Don't Even Think About It (19 page)

So what qualities are we looking for in a communicator we can trust? Integrity appears to be key, according to the political scientist Arthur Lupia. This, he argues, is directly related to our perception of what the communicator receives or risks from the communication. Thus we tend not to trust a communicator who is self-serving or unaccountable compared with someone who has taken a personal risk or would face penalties if he or she lied.

People who confound our expectations also become correspondingly more persuasive, especially when they cross sides, which we perceive as an act of great social risk and proof of their integrity. Whether regarded as freethinkers, whistleblowers, turncoats, or traitors, they are behaving contrary to expectations and invite our curiosity. What is more, they have a fascinating story to tell: of a challenging personal journey, often with a moment of revelation, a painful conversion, and the bravery of stating their new position despite the condemnation of their former friends.

Many notable deniers like to generate an environmentalist backstory. The Canadian denier Patrick Moore can, quite legitimately, claim to have been a founder of Greenpeace, even though he then spent the next twenty-five years undermining every campaign it ran. The high-profile Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg claims that he is a “skeptical environmentalist” because he was once a member of Greenpeace (even though there is no record of his ever having been one).

And, going the other way, occasionally skeptics such as Richard Mueller, the U.C. Berkeley theoretical physics professor, cross over to support climate change, gaining widespread publicity and credibility for their perceived independence. Mueller now has direct access to senior CEOs, financiers, and policy makers simply by repeating what climate scientists have been saying all along.

The lack of trust in climate communicators is particularly acute among conservatives. The anti-warming campaigner Marc Morano identifies two critical mistakes: setting up the “highly distrusted, international bureaucracy” of the United Nations to supply the science (he chooses to forget that its real role is to only convene meetings of scientists) and choosing Al Gore, “the most polarizing figure in U.S. political history” as a figurehead. And that, he tells me with glee, is a total lose-lose! Morano is a highly combative character and clearly enjoys the thought that his side can claim the win-win.

He does have a point. Al Gore has provided a convenient hate figure for deniers. A word count of skeptical articles (among eight hundred op-eds) shows that nearly 40 percent of them mention Gore. He came with a long history of conservative mockery by George H. W. Bush as “ozone man” and is caricatured as self-serving, politically motivated, arrogant, and hypocritical—all qualities designed to damage the perception of trust. This can sometimes reach ridiculous lengths. The senior physicist William Happer argues that Gore is untrustworthy because the designer of one of his books has photoshopped clouds out of the cover photo of the earth.

However, the evidence suggests that distrust of Al Gore is a symptom rather than a cause of the conservative rejection of climate change. In fact conservatives’ concern about climate change stayed fairly constant and even rose slightly when Gore’s documentary
An Inconvenient Truth
was released and he received a Nobel Prize. If anything, their fall in concern came when his prominence declined. The issue appears to be less one of the presence of Gore than of the relative absence of other prominent climate communicators, especially those who speak to conservative values. In their absence, Gore has become an iconic figurehead for both the pro–climate change and anti–climate change campaigns.

Bob Inglis, former Republican representative for South Carolina, has been trying to fill the breach. His refusal to repudiate climate science in the 2011 election proved to be his undoing in the face of a concerted campaign by the Tea Party. However, the loss of his political career on a point of principle has given him an unparalleled legitimacy and trustworthiness in his new career as a campaigner for conservative action on climate change.

Inglis is passionate about the need for a conservative response to climate change, which he sees as a religious as well as political calling. Inglis is very Christian, very conservative (the American Conservative Union gave him a 93 percent approval rating), and strives to find evocative new language that will speak to conservative values, especially frames of respect, authority, and accountability. In his view, finding the right language is critical because, he tells me, “if you name the baby, you win it, and if you get the words around climate change right, you win the issue.”

When people from the conservative political culture experiment with new language based on their values, the results can be surprising, intriguing, and, for many liberal environmentalists, appalling. They are going to have to recognize that opening up climate change to new communicators may also introduce new frames that make them feel decidedly uncomfortable.

New communicators like Colonel Mark “Puck” Mykleby, a lean, mean ex-Marine who translates sustainability into the language of special forces. He describes walkable communities as the future of American power and says that recovering from climate change impacts is like taking a gut punch and coming back swinging. Or Rob Sisson, the Catholic president of ConservAmerica, who argues that climate change is “the greatest single infringement on liberty after abortion” and that the pro-life campaign should fight for the six hundred thousand American babies who are “poisoned while still in their mothers’ wombs every year by toxins released from burning fossil fuels.”

But these are still high-profile professional campaigners—albeit with a new political stance. What climate change really needs are the voices of ordinary people who might not be fluent speakers or skilled orators but can bring an authenticity and genuine sense of common ownership to the issue.

They are rarely seen or heard—pushed to the sidelines by the experts or the advertising copywriters. It is shameful that high profile climate communications have never equaled the democracy of the “BP on the Street” commercials of 2004 that featured a range of opinions from ordinary people on energy and climate change, or the emotional power of the 2013 Chrysler Dodge Ram “So God Made a Farmer” commercial, composed entirely of photographs of farmers and their families.

