How can we talk about climate change?

It depends on the context.

I wrote a while ago asking some people to cease shouting in order that others might be heard. The appeal went out to the well-meaning alarmists who publish articles or posts that spread fear and worry and cause people to stop listening and bury their heads.

I should have known better really, as someone who has, for years, explained that ‘everything depends on the context’ and that there is no ‘one size fits all’ policy, philosophy, diet or medicine. I came across this study recently which shows that this is the case with how news is presented and how it is received.

My contention was that if you spread doom and gloom messages people will learn to avoid them, ignore them or attack them (as they feel challenged and guilty). In the study the researchers titled this approach ‘intimidation’, their results showed that bad news messages are effective at getting people to click ‘share’ but rarely get people more engaged than that. In fact in some countries bad news reduced support for more physical interventions such as planting trees.

In some ways you’d think that talking about the consensus amongst 99% of climate scientists about what is happening would encourage people to support initiatives aimed at mitigating climatic breakdown. Well in some cultures like Romania it does, in others like Canada it does the opposite. For the Canadians it’s a bit like the vast majority of your neighbours telling you that so and so is the best dentist around and then you heading off to someone else.

So what happens if you write a letter to a child you know about what we did today to leave them with a better world? This, in some countries increases support for climate change mitigation measures and in others it has little or the reverse effect.

Telling people about successful projects also has different impacts, sometimes encouraging action and support, sometimes discouraging it.

Perhaps all of this can be explained by cognitive biases, reading about a successful project can make people think that all’s OK because someone is doing something so I don’t need to bother. Hearing about some bad climate news and then being happy with just clicking and sharing it is maybe a form of hyperbolic discounting, people have a stronger preference to immediate awards, seeing how much their post is re-shared, rather than a longer term reward from getting outside and planting some trees.

It may seem harder to explain why, in some countries, expert opinions cause an opposite reaction. Perhaps this is to do with a general misunderstanding of what science is and how it works? Or does the 99% mean to people that there is doubt, of course there is because that’s how science works. Some contend that expert opinions are less and less valued because experts are often presented as being separate to ‘us humans’ living in ivory towers and not understanding what real life is like. On top of that there is the agreeable sensation that one can feel when a scientist expert is shown to be wrong, “you see? They’re only human after all.”

To quote Madalina Vlasceanu, Assistant Professor at New York University and one of the leaders of the research project. "The findings show that spreading a climate message depends on people's attitudes towards climate change in the first place. Legislators and campaigners must adapt their messaging to the public."

The subject of climate change and what to do about it has become extremely politicised and is an echo chamber reverberating with facts and lies. Most of this provokes the defence mechanism in people, this being an unconscious process that reduces anxiety when faced with negative news. The study I cited showed that none of the ways we currently use to communicate about our global climate problem are really getting people to get out and do something about it, like getting involved with a community house insulation project or planting a community orchard.

I often talk about the futility of banging on closed doors and that it’s much easier to gain access through an open one. This means assessing what the major concerns may be and going with them. For example someone may be struggling to pay their heating bills, this problem can often be resolved by through better insulation, this reduces the amount of energy they have to buy to heat and also reduces emissions of greenhouse gases.

We can still get to where we need to be by taking little steps, it’s just that today we’re going to have to hop along a lot faster than would have been the case if we’d got on with the job a few decades ago.