It wasn’t a novel observation when it became a line in the movie “The Social Network,” but “the Internet is written in ink” is often attributed to that fictional conversation – expressing the idea that anything that was ever said on line will forevermore be discoverable, whether on a web site that never culls it or through a facility like The Wayback Machine. (Some of my own old stuff is readily found in that archive.)

It seems likely, moreover, that anything that people have read on the Internet is to some degree “written in ink” in their memories and beliefs – especially if it provides a comforting excuse to keep doing familiar things, instead of taking on the challenges of change.

The permanance of past public comment can be unwelcome news, to anyone who thought they could alter anything that they later wish they hadn’t said. Past comments on climate change, in particular, might merit a wish that one could send an email back through time, to warn a prior self that they might want to have another think before they hit “Publish.”

A notable example might be found in the 2009 profile of a geologist who asserted, in his book entitled Heaven and Earth: Global Warming – The Missing Science, that “temperature and CO₂ are not connected.” The web site Skeptical Science targets that 2009 misstatement—which had a number of proponents at about the same time—and subjects it to a wide range of debunking data. Even so, the rough road to refutation of Internet-inked “alternative facts” is well described at climate.gov, a NOAA web site that is no longer being updated but has not (yet) been expunged:

The challenge in pinning down the exact relationship between a given carbon dioxide level and a specific temperature is that other factors influence temperature, too, including atmospheric dust and volcanic eruptions, amount of forests and other vegetation, and variations in incoming sunlight. Those factors have also varied over time, sometimes warming and sometimes cooling the climate.

It’s therefore important for scientists to communicate, proactively and without apology, that changing of scientific opinion is a goal of additional learning rather than a confession of past incompetence. “When my information changes, I change my mind. What do you do?” – said the economist Paul Samuelson in 1978, attributing that quotation to John Maynard Keynes who can not actually be proven to have said it.

What Keynes did say, which Samuelson might have been paraphrasing, was said in a context of managing one’s investments: “The idea which some people seem to entertain that an active policy involves taking more risks than an inactive policy is exactly the opposite of the truth. The inactive investor who takes up an obstinate attitude about his holdings and refuses to change his opinion merely because facts and circumstances have changed is the one who in the long run comes to grievous loss.” (My boldface added.) This feels even more relevant to the climate change question, because “changing our opinion of our investments when facts and circumstances change” seems to be among the most difficult things to make happen – both for individuals and for larger communities with generations of investment in (what’s now seen to be) climate-crashing infrastructure.

Crucially, we also need to be open to the idea of improving our ability to make better inferences from archived data – so that even unchanged facts may still be able to alter our opinions. For example, a paper from March of this year explains that

Since the 1970s, global mean surface temperature (GMST) has followed a rather steady upward trend, rising at an average rate of about 0.2°C/decade, together with ubiquitous fluctuations about that trend. Random variations can be very suggestive of a change in the trend, which caused speculation in the early 2000s that global warming had slowed or even stopped (the infamous “pause”)…

We remove the estimated influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation. The resulting adjusted and thus less “noisy” data show that there has been acceleration with over 98% confidence, with faster warming over the last 10+ years than during any previous decade…

Everything above this paragraph, though, was written mainly because I wanted to share a comment by Hugo Rifkind at The Times (the Times in the UK, whose name doesn’t need to include a city because they were first). Rifkind asked, in an opinion piece last week, “Where have all the climate sceptics gone?” He reviews the history of climate debate, both in good faith and otherwise, and candidly concludes that

Having written about our changing climate for most of my career, there are two aspects of all this that I did not, in my naivety, see coming. The first is that inaction would win, and look set to keep winning, even while the predictions of the climatologists were proven true, day after sweaty summer day. The second is that there would be no shame. No mea culpas. Nothing. Because you expect at least some, don’t you?… But to just slink away? To pretend it never happened, even when the stakes were so high? How could you?

The reason that this matters is that people remember being told that they could ignore climate change warnings – and unless the original proponents of that sentiment are right out there, today, saying, “I was wrong,” people may hold on to their baby-duck “imprinting” on this subject. After all, people’s discomfort with needed change is a massively inertial obstacle to action – and getting people to take action is even more difficult than getting them to “support” that action, as researchers have found that

Globally, people underestimate others’ support for climate action – a phenomenon frequently described as pluralistic ignorance, which is seen as a major barrier to collective climate engagement… [but] correcting these misperceptions partly affected [for example] self-reported donation willingness but not actual donations.

Presuming that the “perception gap” is the problem to be fixed is therefore a trap: as noted last month by Jess Milligan at CarbonBrief, “simply ‘correcting misperceptions’ does not automatically lead to greater climate action.” At least as important as the science of climate is the psychology of dealing with change – of what we know, of what we understand it to mean, and of readiness to live in a different way.