BBC Learning English–How To Talk To A Climate Denier
By Paul Homewood
Quite what a naive propaganda piece has to do with teaching people English eludes me:
Introduction
Do you know somebody who doesn’t believe that climate change is happening? Most scientists say it is. Rob and Sam get some tips on how to make people think about climate, and teach you new vocabulary along the way.
This week’s question
What percent of the world’s scientific community agree that climate change is real?
a) 79 percent
b) 89 percent
c) 99 percent
Listen to the programme to find out the answer.
Vocabulary
climate denier
person who does not believe that climate change is happening, or does not accept that it is caused by human activity such as burning fossil fuels
ill-informed
knowing less than you should about a particular topic
full-blown
completely developed or committed
take a long, hard look (at something)
examine something very carefully in order to improve it for the future
throw insults
say offensive, hurtful things directly to someone
backfire
have the opposite effect from the one you intended
TRANSCRIPT
Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript.
Sam
Hello. This is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I’m Sam.
Rob
And I’m Rob. When Sarah Ott was growing up in Florida in the 1990s, she loved playing in nature. She picked up litter in the street and took it home to recycle. But later, in college, Sarah became surrounded by people in her community who didn’t share her love of the environment – people who didn’t believe that climate change was real. And slowly, Sarah started to doubt it as well.
Sam
Climate deniers – people who don’t believe that climate change is happening, or that it isn’t caused by humans – make up around nine percent of the American population, according to some estimates. Now, Sarah works as a climate campaigner at the US National Centre for Science Education, teaching children the science behind climate change, but her journey there was a difficult one, and she lost many friends on the way.
Rob
In this programme, we’ll be discussing climate deniers, and finding out how to talk with people who doubt the science of global warming. And as usual, we’ll be learning some new vocabulary as well.
Sam
But before that, I have a question for you, Rob. Whatever climate deniers think, there is strong agreement on the issue among scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. So, what percentage of the world’s scientific community agree that climate change is real? Is it:
a) 79 percent?
b) 89 percent? or
c) 99 percent?
Rob
I’ll have a guess and I’ll say it’s 99 percent.
Sam
OK. I will reveal the answer later in the programme, Rob. Marco Silva is a climate disinformation reporter for the BBC. He told BBC World Service programme, The Climate Question, what he’s learned about reporting on the issue from around the world.
Marco Silva
It’s quite important to make here a very clear distinction between being wrong, ill-informed about climate change and being a full-blown climate denier. A lot of people may not be very well versed with the science, the facts of climate change… to be honest, they can at times be quite complex, quite dense. Some people may have genuine questions about the subject. So, with information, with facts, those people can be convinced. Climate deniers, though, people who reject the basic facts of climate change, are likely to be more difficult to persuade.
Rob
Marco distinguishes a full-blown climate denier – someone who is completely committed to the idea, from someone who is simply ill-informed, meaning someone who knows less than they should about a particular topic.
Sam
Marco thinks it’s possible persuade an ill-informed person that climate change is a fact, for example by sharing personal stories of how of the weather has changed in recent years, or by asking them why they doubt the scientific evidence.
Rob
Full-blown climate deniers, on the other hand, are much harder to persuade. Here’s Marco Silva again, sharing some advice on how best to talk to people about the climate with BBC World Service programme, The Climate Question.
Marco Silva
A number of researchers and academics have looked into exactly this topic before. Professor Sander van der Linden, professor of social psychology at the University of Cambridge, is one of them. He’s been looking into this long and hard, and when I spoke to him, he gave me a couple of tips. For instance, don’t challenge a climate denier directly. Don’t confront them telling them that they’re this or that, throwing insults at them, that their beliefs are wrong – that sort of attitude or strategy is only likely to backfire. If you do that, the chances are people are just going to hold on to their views even more firmly.
Sam
Marco mentions Professor van der Linden, a psychologist who has taken a long, hard look at the issue of climate denial. If you take a long, hard look at something, you examine it very carefully in order to improve it for the future.
Rob
Professor van der Linden advises us not to challenge climate deniers directly, and never to throw insults – to say offensive, hurtful things directly to someone. This approach is unlikely to work and will probably backfire, or have the opposite effect from that intended, such as making that person’s opinion even stronger.
Sam
Instead, what’s needed is understanding and empathy – realising that climate deniers cannot control the life events that led them to mistrust science; and the patience to try to show them difference between fact and fiction.
Rob
OK, it’s time to reveal the answer to your question now, Sam – what percentage of the global scientific community agree that human-caused climate change is real? And I guessed it was 99 percent.
Sam
And that was the correct answer, Rob! The scientific evidence for a climate emergency is overwhelming, leaving just the question of what we do about it. OK, let’s recap the vocabulary we’ve learned from this programme on climate deniers – people who do not accept that climate change is real.
Rob
Someone who is ill-informed knows less than they should about a particular topic.
