Don't Even Think About It (20 page)

But then the issue became polluted by political and cultural meaning. By 2010, when the number of people who said they didn't grasp climate change had fallen to just 3 percent, people's views were formed largely by their political orientation. Among Republicans, the more people knew about climate change, the less likely they were to believe in it. Overall, climate deniers had a slightly better general understanding of science than believers. As the Australian academic Clive Hamilton puts it, very elegantly, “Denial is due to a surplus of culture rather than a deficit of information.”

Nor, I should add, is there any correlation between views on climate change and intelligence. In testing, law students with high IQs had no more interest in hearing different points of view than people with lower IQs; the only difference was that they used their intelligence to create more arguments for their existing view.

This confirmation bias extends to the trust we put into scientists as communicators. By and large, scientists are still well very trusted as a profession, even by Republicans and climate skeptics. However, when people are given a choice between scientists, they cannot resist extending that trust to the scientist who best confirms their own view.

Dan Kahan at Yale's Cultural Cognition Project ran an experiment in which he presented participants with different quotes on climate change ascribed to fictitious “experts.” These were all described as professors at Ivy League universities and represented by clip-art photographs of middle-age white men in suits. Participants had no problems identifying which expert was the most authoritative and qualified to give an opinion. He was, of course, the one who presented the opinions that they already agreed with.

Ironically, one of the best proofs that information does not change people's attitudes is that science communicators continue to ignore the extensive research evidence that shows that information does not change people's attitudes. The vast majority of scientific communications is still in the form of data and graphs, and the main attempt to make it more appealing is to jazz it up with three-dimensional animated graphics and charts that whizz round, spin round, or bulge out.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) struggles with language. It does not have an easy job, considering the long, painful, and highly politicized process that approves its texts. As Sir John Houghton, the founding chairperson, tells me, “Everything it says has to be agreed on, word by word, with one hundred people present, through simultaneous translation, and despite the efforts by Saudi Arabia and oil states to derail it.” The language that survives this process becomes critically important for framing subsequent understanding of the science by politicians and the lay public. This is the key point at which the abstract rational language of probability needs to cross into the emotional language of threat.

Stephen Schneider understood this very well and urged the IPCC to adopt more colloquial language to convey degrees of certainty and uncertainty. For twenty-five years, the IPCC has been struggling with this task and, it must be said, has not managed it well, prompting strong criticism from a council of international science academies.

A team at the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois tested the language used inside the IPCC reports and found that people severely underestimated the probabilities that the IPCC intended to communicate. The IPCC uses the term “very likely” to mean a chance of over 90 percent, but three-quarters of the lay readers put the odds far lower, some as low as 60 percent or less, even when they had the official IPCC definitions of these terms at hand.

Nonetheless, IPCC reports continue to use this language. When the fifth assessment report was launched in September 2013, the quotable press release banner headline was that scientists were “now 95% certain” that humans are the cause of climate change. A hundred years of retailing experience could have told them that people all too readily assume that a price tag of ninety-five dollars is significantly lower than one of a hundred dollars.

A similar problem emerges with the many attempts to quantify the scientific consensus that consistently finds that 95 to 97 percent of scientists or peer-reviewed papers agree human activities are responsible for climate change. If you are already distrustful, this statistic only reinforces the status of the 3 percent of dissenters. We have already seen that people are unmoved by numbers and that they focus on the individual with whom they can feel a personal connection. Narratives start to kick in that are deeply appealing to individualistic cultures that are suspicious of government and large institutions—of David and Goliath, the maverick, Joe the Plumber. A thousand people are a mob, but a single person standing up to that mob is a hero.

But while scientists are seeking to keep their language balanced and unemotional, they are missing the story that really would engage, excite, and inspire people: the story of themselves and their own passion for their science. After all, what truly engages the emotional brain are personal stories, and what convinces us of the trustworthiness of the communicator is our evaluation of his or her own commitment.

In his book
The
Discovery of Global Warming
, physicist Spencer Weart says that he is going to tell “an epic story: the struggle of thousands of men and women over the course of a century for very high stakes. For some, the work required actual physical courage, a risk to life and limb in icy wastes or on the high seas. In the end they did win their goal, which was simply knowledge.”

It's a bit frothy, I know, but it
is
exciting and makes you want to meet these scientists and hear what they have to say. I am fortunate to meet many climate scientists and I am always impressed by their passion, enthusiasm, humor, and commitment. Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric physics at Rice University in Texas, argues that these personal stories are their strongest weapon and crucial for building trust. He regrets that “it goes against the culture of science, which emphasizes the collective and de-emphasizes the individual, but it's a skill climate communicators need to learn.”

Indeed so. It is challenging, but then this is challenging for all of us. Despite the systematic smearing of scientists, they are still the most trusted communicators not just for their personal qualities but also for the quality of the scientific method they embody. There is no reason why they cannot present their findings and then take a step back and present their hopes, fears, and humanity. We do have a great deal in common after all.

