Don't Even Think About It (16 page)

Without salience or social cues climate change sits outside the analytic frame that we apply to make sense of the world around us. Rather than actively attending it, we actively disattend it, keeping it permanently on the edge of our “pool” of worry.

However, I argued, this is not because climate change is innately unthreatening. Clearly it poses a very serious threat and our rational brain can fully appreciate this. The problem is that the signals it supplies to our other emotional brain are far too ambiguous to galvanize us into action. Climate change is here and now, but it is also there and then. It does have causes and impacts, but these are widely distributed. It refuses to fit into any single category and, as a result, fits into none. It is exceptionally
multivalent
and, as a result, it invites us to apply our confirmation bias and to “believe what we want to believe.”

For this reason the critical means by which we make sense of the issue is the way that we talk about it—and in particular the stories we build around it. And, as I will show, it is these socially constructed stories, not climate change itself, that people choose to accept, deny, or ignore. Climate change may not be the perfect problem, but it does not generate the perfect story either, and this, as I will explain, may be its biggest problem of all.

19

Cockroach Tours

How Museums Struggle to Tell the Climate Story

There is a school class
inside the Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History when I visit, and a young girl is reading out the panels to her friend. Some of the language is a bit tricky, but she is giving it her best. “This ex-hibit shows how the charact-character-istics that make us human evolved over six million years as our an-cestors struggled to survive during times of dramatic climate change.” She gives me a big grin and asks, “How did I do?”

The hall has molds of footprints and skulls in well-designed if somewhat staid displays to show evidence that climate change has been a driver in human evolution. This theory is generally supported by paleontologists, though it is a simplification and excludes the many other factors that contributed to brain development, such as sexual selection, cooperation in social groups, hunting, and cooking. Museums like to tell a clear and digestible story, and so have kept this one simple.

Actually, though, the Hall of Human Origins is telling two stories: One is about evolution. The other is about climate change. The first thing one sees on entering is a ten-foot-wide video screen on which the phrase “Extreme Climate Shifts” is repeated over and over again on top of images of the cracked earth, deserts, and melting ice sheets—all familiar images from the B-roll of environmental documentaries. Climate change carries powerful and resonant frames and these are triggered by the language and images in every display inside the hall.

Yet, while toying with these associations, there is a strange absence of discussion about climate change as a threat in our own times. A single panel, tucked over to one side, tells us that carbon dioxide levels are increasing and that these are “associated with” a warmer planet and sea level rise. Alongside is an interactive video game that weaves this potentially distracting information back into the central theme of the gallery. It invites visitors to consider what useful new features we might evolve to cope with this greenhouse future. “Imagine all the land is underwater,” it says. “Would you have big webbed feet like a duck or long stilt legs like a flamingo?” “The temperature is really hot—do we have a tall narrow body like a giraffe or more sweat glands?” Each time you press a button, the cartoon figure alongside develops a new body shape or a shower of droplets pours from his armpits. The schoolkids are shrieking with laughter as they put together the freakiest possible future man.

This is not unlike the deliberately provocative proposal by the philosopher S. Matthew Liao of New York University that we should genetically engineer humans to reduce emissions. We could have cat eyes so we need less lighting. We could have a choice between two medium-size children or three small-size children in order to save energy. “Examining intuitively absurd or apparently drastic ideas can be an important learning experience,” Liao says.

If so, the children in the Smithsonian are learning nothing about climate change. There is no information about the issue, its causes, or its solutions. But they
are
learning some powerful frames. The narrative that the Hall of Human Origins promotes to the million plus people who visit every year is that the climate has always changed, that we have always coped with these challenges, and that adapting to them is what has made us strong and smart.

It is an argument that would chime very happily with the fossil fuel lobbyists and professional contrarians in their K Street offices just a few blocks from the museum, most of whom have been directly funded by those nefarious oil billionaire Koch Brothers. The Kochs are men of many interests who like to spread their largesse around, including—oh, didn’t I mention this?—twenty million dollars for the
David H. Koch
Hall of Human Origins.

Talking later with Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, on the well-stuffed sofa in his vast corner office on the fourth floor, I am intrigued to know why the Smithsonian, America’s most respected scientific body, took funding from America’s most notorious climate change denier to host a permanent display—one that now carries his name—portraying climate change as a natural cycle and positive challenge that we will mutate to survive.

Johnson is up for the challenge. He understands the battlefield of climate communications well. His own initiation came ten years earlier, when he made a keynote presentation on climate science to the great and good of the Albertan oil industry. “They were really mad! I was in the full blast of two thousand really unhappy people. And all the time I was thinking, ‘Wow, that’s interesting.’”

Maybe I am too easily charmed by Johnson, who is smart and entertaining, but he persuades me that there was never a deliberate strategy to misinform: This was a paleontological display on the effects of
natural
climate change, which just happened to stray, rather naively, into the highly politicized issue of
anthropogenic
climate change. Johnson, who has a background in paleoclimatology, freely admits that the two have been confused in the display and that the cold-to-cool changes described in the exhibition are entirely unlike the devastating cool-to-hot changes we are facing with human climate change.

According to Johnson, there was also a great match between a curator with a specific vision and a large donor who is so passionate about paleontology that he makes regular visits to research sites in the Rift Valley. The enemy narrative would love to read Koch’s support as another cynical exercise in public misinformation, but reality is more complex and interesting than that.