Sam
The adjective full-blown means completely committed or developed.
Rob
The idiom to take a long, hard look at something means to examine something very carefully in order to improve it for the future.
Sam
If you throw insults, you say offensive, hurtful things directly to someone.
Rob
And finally, if your actions backfire, they have opposite effect from the one you intended. Once again, our six minutes are up! Bye for now!
Sam
Bye bye!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/english/features/6-minute-english_2023/ep-230309
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Add to vocabulary “Crackpot envonmentalist” – someone who wrote this rubbish
Should read environmentalist but can’t see how to edit comment!
emo-mentalist is good too or warm-monger
They need to add “patronizing” to the vocabulary as well, from the “we know what the truth is, so whatever you think you know has to be wrong” attitude woven through that entire thing.
Typical load of BBC lies .
The original Doran / Zimmerman and Cook et el 97% papers are total lies , using only a very small percent of answers . And when you use the OREGON Petition numbers the fact is that less than 1% of scientists believe humans have any effect on the climate .
But a much better question is ” What is the total amount of human produce CO in the atmosphere ”
You can bet that none of the green loonies will know that it is only 0.001%, and the UK total is only 0.00001%.
The Cook paper was so bent it took analysts the best part of six months to work out what he had done. If I remember anyone who had mentioned the word ‘climate’ was read as being part of the 97%, or something similar.
Reputable scientific research it wasn’t. Doran & Zimmerman got 3,000 replies from 10,000 questionnaires and ended up filleting it to the point where the final figure was 97% of 75. Zimmerman ended up disowning it.
And that is before we start on the “‘science’ and ‘consensus’ are mutually exclusive” argument!
Quantitatively, the difference is the amount between pre-industrial 280 ppm and today’s 420 ppm… 140 ppm. One ppm = 7.8 billion metric tons. So that is 1,092 billion metric tons. Try capturing and storing even one ppm.
The IPCC claim that the pre- industrial level of CO2 was 270 ppm. Though according to Dr. Tim Ball, approx 90,000 measures of atmospheric CO2 that began in 1812 have shown pre-industrial levels of 335 ppm.
Sadly, even if we burn all available ´fossil’ fuels, we cannot achieve the ideal 1000ppm CO2 food crops prefer.
Let alone the 3-4000 ppm the dinosaurs enjoyed…
For Primary school children given the vocabulary.
A bogus argument from authority is all they have time for. What they do not see is that they are giving science a bad name by politicizing it.
Terribly blatant propaganda, full-blown in fact.
A couple of insights revealing how they are arming people with strategies for confronting different types of non believers like it were a disease or illness.
[For instance, don’t challenge a (full-blown) climate denier]
In other words, don’t debate someone who knows what they’re talking about.
“TRANSCRIPT
Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript.”
It’s becoming too easy to highlight the BBC incompetence:
“transcript
noun [ C ]
UK /ˈtræn.skrɪpt/ US /ˈtræn.skrɪpt/
an exact written copy of something:
[eg] Mysteriously, the transcript of what was said at the trial was lost.”
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/transcript
Changing the meaning of words, in order to disrupt normality, is one of the objectives of the malevolent forces.
I was seeing the fallacy of equivocation right there. Often ordinary lack of smarts is to blame.
No by-line for the author of this poisonous tosh on the BBC site – not even departmental attribution.
No surprise I suppose – starve the beast.
Starve the beast?
Put me down as an enthusiast for high explosives and salting the rubble.
That too 🙂
Pass the sick bag, Ethel.
“Hi, Sam! You know, Einstein was a great scientist. So, here are two questions for all the boys and girls (etc) to answer to see if they are budding Einsteins:
1. How many scientists did Einstein say it would take to disprove a theory?
2. Einstein had reservations about the ability for CO2 to cause global warming: True or False?
And remember, insulting people is bad – unless they are Deniers!”
As far as I can see it’s not even good English – taking a long hard look at something does nothing whatsoever to the thing your looking at, far less improve it. It should improve your knowledge and understanding of it. Clearly something the BBC have not done with climate change.
They really ARE the Bolshevik Brainwashing Comradeship !
Pure, undisguised propaganda. We live in perilous times.
These people are out of control…..this is past stupid, this is imposing ideology. This is Lord of the Flies. Those ideologs infesting the BBC using it as a vehicle to wilfully promote their political views, (political, because there is no science as empirical data does not exist to support what they claim) should be reported to Ofcom and also be brought up at Prime Ministers Questions time. “Is the Prime Minister aware that the BBC, paid for by forced public subscription is being used as a vehicle for the promotion of left wing ideology and unsubstantiated pseudo scientific causes”?
My favorite response was this one:
“Instead, what’s needed is understanding and empathy – realizing that climate deniers cannot control the life events that led them to mistrust science; and the patience to try to show them difference between fact and fiction.”
