Don't Even Think About It (23 page)

This is actually an ancient story that first appeared in Buddhist scriptures some 2,500 years ago. It has been constantly reinvented with updated moral conclusions to fit the values of each society that tells it: the evils of mass panic (India), the need to find your own evidence (Tibet), individual stupidity (Europe), and in a 1943 Disney cartoon, the dangers of wartime rumors. In all of its manifestations, though, it is a marvelous display of the social norm at work, and how, though repetition between peers, a lie can gain social proof. It is, then, a story that is highly relevant to climate change.

But the more appropriate metaphor for failed climate change predictions may be Aesop’s fable of the boy who cried wolf. A boy who is asked to guard over the sheep repeatedly cries that the wolves are coming. After he has been found to be lying three times in a row, no one pays any further attention. Then the wolves really do come. Aesop says that the moral is, don’t lie, because no one will believe you when you are telling the truth.

Conviction in climate change depends, like the warning of the wolf attack, on the perceived authority and honesty of the communicator. No warning will be believed once the trust in the communicator is lost. But timing is also essential—after all, the boy was not exactly lying; the wolves really
were
there, they
were
a real risk, and they
did
come and eat the sheep, but just not when he said they would.

In 1989 NASA climate scientist James Hansen asked, “Must we wait until the prey, in this case the world’s environment, is mangled by the wolf’s grip?” He disagreed with the wider scientific community that a few cool years might discredit the whole issue. “The time to cry wolf is here,” he said.

Hansen has been proven both right and wrong. He was right because “crying wolf” put the issue high on the international agenda. But the concern that a few cool years could undermine trust was well founded. Surface temperatures appear (although the measurements are debated) to have leveled off since 2000. Conveniently ignoring the complex scientific explanations of what might be happening, this has been widely reported to suggest that the original fears were without foundation, often by the same newspapers and news programs that reported the original fears under lurid exaggerated headlines.

The news media is fickle and inconsistent in its coverage. It happily stokes up fears on the tried and tested principle that “if it bleeds, it leads.” A study of news stories about a 2006 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report found frequent use of the adjectives
catastrophic
,
shocking
,
terrifying
, and
devastating
,
even though
not
one of these words was present in the original document. It is not surprising that 40 percent of Americans believe that the media exaggerates the threat of climate change.

The climate scientist Michael Mann sees this overstatement as part of the media cycle that then feeds denial. “Saying climate change is really bad became stale. And so journalists felt they had to find a new narrative that they ironically had helped create, that the science had somehow been overstated.”

Talking to scientists, though, I sense that they are not just concerned with the distortion of the data but also feel deeply uncomfortable with the construction of the disaster narrative itself. Their definition of professional integrity requires the production of a well-balanced product stripped of all emotional hyperbole, and seeing it reconstituted this way is as insulting to them as dousing a dish with hot sauce would be to a master chef.

Regardless of their professional pride, there is no easy answer to the question of how to best communicate the serious threats contained in their science in a way that people respect, understand, and heed. Solutions are likely, as usual, to lie in a plurality of approaches, with different communicators speaking in different ways to different audiences. As Dan Kahan argues, people interpret these warnings through their lens of their values and cultures. Some people want the ten course scientific tasting menu and some just want a taco with lots of hot sauce.

The problem is that, thanks to the pervasive climate silence, they are rarely offered either option. Those of us who work in the field assume that everyone is talking about climate change and that, as stated in a paper by three Australian psychologists, “the nonstop media coverage of the climate change threat, its often apocalyptic portrayal and ubiquitous images have all given the threat of climate change a very substantial virtual and psychological reality.”

That might be true if there really was nonstop media coverage. But, as the blogger Joe Romm points out, in the United States, there is virtually no presence of any kind for climate change in mass popular culture, with the very rare coverage on mainstream news sandwiched between millions of dollars of fossil fuel ads and trivia. The conclusion, again, is that what is not said is as important as what is said.

In May 2011, for example, the three main networks gave blanket coverage to the marriage of the future king of a minor island (my own as it happens) rather than the record collapse of ice cover in the Arctic. Climate change still hardly figures against the reporting of the economy, terrorism, or any other pressing concern. And in reality, most people aren’t watching that either: They are switching over to the game shows, soap operas, or shopping channels, or watching funny animals, not drowning ones.

27

Bright-siding

The Dangers of Positive Dreams

The climate apocalypse narrative has
a positive, optimistic, and altogether bouncier twin: the bright side. It provides a far more coherent narrative than apocalypse and so can be summed up in a paragraph:

Climate change is a challenge, but it is also a great opportunity. Humans have always triumphed over adversity and come through stronger. Our ingenuity, technology, and capitalism have created unbelievable progress and will continue to do so. We can be anything we want to be, so the real enemy is negativity and despair, which must not be allowed to poison this positive vision.

In cognitive terms, the bright side appeals directly to the emotional brain and passes through its biases with flying colors. It replaces uncertainty with confidence. It replaces short-term sacrifice with the offer of immediate rewards of wealth and status. And it compensates for the taint of failure and self-doubt that hangs around climate change with an overstated confidence in technology and economic growth.

Americans are particularly prone to bright-siding. The journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, who helped popularize the word, argues that “positivity is a quintessentially American activity, associated in our minds with both individual and national success, but it is driven by a terrible insecurity which requires a constant effort to repress or block out unpleasant possibilities and ‘negative’ thoughts.”

