Chris Mooney is valiantly attempting to understand the mindset of deniers, particularly those of the climate change stripe. In a new, longish piece in Mother Jones, he covers a lot of ground that will be familiar to many of you, dear readers. Chris wraps up an excellent overview of the situation:

Given the power of our prior beliefs to skew how we respond to new information, one thing is becoming clear: If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn’t trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.

This theory is gaining traction in part because of Kahan’s work at Yale. In one study, he and his colleagues packaged the basic science of climate change into fake newspaper articles bearing two very different headlines—”Scientific Panel Recommends Anti-Pollution Solution to Global Warming” and “Scientific Panel Recommends Nuclear Solution to Global Warming”—and then tested how citizens with different values responded. Sure enough, the latter framing made hierarchical individualists much more open to accepting the fact that humans are causing global warming. Kahan infers that the effect occurred because the science had been written into an alternative narrative that appealed to their pro-industry worldview.

You can follow the logic to its conclusion: Conservatives are more likely to embrace climate science if it comes to them via a business or religious leader, who can set the issue in the context of different values than those from which environmentalists or scientists often argue. Doing so is, effectively, to signal a détente in what Kahan has called a “culture war of fact.” In other words, paradoxically, you don’t lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values—so as to give the facts a fighting chance.

Forgive my short temper, but if this view of how we approach such topics is accurate — and it frankly agrees with my personal experience in attempting to communicate with deniers — then we truly are bordering on too stupid to live as a civilization. Those of us on the side of reality can’t lead with the facts, because they’re too inconvenient or too much at odds with the emotions of the deniers, so we have to bribe them with fairy tales about nuclear power, or get a business leader or religious figure to deliver the message. And what are we to do when the deniers resort to their playbook and start spouting the usual list of many-times-debunked confabulations? Appeal to their sense of values instead of showing them that they are simply wrong?

This is not a rhetorical question: Are these people adults or poorly behaved eight-year olds who will continue to throw their tantrums until we bribe them with candy (or a promise of more nuclear power) or find someone who strokes their emotions to deliver the nasty news? Am I the only one who finds it deeply offensive that almost incalculable harm to generations of human beings is hanging on the emotional response of one portion of the public that’s this determined to remain detached from reality?[1]

Let me spin this forward a bit. Assume, for the sake argument that the entire community of people who are trying to convince Americans, just to pick the most important category, that climate change is a real and imminent danger, retools our approach. We lead with values, not facts, whatever that means. We coddle and coax them into taking/supporting at least some action that serves their and everyone’s best interests. Are we really to believe that not only is this the only way to reach them, but that they’re too stupid to realize that (gasp!) we won the argument and changed their minds? Even if we change their minds and get them to cooperate, who here thinks this will result in anywhere near the type and degree of change that’s needed to avert some truly horrific events in the next few decades?

My guess is that despite efforts to rally youth (please check out these videos of McKibben and Gore addressing the crowd at Powershift 2011), we won’t do nearly enough. Between the ideological deniers and those with a huge financial interest in delaying any significant action to reduce our CO2 emissions, things will continue to deteriorate. Temperatures will rise, glaciers and ice sheets will melt, droughts and floods will get worse, sea levels will rise, and storms will become more violent. We are headed at full speed toward the ugliest of scenarios, the one Lester Brown has been talking about so much recently: All these environmental changes plus our relentless misuse of fresh water aquifers[2] will result in food shortages, which in turn will cause failed states. Once we’ve reached that nightmare scenario, then the problems only compound themselves. We’ll be faced with life on Planet Triage, in which those of us lucky enough to have food will have to decide repeatedly how much of it and other forms of aid we’ll ship around the world to all the newly desperate human beings. That will be a huge resource and emotional burden, and it will come at a time when the general public is finally connecting the dots and realizing that the scientists had the basics of climate change figured out many decades earlier, and we have to take very swift action to prevent things from getting much worse.

[1] And before you leave a comment pointing out that this isn’t fair, comparing the public at large with deniers, please see see what the people of Massachusetts think of climate change. Hint: It isn’t pretty.

[2] In particular, see chapter two of Brown’s latest book, World on the Edge, in which he provides considerable detail about our current food production bubble and how it’s fed with non-renewable fossil water aquifers.