Occasionally a small enlightened project seeks new voices. In the summer of 2012, Erik Fyfe and Albert Thrower toured the Northeast on a biofuel-powered motorbike filming interviews about climate change with people they met on the way: a barber, a distiller, a cranberry grower, and a sawmill operator among them. Some were worried, some were dismissive, and some were resigned, but the interviews, called “Slow Ride Stories,” respected them all. Climate Wisconsin, a project of the state educational communications board, compiled short videos of timber workers, maple syrup farmers, fishermen, and a cargo ship pilot talking about the changes they have seen and their concerns for the future.

These interviews have a depth and human warmth to them that is so often lacking in the expert-driven discourse. The answer to the partisan deadlock and public disinterest starts, I am convinced, with finding new messengers rather than finding new messages, and then creating the means for them to be heard.

23

If They Don't Understand the Theory, Talk About It Over and Over and Over Again

 

Why Climate Science Does Not Move People

 

 

 

 

 

 

Climate change is a complex
and technical issue that emerges from the theories, data, and predictions of scientific specialists. The problem is not just that scientists emphasize uncertainty and use obscure abstractions, but that they also often excise the very images, stories, and metaphors that might engage our emotional brain and galvanize us into action. Sometimes there seems to be a near-perfect mismatch between message and messenger—like those comedies where all the roles get mixed up: the homeless con man swaps places with the commodities broker, or the
I Love Lucy
episode where
Lucy and Ethel get jobs in the candy factory while husbands Ricky and Fred stay at home.

This is not coincidental. The division between the emotional brain and the rational brain runs deep in our culture and is clearly expressed in the cultural divide between religion and science that first emerged during the European Enlightenment. It is, in the words of Tony Leiserowitz at the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, “a long cultural mistake” to divide the two. They are, he says, inseparable, and “without that feeling of emotion, you cannot make good decisions. Scientists are human beings too, not Spock.” Certainly so, and, as I will discuss later, the professional detachment of scientists leads us to seriously underestimate their own anxiety or despair.

This “long cultural mistake” continues to be expressed in the education system, which requires students to specialize far too early in the science, art, or humanities stream. This division then slices its way straight through the cultural debate around climate change. The vast majority of journalists, politicians, and environmentalists who dominate the communication of climate change have an arts or humanities background, and sometimes express their in-group contempt for scientists with a venom that would be considered entirely unacceptable in any other cultural realm—calling them “pointy heads,” “white-coated prima donnas,” or “mad cranks.”

There are culture wars between scientists too, in particular the so-called paradigm wars between positivism (which uses experiments to establish findings that are declared to be universally true) and constructivism (which insists that knowledge is always situated in a time, in a place, and in a culture).

The few skeptics who have a legitimate scientific background invariably come from the positivist disciplines of physics, chemistry, and geology—particularly, it would seem, those with a background in the nuclear and petroleum industries. Their criticisms that climate science is being distorted for political or ideological reasons are reflections of deeper resentments about constructivism.

This all makes life very hard for climate scientists who find themselves torn between the need to maintain their professional detachment and engaging with this complex mental landscape of biases, narratives, and cultural prejudices.

The late Stephen Schneider, for many years America's best-known climate scientist, said that scientists found themselves in a “double ethical bind”: “On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements.”

No scientist better exemplifies this struggle than climate scientist James Hansen, formerly of NASA, who told me that he does a “terrible job” at interviews and expresses a strong distaste for television. So much so that after his testimony to Congress in 1989 made international headlines, he decided to “throw in the towel on the communication business” and hardly spoke in public for the next fifteen years until he felt morally compelled to. While we chatted in the autumn sunshine on the steps of Columbia University, we were constantly interrupted by admiring students coming up to shake his hand. He received their attention graciously but seemed shy and somewhat perplexed. There is no sense around Hansen—without doubt now the most famous climate scientist in the world—that he ever sought this profile.

As Bob Ward, communications director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London, says, “Our primary aim is to inform rather than to motivate. We perceive our role as providing factual inputs into rational decision-making processes.” So when asked why people still do not get climate change, the vast majority of climate scientists will say that the problem is that people do not understand the research or the scientific process that produces it. For example, Jay Gulledge, a senior scientist at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, recommends explaining the theory, showing people the data, showing them the models, “and if it's hard to understand, you talk about it over and over and over again, because that's how you learn.” This argument is often called the information-deficit model, because it sees people, in the words of Ward, as “empty vessels who will respond appropriately once informed of the facts.”

In recent years, with the continued lack of political or social action, scientists have become even more convinced that the problem lies with the distortion of this information by what they call “disinformation campaigns.” This, they believe, is best countered with more information. Announcing a new report by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the research team leader declared his confidence that his data would “put to rest a misconception popular in some quarters, that global warming has slowed down.” And of course, it did no such thing. Research shows that oppositional views can rarely be challenged effectively by new information and, if anything, are likely to be reinforced.

This was not the case when climate change first emerged. For the first ten or fifteen years, people's understanding of the underlying science was the single most powerful predictor of their willingness to change their behavior or support government policy. Successive Gallup polls during this period found that Republicans and Democrats who claimed to have a good understanding of the science were close together in their opinions on the issue.