Why do we still ignore threats to our survival?
The warming of our planet, “if it proceeds unchecked”, will make large areas of the globe uninhabitable. We are living unsustainably, squandering the resources on which future generations will depend. But why, Giddens asks, despite repeated warnings of cataclysmic breakdown and the emergence of a doomsday literature, “do most people, most of the time, act as though a threat of such magnitude can be ignored?” Climate change presents a multitude of complex problems, the scientific questions are formidable and the vested interests powerful. It’s a political issue.
Ours, some commentators maintain, is an “age of scares” with the mass hysteria and rampant superstition of medieval witch-hunts transferred to fears of global warming. Giddens, a former director of the London School of Economics, dismisses such claims and those of sceptics who argue that the scientific projections are flawed, that global warming isn’t happening or that it’s not the result of human activity. Climate scientists, he points out, base their conclusions on years of meticulous research but their critics, often funded by interest groups such as the oil and gas industries, don’t submit their counter-claims to peer-review and critical examination. Deniers portray the scientific consensus as a conspiracy, recruit pseudo-experts to create a façade of plausibility, pick evidence selectively and repackage scientific uncertainty as doubt.
