Don't Even Think About It (17 page)

But then why would Shell need to influence an exhibition that was so determined to say nothing that could challenge its interests? Shell received what they needed—a showcase for their global brand and own corporate story line—that they are good guys who produce energy, find positive environmental solutions, and help solve the climate crisis. Shell’s narratives are very much better-written and better-funded than any climate change education program. It is a measure of their success that people not only accept them but cannot even see that they exist.

And so a museum with a proud scientific history, led by a dedicated and self-reflective climate scientist, ended up with a nicely lit atmospheric crèche sponsored by a company whose entire business model is, by necessity, based on making climate change worse.

Now that’s an interesting story.

20

Tell Me a Story

Why Lies Can Be So Appealing

Stories are the means by
which we humans make sense of our world, learn our values, form our beliefs, and give shape to our thoughts, dreams, hopes, and fears. Stories are everywhere; in myths, fables, epics, histories, tragedies, comedies, paintings, dances, stained-glass windows, films, social histories, fairy tales, novels, science schemata, comic strips, conversations, and journal articles. Before we can even read and write, we have learned more than three hundred stories.

In his book
The Storytelling Animal
,
Jonathan Gottschall says, “We are, as a species, addicted to story. Story is for a human as water is for a fish.” The author Philip Pullman, who has been among the handful of writers struggling to build stories around climate change, says, “After nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”

Stories perform a fundamental cognitive function: They are the means by which the emotional brain makes sense of the information collected by the rational brain. People may hold information in the form of data and figures, but their beliefs
about it
are held entirely in the form of stories. Stories are the essence of climate change as a wicked problem—where the problem is shaped by the very process of explaining it.

Professor Walter Fisher, a theorist in communications theory at the University of Southern California, has argued that when non-experts make sense of complex technical issues, they make their decisions based on the quality of the
story
—what he calls its “narrative fidelity”—rather than the quality of the
information
it contains. Fisher says that when we encounter a new issue, we ask: “Does it hang together? Does it contain a linear sequence of events from past to future? Do the characters behave as we would expect them to behave, with clear and understandable goals and motives? Does it match our own beliefs and values?”

So, stories strip facts away, seeking what is most narratively satisfying, not what’s most important or truthful. They can be regarded as facts in their own right, gaining weight through repetition and social proof as part of a social norm—as happens in rumors.

People will maintain their belief in an engaging story even if they are told that it is a fiction. In one psychology experiment, people were invited to read stories that, they were clearly warned, were false. Later on, when they were given a general knowledge quiz, this incorrect information then reappeared in people’s answers. They had internalized this information so effectively that some people could not remember that it had come from the stories they had first heard a few hours earlier.

For twenty-five years, psychologists have been repeating variations of another storytelling experiment. Participants are told the story of a warehouse fire in the style of live, rolling news coverage. First they hear of toxic smoke, then explosions, and then they are told that it may have been caused by gas cylinders and oil paints that were negligently stored in a closet.

The final story is so complete that many people resolutely refuse to accept any further variation that might weaken it. If they are subsequently told that there was no gas or paint in the closet, the repetition of the phrase leads some people to become even more convinced that gas and paint
were
responsible. Only if they are supplied with an even more compelling replacement story—for example, that arson materials were found in the closet—will they abandon the original version.

This experiment provides strong clues about what makes a compelling narrative—cause, effect, a perpetrator, and a motive (ideally one that is consistent with our assumptions about how we believe they might act). The most compelling narratives in climate change have this structure: Governments (perpetrators) justify carbon taxes (effect) in order to extend their control over our lives (motive). Right-wing oil billionaires (perpetrators) fund climate change denial (effect) to increase their wealth (motive).

This is why it is extremely hard for a deeply unengaging narrative based in fact to compete with a compelling narrative based in falsehood. “The balance of evidence leads many scientists to suggest that our emissions may be damaging the climate” is, unfortunately, less inherently compelling than “rogue scientists are conspiring to fake evidence in order to secure larger research grants.”

As communications guru Frank Luntz advised Republican candidates on messaging climate change, “a compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth.” Luntz claims to have personally sat in more than two hundred focus groups, from which he has extracted his own rules for what constitutes a compelling story: simplicity, brevity, credibility, comprehension, consistency, repetition, repetition, and repetition.

Patrick Reinsborough, executive director of the Center for Story-based Strategy, suggests some more ground rules for a compelling story: simplicity of cause and effect, a focus on individuals or distinctly defined groups, and a positive outcome. A perfect example of a story that combines these qualities was the rescue in August 2010 of thirty-three Chilean miners who had been trapped for two months down a San José gold mine. A staggering one billion people watched their rescue broadcast live on global television.

The ability to identify directly with the victims is a consistent component of compelling stories. As Joseph Stalin put it, “The death of a single Russian soldier is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic.” Not that Stalin seemed overly concerned either way, but he knew good propaganda when he saw it. In experiments, people overrule factual evidence in favor of vivid personal descriptions and donate generously to feed a single child whose name they know and photograph they can see, but give somewhat less to feed two children and only half as much to feed “millions of Africans.”

