Watching Horizon on BBC2 last night it became clear why the Climate Change deniers have such an easy time of things, compared say to the scientists struggling to warn us of impending peril.

In the programme entitled Out of Control, cutting edge research into how our behaviour is largely dictated by the sub-concious included an intriguing experiment. Participants were given a set of 80 questions asking them to predict the chances of them suffering everything from a broken arm to cancer. After each question the participant was given the actual statistical probability which in some cases was higher and in others lower. Finally the entire set of questions were repeated and the participant allowed to adjust their previous answers.

The results were stunning… overwhelmingly participants would revise down their answers where they had overestimated, but NOT where they had underestimated. The conclusion being that we sub-consciously filter out information we do not like.

Further proof that we are less in control of our minds that perhaps we would like came from an experiment where individuals were asked to simply chase and catch a small remotely operated helicopter darting around in a random flight pattern while wearing a head-mounted video camera. Each was asked to describe the strategy they had adopted and unsurprisingly each sounded very different. Until that is, the recorded videos were analysed and it became evident that despite the strategy each participant thought they had used… they had all done exactly the same thing: moving about to keep the helicopters flight path appear straight relative to their own position.

Of course none of this should be any surprise. We eat food that we know is unhealthy, drink alcohol, smoke, drive fast cars and… well you know the rest.

So even after being presented with evidence as compelling as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth which predicts a fairly bleak future unless we make radical changes, most completely normal people will simply choose to carry on as normal. This not because they do not care, or do not take the subject very seriously.. but because sub-consciously deciding to change your life to save the planet is a mental leap that few are able to make. Add to this the tendency for herd behaviour and you arrive at where we are today with any trivial doubt, piece of misinformation or junk science that the deniers can throw in the public domain re-enforcing the sub-concious desire to ignore bad news, not to stand out and stick to what has worked previously.

And this is the other non-surprise; for as long as we’ve understood herd behaviour, others have become skilled shepherds. Take for the example, the junk science published for decades on behalf of the tobacco industries. By spreading just enough F.U.D (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) it was possible for the sub-concious to discard the bad news that smoking does, indeed kill. This made a lot of money, but sadly continues to kill around 100,000 people in the UK every year.

Perhaps the debate needs to be reversed, turn Climate Change into a good news story…. after-all,  a good many properties that are currently 5-10 miles inland could become prime seafront real estate by the end of this century.

Somehow we think this approach is not likely to work. So we will have to wait for a seismic shift in the public sub-concious before any serious attempts to tackle Climate Change can begin. Let’s hope it doesn’t come too late.