Nonetheless, I doubt that David Koch is the “hands off, here’s the money, see you later” funder described by Johnson. No one wants to antagonize their largest donor, and I would happily bet that the museum held back on any temptation it might have had to make the hall that bears his name into a showcase for the latest climate science.

Which raises a more interesting question: Why is a single lackluster panel in the corner of a paleontology gallery the only permanent display, across the entire Smithsonian museum complex, of the most important science-driven issue of our times? The real problem seems to be that people at the Smithsonian, like everyone else who works on climate change, are struggling to find ways of talking about it that are interesting, engaging, and truthful to the science yet able to navigate the politics. And, it would seem, they are not doing a great job of it.

Johnson says that he has never seen any museum, including his own, address climate change effectively. There is, he feels, a consistent mismatch between the subject matter and the audience, which tends to be schoolchildren and families on holiday. You get people for only about two hours, with breaks for food or the bathroom—and so you don’t have a chance to educate. Maybe, he says, you can achieve “an inoculation of curiosity” that might trigger people to get more interested. But you have to find techniques that are interesting, startling, and fun to get the message out.

So, surprisingly, museums face exactly the same problems as any artist or entertainer: how to be faithful to the science, honest, and independent while avoiding the poisoned narratives of the partisan debates.

This was the challenge facing Professor Chris Rapley when he was appointed the new director of the Science Museum in London in 2007 and set up a team to design a six-million-dollar gallery about climate change. Rapley, a climate scientist himself, was the former head of the British Antarctic Survey. He feared that critics would accuse him of being an activist and kept a careful distance from the project. In summer 2009, though, with the permanent display still in the design stage and the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference just months away, he personally oversaw a temporary display called “Prove It!—All the Evidence You Need to Believe in Climate Change.” The experience, he says, left him “badly burned and shaken.”

As its name suggests, the display took the position that the science was beyond doubt and that the museum, with the help of disaster images and apocalyptic framing, could convince any remaining Doubting Thomases. It invited visitors to endorse a message of encouragement to governments at the Copenhagen climate conference to “prove they’re serious by negotiating a strong, effective, fair deal.” To Rapley’s horror, deniers got into the online system with automatic voting software and sent in thousands of opposing votes effectively saying, in his words, “This is all bollocks and you should not support it.” Rapley looks crestfallen: “I still blame myself,” he tells me.

The museum trustees went into a meltdown. Rapley stepped in to drastically overhaul the flagship project, as yet still on the launch pad. In interviews he promised the right-wing press that the permanent gallery would not state a position on whether or not climate change is real and driven by humans, so as not to “alienate any people who want to be part of the discussion.”

And so the Atmosphere Gallery—a name that embodies this neutrality—tries valiantly to meet its impossible brief. There is certainly a lot of atmosphere in Atmosphere. It’s a cavernous blue-black space with five themed islands. It aims to be an “immersive environment,” but feels rather like IKEA—once inside and disorientated, you trundle between spotlit zones, filling your brain with things that capture your fancy.

In the fashion of modern museums, the displays have been converted into computer game consoles. When I visit, one schoolgirl is immersed in a game involving loading a virtual gun with insulation and firing it at a house. She seems to have no idea of what this means but is enjoying firing a gun at things. At the next island, two boys tell me with teenage confidence that climate change does not exist and is a natural cycle. Their teachers, flirting in the nightclub gloom, tell me that they love the gallery because “it has lots of things to occupy the kids for half an hour before lunch. It gives us a much-welcome break.”

By the critical measure of visitor numbers—known as “footfall” in museum jargon—the gallery has been an unexpected success, with more than a million visitors in its first fourteen months, four times above its target. According to Rapley, the exit polls suggest that it has fulfilled its mission to inform the concerned and engage the unconcerned. Overall, people said that “the tone of voice is what I would expect from the Science Museum.”

But, I wonder, is it the tone of voice that we would expect for a crisis that threatens our survival? Nothing in the gallery suggests that this is a disaster, a historical turning point, an opportunity or, indeed, that anyone cares much at all. In fact, it seems that in its desire to avoid the contested narrative, the museum has largely abandoned narrative altogether: except, maybe, to show that scientists can do clever things with fancy instruments packaged with a vague technological optimism that, in Rapley’s words, “human ingenuity can lead to a better future.”

Rapley accepts that “possibly we overreacted and went too far into the neutral voice in the exhibit.” The original idea was to bundle up the more contentious climate change parts into a parallel education program. This dissenting voice now survives largely as the “cockroach tours,” in which people dress up in bug costumes and learn “how strange humans are that they don’t confront these huge issues when they should do.”

Maybe these quizzical cockroaches might like to linger a while at the entrance to the Atmosphere gallery and ponder the strange plaque honoring its principal donor, Shell Oil. On the plaque, Shell explains that “all of us need energy to develop and grow. That’s why, at Shell, we are working hard to build a new energy system while supporting a deeper understanding of climate science.”

Rapley is very defensive of the decision to take funding from Shell, saying that “demonizing the corporate world is a route to nowhere. It is much better to enter a dialogue with them.” Certainly Rapley entered a very positive dialogue with the chairman of Shell, James Smith, who, he says, “was one of the most thoughtful people you can imagine and takes this issue very seriously.” He is less enthusiastic about dialogue with the radical climate change campaign group Rising Tide, whose members invaded the museum with noisy protests and banner drops. Anyway, he insists, Shell “was under a very strict and legally binding contract” that it had no editorial influence over the exhibition.