It has suddenly dawned on me why climate change denial is so numerous and so strident. The fault lies with none other than Australian Idol. Well perhaps not just Australian Idol. Dancing with the Stars, It Takes Two and all their so-called ‘reality’ brethren are equally to blame.
There was a time, ‘back in the day’, when we relied on experts to make the call on the important decisions in life. On New Faces or Pot of Gold, viewers at home could postulate on who might win, but we left it to the expert judges to make the final call on which nascent talent should take the chocolates. In those days, it was acknowledged that the experts knew more than the rest of us. They had experience and knowledge we couldn’t match and thus deserved their position as holder of the number cards – even if we didn’t always agree with their decisions.
In those days, the same respect for expertise meant that we were happy to have scientists guide decision making on things like the addition of pollution controls to cars, the replacement of CFCs in aerosols and, eventually, the dangers of smoking.
Enter the latest generation of reality television. After Big Brother introduced television stations to the abundant revenues of SMS voting, audience-based decision making was quickly adopted by a new breed of (horribly stretched out) talent shows. In a move which must have had Bernard King spinning in his grave, judgement was taken off the experts and handed to a seething mass of opinionated but highly untrained punters.
Now we could not only pretend we had expertise but we could actually act on our pretense.
Around the same time as this was happening, climate change started to become a prominent issue. Involving some of the most complex science that can be imagined, including drawing on a wide range of scientific disciplines, climate change would seem an obvious case for the rest of us to defer to the experts. Governments across the world recognised this and set up the IPCC as a independent mechanism for review, as a way for hundreds of experts to compare notes and come to as good a consensus as they could muster.
But this wasn’t enough for many ordinary folk who were enjoying their new found expert status. Enthused by their newfound credentials as talent spotters, hundreds of bloggers, columnists, politicians and ordinary folk around the world decided that if they could differentiate between Guy Sebastian and Shannon Noll, they could just as easily look out the window and make a call on the finer points of climate change.
So we have the politicians like Steve Fielding (see my previous comments on him here) and Nick Minchin – along with many others – who confidently deny climate change because they’ve ‘read a bit’, essentially taking the amateur wine taster’s “I know what I like” approach to climate science.
And we have the likes of columnist Miranda Devine who recently appeared on the ABC’s Q&A program. In answer to an audience question, Devine stated that she believes climate change is real but that it is not significantly manmade. Devine is a journalist, not a scientist, but somehow she sees herself capable of deciding which parts of the body of global climate research are to be believed and which aren’t. She also sees herself as more expert than the combined resources of the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology, dismissing their recent update as part of an ongoing “scare campaign”. Devine’s is the “I know it when I see it” approach.
In the end, I don’t really care who the public votes for on Australian Idol. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to ask any Joe in the street to help me with a medical problem. Some stuff is best left to those who actually know a bit.
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