Another way to identify the components of compelling stories is to look at existing stories and strip them down to their core. Few people have approached the task with such obsession as the journalist Christopher Booker, who spent thirty-four years condensing a thousand classic novels, films, plays, and operas down to seven basic plots. These, he says, all originate from the same great basic drama, in which a hero or heroine is constricted but ends up with “a final opening out into life, with everything at last resolved.”

It is maybe no coincidence that Booker is also Britain’s leading climate change denier. He was forced to pay a large libel settlement and publish a full retraction after telling an entirely fabricated story that the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, made “millions of dollars” from his links with carbon trading companies. One critic said that Booker has “been playing to the gallery for so long that he can no longer distinguish between fact and fiction.”

Much the same could be the late Michael Crichton, the only writer to have achieved a simultaneous number-one slot for a television program (
ER
), a film (
Jurassic Park
), and a book (
Disclosure
). Crichton drew on all the classic narrative devices in his 2004 eco-thriller
State of Fear
, in which eco-terrorists from the Environmental Liberation Front set out to trigger natural disasters in order to create mass panic about climate change and install a green dictatorship. It presents a compelling narrative with a focus on individuals, a struggle against an evil conspiracy, and a positive outcome. It is, unfortunately, by far the bestselling book yet written about climate change and includes dense technical appendices to prove that it is a concocted myth.
State of Fear
presents rather a curious paradox: that the truth is portrayed as a story within a story that is perceived, by many readers, as truth.

Not least by President George W. Bush, who spent an hour chatting with Crichton about the book in the Oval Office, after which, according to his chief of staff, they were in near-total agreement. The novel was then presented as “scientific” evidence into a U.S. Senate committee and Crichton gave briefings on climate change around the world at the invitation of the U.S. State Department.

The critical ingredient that has made
State of Fear
such powerful denialist propaganda is that Crichton perfectly understood the principle of narrative fidelity and set out to write a compelling story. It has pace, enemies, motives, and a comprehensible human-generated threat that could be defeated. Like all good myths, it ends with the punishment of the perpetrators and the restitution of social order. It is hard to think of any story that could be more different from the complex, multivalent, collective, and boundless reality of climate change.

21

Powerful Words

How the Words We Use Affect the Way We Feel

Words are powerful. Every time
a word is used, it brings into play a cluster of interlocking frames and associations. Sarah Palin’s offhand phrase “death panels” generated such a powerful frame that it nearly derailed Obama’s healthcare plan. Progressives play this game too, and the insertion of their own language, such as gay, same-sex, and African American, into their opponents’ vocabulary is a lasting campaign achievement.

George Lakoff, the U.C. Berkeley cognitive linguist, argues that the goal of good communications is to use “the words that trigger your frames and inhibit your opponents’ frames.” Once words become engrained in common usage, they forever carry around their frames.

An example that Lakoff often gives of political reframing is the phrase “tax relief,” which replaced “tax cuts” and was inserted, quite deliberately, into the early speeches of George W. Bush. The word “relief” activates the frame that taxation is an affliction, that the person who relieves that affliction is a hero.

As a result, “tax” has become a deeply problematic word for many conservatives. In one experiment, Republicans were five times more willing to pay a 2 percent climate change surcharge on an airline ticket when it was described as a “carbon offset” than when it was called a “carbon tax.” They were asked to write down their thoughts as they considered their choice, and it was clear that the mere word “tax”
had
triggered a cascade of negative thoughts that had biased their entire decision making.

Knowing this, the lobbyists for a climate change bill in the U.S. Senate deliberately excised the word “tax” and replaced it with the more anodyne “fee on polluters.” Then Fox News brought it right back into play with an online article opposing the bill that called it a “tax” thirty-four times.

Another recent framing battle emerged over the name “bituminous sands.” The common term for these was “tar sands,” until the Canadian oil industry became concerned about framing and decided to rebrand them as “oil sands.” Campaigners, of course, preferred the old frame. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, forced to adjudicate, mandated the term “oil sands” in its reporting on the grounds that this is “more accurate because the substance refined from the extracted bitumen is oil.” One campaigner wryly commented that on this basis we should call tomatoes “ketchup.”

The most effective and deliberate linguistic framing occurred in November 2009 when the server of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia was hacked into and fragments from a thousand e-mails were pieced together by climate deniers into a grand narrative of conspiracy, manipulation, and suppression of dissent. They dully dubbed it Climategate (the rival term Climaquiddick never took off), and within a week this new word had appeared more than nine million times across the Internet.

This was hardly a moment of great linguistic originality, following, as it did, the previous manufactured scandals of Nannygate, Nipplegate, Grannygate, Flakegate, Tunagate, Biscuitgate, and Pastagate. But it was a textbook example of how to use framing to dominate a discourse with your own values. Two months later, I attended a communications conference at which every participant used the term, even a senior professor from the Climate Research Unit itself. Climate deniers keep hoping to replicate that initial success with Himalayagate, Amazongate, Glaciergate, and Hurricanegate.