Not the usual headline you’d expect to read, but this was the topic of a brilliant article on the BBC recently, about belief in Umberto Eco’s novels and the fact that people will cling onto any sorts of dubious ‘facts’ to fit their own views of denial of climate change:

If you want to believe something badly enough, Eco’s novels suggest, then by selective listening – by editing out the contrary evidence – you will hear what you want to hear. Nowhere is this more true currently than in the debate about global warming…

Instead the climate sceptics have created an intricate web of their own associations and allusions, to produce their version of an alternative story which runs contrary to that of mainstream science.

What Umberto Eco’s stories tell us is how comforting such quests can be. Faced with an uncertain future and declining prosperity, without religion for reassurance, what could be more comforting than to join a select band searching for the Holy Grail?

Read the rest. From my observations on how climate change deniers work, there is a ‘head in the sand’ mentality about what they say, and I suppose, at heart, they’re just seeking a kind of escapist comfort in constructing a fiction around them.

It doesn’t make me loathe their opinions, or despise the way they try to murk-up scientific facts with their fiction, any less however.

And all of this reminds me to read more Umberto Eco at some point. I absolutely loved The Name of the Rose.