale. The impacts that commonly occur and directly affect humans are floods, landslides, drought, forest burning, and others. And because this is a global issue, we need more hands to face it. But unfortunately, there are still many people who don’t believe in the climate crisis, even Indonesians.

According to YouGov, Indonesia and the U.S. are the countries with the highest shares of climate change deniers. This yearly survey was carried out in July and August 2020. 21% of Indonesians and 19% of Americans said that climate change wasn’t real, even humans weren’t responsible for it. Other than that, 3% of Indonesians and 5% of Americans said that climate change wasn’t happening at all.

Above all that data, I started to wonder, why people continue to deny climate crisis when every impact is clearly visible and even can threaten the human population? As far as I’ve found, there are at least 5 perspectives on why people continue to deny climate change. Those come from science, economic, humanitarian, political, and crisis perspectives.

Deniers from science perspective suggest that climate change is just a natural circle of the earth. It is just how the earth heal itself. In fact, yeah that’s true. Our planet has its own mechanism to heal itself. In brief, the earth will become totally ice for some definite time, then it will melt. After that, the earth will start a new life. The last ‘new life’ occurred about ten thousand years ago. And indeed, this mechanism will be repeated, but human activities make it happen faster than the natural timeline. And that’s what causes it more dangerous.

Those who deny climate change from economic perspective have thought that we really need an amount of money to tackle the climate issue. And that isn’t really economist. The fact that tackling climate crisis is too expensive makes them keep denying this ‘getting worse issue’. Besides of that, the majority of climate deniers that came from the US (and as flat earth followers) also don’t believe the fact that humans are the cause of the climate crisis. This makes them refuse to do the things that we all have to do to tackle the climate crisis, start from small — daily basic activity — until huge — regulation, nonproper action that gives significant impacts to the environment — scale.

Climate change deniers from humanitarian perspective often argue that climate change is good for human. The increase of temperature makes our world warmer so that it can support food sector. Whereas, not every plant has an optimum growth in warm temperature, aren’t they?

A paradigm of “if others don’t do it, why should i?” is still thought of most people who deny climate change from political perspective. They argue that they don’t take any action because other countries don’t. It is surely a matter of political will of those countries.

Climate crisis, as known as an unknown future, certainly increases the anxiety level for several people, although we found the opposite for the others. Also, I agree that this issue is very abstract for some people or society. It causes misunderstanding that leads them to the hole of distrust and unwillingness to believe about the climate crisis. So, that’s why the flow of educative information related to climate issues has to be spread comprehensively and as is.

Society needs to hear the truth about climate conditions to realize and open their eyes to see the real condition. We are living on earth that has a getting worse environment and become more uninhabitable day by day. The more deniers who ultimately believe in the climate crisis, the closer we are to hope to become a reality.

References:

Buchholz, K. (2020, December 2020). Where Climate Change Deniers Live. Retrieved from Statista: https://www.statista.com/chart/19449/countries-with-biggest-share-of-climate-change-deniers/

Maslin, M. (2019, November 2019). Here Are Five of The Main Reasons People Continue to Deny Climate Change. Retrieved from SCIENCEalert: https://www.sciencealert.com/the-five-corrupt-pillars-of-climate-change-denial