24

Protect, Ban, Save, and Stop

How Climate Change Became Environmentalist

On July 9, 1977, Sheldon
Kinsel, a young lawyer working with the National Wildlife Federation, took the stand in front of a congressional hearing on energy policy. It was the first time that an environmental organization was entered into the congressional record on a topic that, at that time, still had no agreed name. Kinsel called it the “climate shift” and declared that “other
environmental
problems pale beside it.” Even at this early stage, this was not just an
environmental
issue; it was the biggest
environmental
issue of all.

To begin with, environmental organizations simply expanded their existing activities to include climate change. A few years later, as the scientific and political momentum built, they clustered together in coalitions starting with the Climate Action Network in 1989 and, three years later, the Sustainable Energy Coalition. The movement built steadily and took off around 2005. There are now more than five hundred organizations campaigning on the issue.

Environmental organizations have always seen climate change as an obvious environmental issue. After all, it deals with atmospheric pollution, and this is exactly what they do. It emerged as an issue on the tail of a string of major legislative wins over air quality, lead in gasoline, ozone depletion, and acid rain. And climate change also contained a deeper critique of oil, coal, car-based transportation, high-consumption lifestyles, industrialization, economic growth, agribusiness, and meat eating—hot-button topics for many environmentalists.

Despite their differences—and it is a mistake not to recognize the vast differences in resources and politics between the rich Beltway groups and the grassroots environmental justice networks—all environmental organizations shaped climate change in their own image with narratives, images, and metaphors drawn from their previous struggles.

As they did so, another cognitive feedback ensued: The issue became more and more associated with the meanings that the environmentalists gave it, and any alternative framings became sidelined or remained unvoiced. Government, business, and the media were only too happy to help this happen—they all had their own motives for defining climate change as an environmental issue that they would take very seriously once they had dealt with more pressing matters.

Climate change became the biggest
environmental
issue of our times, reported by
environmental
correspondents in the media in special
environmental
reports, covered by
environmental
legislation created through
environmental
policy that was discussed in
environmental
speeches at
environmental
conferences.

This may create proximity for environmentalists, but for the wider public, these associations only make climate change more distant from their immediate concerns: as a luxury that can be kept on the edge of their pool of worry by economy, jobs, crime, and war. In wider polling, climate change always tracked concern about unrelated environmental issues, locked together firmly in the same cognitive frame.

And so an issue that requires an unprecedented level of cooperation has became exclusively associated with one movement and its various worldviews. Those who have historically distrusted environmentalism came to distrust climate change, and those who distrusted climate change came to distrust environmentalism all the more.

This is especially true of political conservatives. Former Republican representative Bob Inglis, struggling to develop a conservative narrative on climate change, is none too polite. “We conservatives tend to regard greens as gray-ponytail bed-wetters who’ve got their panties all in a wad,” he tells me, laughing cheekily with the pleasure of saying this to a real-life panty-wadded bed-wetter. “And,” he adds, “we think they are complainers, worrywarts. Listening to greens is like seeing a doctor who says, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s the
biggest
melanoma I have ever seen!’”

In a remarkable piece of circular logic, Myron Ebell of the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute sees the environmentalist dominance as the ultimate proof that climate change is a fraud: “If it were an actual problem with real science behind it, then the environmentalists would not be able to take it over. It would have become a mainstream issue, and serious people would have discussed how to solve it.”

Ted Nordhaus, the co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute, has built a reputation as an environmental heretic, though he prefers to call himself an “outlier” and “ecological modernist.” He argues that environmentalists have proven to be “pretty well irrelevant,” to have had “absolutely no impact,” and to have “defined the space in such a way that it is very hard for other people to come in.”

When I put these criticisms to Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, he tries to force a laugh, but they clearly hit a nerve: “Isn’t that ironic,” he says. “They are saying that it is the environmentalists’ fault that environmentalists are the only ones who are paying attention to this issue. I would say it’s the fault of
every
segment of society that has not shown strong leadership on this. Everybody speaks for their own constituency, it’s natural, and so of course we approach it using the words and images that motivate our own base.”

I would not disagree, nor would I wish to dishonor the dedication of my colleagues who have worked so long and hard to maintain interest in this issue. But as my work has taken me away from my fellow greens into quite new groups—conservatives, Christians, Muslims, postal workers, coal miners, teachers, asylum seekers, delinquent teenagers, sheep farmers, Rotarians, custom-car enthusiasts, scouts—I have become aware of how poorly that environmental language works outside its own constituency. The problem is that in the absence of any competing narratives, these environmental words and images are so very—well, so very
environmental
.

Protecting, saving, banning and stopping things, for example. The Greenpeace offices in Washington, D.C., seem to be held together largely with posters and bumper stickers and almost all of them are about stopping things (Arctic drilling, greenwashing, nuclear power, logging, global warming, ocean destruction, CO2, ExxonMobil, offshore drilling, Star Wars) or saving things (whales, Sumatran tigers, the biosphere, orangutans). Outside the toilets—themselves covered top to bottom with stickers—there is a banner (what else) from its Finance Department that reads, “Saving Time Saves Whales. Submit Your Receipts.”