The Late Great Denial Argument
As people strike up the conversation about global warming there seems to be a distorted point of reason I recognise from the old cigarette versus cancer debating days – I call it the late great denial argument.
According to the late great denial argument and framed around cigarettes, the bent reasoning was that with cars and factories and radiation then how does anybody know cigarettes are causing cancer? Science funded by the cigarette industry framed the question exactly that way… Don’t laugh, that was the 70s and even into the wild 80s. In the 90s a friend with all sincerity declared that smoking never killed anybody. Today, who among us would doubt the scientific consensus that cigarette smoking causes cancer and other terminal illnesses? Yes, cars and pollution contribute – but cigarettes kill. End of story.
The argument that volcanoes and forest fires and natural disasters are causing global warming is a rehash of the late great denial argument. Yes there have been ice ages and global warming periods in the past. But given the global scientific consensus based on the data, the melting polar ice (ask the Innuit), the chemical composition of the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, the warming of the oceans and the increasing intensity of storms – the rate of change – how can we rationally disagree with the statement that our footprint is affecting the planet to the detriment of our long term survival.
Nobody wants to think we need to make difficult steps to change our behaviour. But we do. Eventually we do. And the late great denial argument, like all good futile denial arguments, is really the last hurrah effort to fend off that inevitable truth. Its the added contribution we make on top of that other stuff that pushes those environmental boundaries outward. Food for thought.