The bright side is the narrative of choice for business entrepreneurs and politicians and reflects their disposition to risk taking and optimism bias. As Barack Obama said during a 2008 presidential debate, “This is not just a challenge; it’s an opportunity.”

This balance between challenge and opportunity is nicely represented for bright-siders by the Chinese ideogram for “crisis”—
weiji
, which, they like to claim, combines the character for “disaster” (
wei
) with the character for “opportunity” (
ji
). And here they are neatly tethered together: Every crisis, they argue, offers both a disaster
and
an opportunity.

Following the inspiration of John F. Kennedy, who used it in his 1960 presidential speeches, Al Gore used
weiji
as the central theme in his testimony to the U.S. Senate on climate change and then in his book
An Inconvenient Truth
. The characters for
weiji
dominate the front cover of
The Death of Environmentalism
, a revisionist critique of environmentalism by the Breakthrough Institute. The report’s central theme, not surprisingly, is the ineffectiveness of environmental doom-mongering.

However, the inconvenient linguistic truth is that
ji
doesn’t mean “opportunity” at all—it simply means “a moment,” and in other contexts it could mean “airplane” or “inorganic chemistry,” both of which make an even better metaphor for climate change.

Bright-siders are particularly prone to this kind of selective quotation. Ali Al-Naimi, the Saudi Arabian minister of petroleum, responds to concerns about climate change with a quote from bright-side icon Winston Churchill: “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” Martin Luther King Jr. is another model of charismatic leadership, and they frequently point out that his appeal to the American conscience started with the upbeat words “I have a dream” not “I have a nightmare.”

Bright-siding, then, is not just an alternative view; it is a narrative antidote to the negativity of the apocalypse, in which the real problem is pessimism itself. Loving quotes and strong leadership, bright-siders frequently cite FDR’s inaugural speech in 1933: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

The senior environmentalist David Orr is having none of it and parries the quotations. “Happy talk,” he says, “was not the approach taken by Franklin Roosevelt when facing the grim realities after Pearl Harbor. Nor was it Winston Churchill’s message to the British people at the height of the London Blitz.” Instead, he says, leaders told the truth honestly, with conviction and eloquence.

Climate bright-siders have a homeland too—Sustainia, a Copenhagen-based initiative to visualize the sustainable future based on “a new narrative of optimism and hope” that “seeks to inspire and motivate instead of scare people with gloom and doomsday scenarios.” Not surprisingly, “I have a dream” figures prominently in its materials.

Sustainia even has its own language, Sustainian, in which it describes its “land of exciting possibilities, smart people, and positive images.” Sustainia is more than a concept; “it is a luxurious, desirable lifestyle you cannot live without.”

A promotional animated video gives us a window into the irresistible luxury of Sustainia’s virtual world. The solar panels and revolving windmills are glinting in a late-summer afternoon, and the light rail tram glides silently past the ivy-clad condos, as the beautiful people, with rippling muscles and strangely distended limbs (with no whining children in sight), dine alfresco on their balconies or frolic in the long grass.

I spoke with Laura Storm, the wonderfully named executive director of Sustainia, a week before she was due to have her first baby, which, in fluent Sustainian, she described as “an exciting new chapter in my life.” Sustainia developed, she said, to provide businesses with their own narrative around climate change that could inspire them and their employees. She described Sustainia as “a translation machine,” noting that “environmental organizations have played a huge role in building awareness of climate change, and Sustainia revitalizes this with a narrative of what is possible”—which, increasingly, means working directly with industry to profile practical solutions.

In this spirit, every year Sustainia recognizes these solutions in a high-profile awards ceremony presided over by the ultimate bright-sider, Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of the few people on earth who actually looks like the bizarre avatars in Sustainia’s virtual world. After handing out the Sustainia awards to the “new breed of green solutions action heroes” in 2012, he said, “Being a champion in bodybuilding, in movies, or in politics, I learned that the key to success is motivating and inspiring everyone to be a part of the solution, not just part of the problem.”

Sustainia’s glossy materials tell the story of a future action hero, Prabhu, a Seattle-based solar panel venture capitalist flying to his business meeting on his solar plane with “lightweight solar panels affixed to each wing.” In Sustainia, we hear “there is no need to feel guilty about the amount of energy you use—you know it is nonpolluting. Ahhhh . . . fresh air.”
Fresh
, with its companions
clean
and
bright
, is a key word in Sustainian and the bright-side vocabulary.

One of the leading partners in Sustainia is the Climate Group, an international network of business and government leaders promoting a “low carbon future that is smarter, better and more prosperous.” In particular, it talks constantly of the clean revolution—not, you understand, that old fashioned
dirty
revolution of class struggle, social justice, and sweaty unshaven thugs in bandannas; this is the
clean
revolution of open-shirted executives working on their laptops in transit lounges.

Zachary Karabell is one of them: a financial manager and pundit who has built his career from being, in his words, “optimistic about everything.” No doubt this is why the World Economic Forum calls him a “Global Leader for Tomorrow.” Karabell argues that we have “chosen the path of pessimism instead of a path of innovation.” Climate change, he says, is not the disaster we fear but instead “one more obstacle that humans can meet, one that may spur innovation and creativity.” This will, he says, “make us tough.”