Stranger than fiction (From The Argus)

Stranger than fiction

6:00am Saturday 16th January 2010

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The theory says that climate change is a global conspiracy, designed to keep the world’s population in fear so we can all be controlled in behaviour, possibly even in size. Taxes can be hiked to unprecedented levels and global corporations – and therefore wealth – can be kept in the hands of the privileged few. The perpetrators of this dastardly plan? The left-wing. Communists. Anti-globalist, anti-progress hippies who want us to live in the stone age. Possibly the Illuminati.

But could there be any truth to it? Conspiracies can spring from anywhere, you don’t even need to look too hard.

Emails from disgruntled climate scientists leaked from the University of East Anglia late last year caused a surge in cries of climate change conspiracy, yet indisputable evidence has been in the public domain for many years of collusion between large oil companies to spread misinformation about and distrust of climate science.

The corollary is that people believe what they want to believe, whatever makes them feel safe.

Mark Erickson is a lecturer in social science at the University of Brighton.

He says: “Conspiracy theories are simply a way of making sense of the world. There’s very little to be gained from examining them because there’s not anything there. They share strong commonalities, so a conspiracy about 9/11 is fundamentally the same as one about climate change.”

Where there are gains to be made, however, is in examining why people are drawn to them. Mark says we face two problems: the way we perceive science and the way we perceive ourselves.

He says: “Science is very dominant in our society.

If you talk to Stephen Hawkins or Richard Dawkins, they are very strong advocates of science as being better than everything else. On the other hand you have people saying, ‘Scientists aren’t telling us the truth’ – which is what climate change deniers would say. Both are extreme discourses and neither are really grounded.”

We end up locked in a cycle where the basic premise of science becomes it’s own enemy. We assume scientists will tell us straightforward truths, but instead they debate and argue among themselves to find ever more accurate accounts and it’s this ever changing message which undermines the idea that science knows best.

The way we understand ourselves has also changed dramatically. The 1900s could be seen as the century of the individual, the time when communities broke apart and we began to see the world predominantly in terms of ourselves.

Mark says: “As society atomises we lose faith in the way we used to explain things. As this happens we need to find something else to explain the world and conspiracy theories are fantastic at that.

“The one about Barack Obama not being born in the US is brilliant. He’s got all the proof in the world, but the conspiracy theory says it is forged. Its power is that it comforts people who don’t think he should be their President. When we begin to lose faith in the world, politics, science, or religion, conspiracies make the world explainable.”

As for climate change being one big conspiracy, Mark says: “Personally, climate change deniers scare me. They represent a lot of forces I don’t particularly like – the far right, for example. We put terrible pressure on our scientists.

We ask for clear explanations and when they give it we turn around and do this to them.”

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