This would be a great time to bring up the Keiling curve. Ask the science guru to tell you where the billions spent started to slow the worlds CO2 emissions and made a measurable dent in the rise of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. The west is destroying domestic production and the jobs that go along with it while enriching foreign manufacturing.
Consensus scientists & politicians, with the innumerable greenhouse gas laws and regulations they’ve passed in the last 30 years, have failed at the most fundamental level to control a single aspect human activity (global fossil fuel combustion). However, they want to convince us they can control mother nature and the weather.
Is it 1984 already? This is a terrifying level of brainwashing and denying scientific methods of debate and investigation.
This is a parody, isn’t it?
Babylon Bee…
‘Climate’ is the Universal Cause. It has nothing to do with weather.
‘Climate denial’ is denial of the Universal Cause. It will eventually become a capital offense.
Can I play, too?
What percent of the world’s priests agree that God is real?
‘Sarah became surrounded by people in her community who didn’t share her love of the environment – people who didn’t believe that climate change was real. And slowly, Sarah started to doubt it as well.’
Twisted logic. Equating ‘environment’ and ‘climate change.’ ‘Climate change’ is actually ANTI environment. “If you aren’t on our side, you hate the environment. And throw rubbish out your car window.”
‘people who don’t believe that climate change is happening, or that it isn’t caused by humans – make up around nine percent of the American population, according to some estimates.’
92% by other estimates.
‘Instead, what’s needed is understanding and empathy – realising that climate deniers cannot control the life events that led them to mistrust science; and the patience to try to show them difference between fact and fiction.’
Disagreeing with them is a mental condition.
WTF BBC?
Dangerous, straight-up Marxism–redefine the language to control people’s thoughts and beliefs. What is next for us ‘climate deniers,’ a re-education camp? They already have them for our children–they are called public (government) schools. But if you graduate and still do not accept the climate hoax narrative it will be off to the camps.
I am so glad that I gave up the BBs__tC licence fee. They are criminal liars that are not even good at lying.
“Reject the basic facts of coknste change”.
The arrogance of people who have literally no idea of what those supposed “facts” are based on.
Just log a complaint. Tell them what you think of this bollocks. I already have.
Why did the BBULLSH_T CORP not give us the facts on jimmy saville and rolf harris and all the other deviants in the woodwork.
I have relied on the BBC to provide me with reliable picture of World events for most of my long life. But this appalling “English lesson” illustrates only too clearly why so many of us now genuinely doubt the validity of its reporting on many other aspects of modern times.
I am genuinely curious as to how the astonishing “scientific consensus” reported at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climate_change by the 4, presumably reputable polling companies was carried out.
It does not help much to Google that question! The same turgid answers come back!
I an everyone else to subscribes to “Notaota…” knows full well that many learned scientists all over the World disagree with this “consensus”.
BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy, 2022, points out that in 2021, 82% of the World’s primary energy demand was delivered by fossil fuels, whereas the share of “wind and sun renewables” rose from 6.2% in 2020 to 6.7% in 2021. This illustrates graphically that the massive efforts of most of the democratic nations of the OECD to reduce global emissions of CO2 are having no effect whatsoever on the rising CO2 emissions from Asia and soon to be from sub-Saharan Africa, where per capita energy consumption is 20 times less than the average in Europe and 50 times less than the average in North America.
Therefore, it matters not at all if “100% of the World’s scientists agree that CO2 is responsble for AGW” if, in fact, global CO2 emissions continue to rise well past all those targets laid down and agreed at the last 27 COP meetings.
I have asked our “great mentor”, Paul Homewood, to allow me to make my analysis, in the form of a short but hopefully information dense PowerPoint available to all of us subscribers, in the possibly vain hope that one of you faithful subscribers might have the willing ear of an influential politician or civil servant in our UK and /or European Governments?
Paul?
“there is strong agreement on the issue among scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC”
Especially the economists, political scientists, social scientists, psycho-analysts and NGO’s.
Example: “Melinda Tignor serves as Head of the IPCC Working Group II Technical Support Unit (WGII TSU. The Head of the WGII TSU develops and directs the activities of the WGII TSU and supports the WGII Co-Chairs and Bureau in the preparation and production of the WGII products through the scoping, drafting, review, approval/acceptance, and publication processes.
Melinda holds a Master’s Degree in Clinical Psychology.”
Exactly, Mr Ambler! No doubt she describes herself as a “scientist”!
‘strong agreement’
They really, really agree.
The first sentence demonstartes a lack of understanding :- “Do you know somebody who doesn’t believe that climate change is happening?”
Very few people believe that climate change is not happening, I would say the vast majority accept that it has changed but what the controversy is why?
As I thought “I can’t be bothered with what the BBC thinks”, I realised, I couldn’t care less what they think any longer. The simple fact is that their fantasy is now hitting the buffers of reality, and they can put out all the fluff and puff lies they like, but it won’t change the fact that their cherished campaign is falling apart.