Human societies are generally conservative, averse to substantial change – and they are getting in the way of the necessary intervention on climate change and emissions reduction.

The evidence that conservatives often deny or minimise climate change is everywhere, both here and overseas. Donald Trump recently signalled his view in strong terms: climate change, he said, was “the worst con job ever perpetrated on the world”. Clearly, discussion of it gets in the way of his mantra that we should “Dig, baby, dig” for the riches that underlie wealth creation as he understands it. He gave no reason for his view on climate change: his schtick is to say what suits him, never mind the evidence.

Tony Abbott, as Australia’s conservative Prime Minister a decade ago, emphatically rejected the science of climate change when he called it “absolute crap.” He also rejected sea level rise as a problem, saying that a century of photographs on Manly Beach showed no evidence of it. Never mind that these photographs would largely have been happy snaps of people enjoying themselves: they could not realistically be cited as evidence for anything of a scientific nature.

Abbott’s coalition successors, in dumping net zero by 2050, have shown that dealing with climate change has become a low priority on the political right. Whether climate change even exists, it seems, is just a matter of personal opinion.

In fact, it is as much a matter of personal opinion as whether the sun rose in the east this morning.

Whether climate changes is a matter of evidence, not opinion, and there is much evidence available. Climate change exists, and indeed always has, everywhere. There is clear evidence of past ice ages and warm periods, of massive vegetation changes, of the expansion and contraction of deserts, of changing patterns of air pressure and of animal and plant extinctions. Some changes have been significant and impactful, others less so. But the world is constantly changing in myriad ways in response to changing climates.

But as individuals, we rarely feel things like temperature changes during our short life spans. It is easy for us at a personal level to dismiss climate change because it happens too slowly for us to feel it. Given this, it is not hard to understand why people are more concerned with here-and-now matters like the cost of living, the shortage of doctors and how their children are faring at school. The genuinely long term, as encapsulated by geological time, is relegated from our thinking.

One of the great paradoxes of our age is the co-existence, in populations that are better educated than any before them, of science and conspiracy theory. Science affects our daily lives deeply and intimately: scientific discovery is embedded in the television sets we watch, the food we eat and the vehicles we drive. But we can live without thinking about such things, which means we can passively accept the science which underlies everything. At the same time many of us accept and promote conspiracy theories based on nothing at all. The alleged existence of microchips in vaccines, implanted to make us ‘docile’, is accepted by some people without evidence. The proofs are never demonstrated.

Our scientific education at school, and the methods on which science is based, seemingly count for nothing in some people who might be regarded, by the standards of the past, as being well educated. Like Trump, we easily ‘believe in’ what we want to believe in, and we ignore evidence which gets in the way. It is, for some, ‘cool’ to be sceptical of established science and to see it as the preserve of the privileged and the ‘elites’.

Our governments don’t help much. They tend to focus on the here and now, not on the long term. In Australia we seem to be bent on exploiting our fossil fuel resources before the politics of climate changes renders such exploitation difficult. We give companies decades to dig up or otherwise extract fossil fuels: witness Woodside being granted a licence to exploit the north-west shelf gas reserves until 2070. No doubt the license was accompanied by many provisions on emissions reduction which will greatly annoy the company and restrict its activities, but the gas will still be burnt.

Recently there was a small beacon of hope. South Korea, a huge importer of Australian thermal coal, has pledged to phase coal out as it moves towards renewables in its electricity production. Would that China, Japan and India would do the same, because there is no evidence that we are losing enthusiasm for digging up and exporting as much of the stuff as possible.

In Ian Dunlop's piece on _Pearls and Irritations_ he notes, rightly, that the 2050 target for the achievement of ‘net zero’ is too far distant. The crisis of temperature increases, and the sea level rise which results from it, are already upon us and need to be addressed immediately. But as always the immediate will trump the important until a point of genuinely deep crisis is reached – by which time it may be too late to avoid a looming disaster that scientists have warned us about for decades. Our grand-children might come to think very badly of our generation.

We are a sadly uneducated educated species, unable to think beyond the short term and oblivious to what we might be facing in the not very distant future. We are led by conservative thinkers who cannot focus constructively on the long-term future. We are comfortable with conservatism and short-termism as our ruling forces. That may cost us dearly.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.

Please support Pearls and Irritations with your tax deductible donation

This year, Pearls and Irritations has again proven that independent media has never been more essential.

The integrity of our media matters - please support Pearls and Irritations

For the next month you can make a tax deductible donation through the Australian Cultural Fund

Please click here to add your donation.