Blog post
Communicating climate change: where next?
First published by the Guardian Sustainable Business on 09.07.12.
As the dust settles on another disappointing international sustainability summit, many who work on the myriad of issues around climate change and sustainable development are taking stock. And for those who are involved in promoting public engagement with climate change, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that times are tough.
The enthusiastic, hopeful – almost urgent – buzz of public awareness and expectation that existed five years ago has long since transformed into a low, background hum. There has been no weakening of the scientific evidence that climate change – attributable to human activity – poses a range of serious risks. But there has been some weakening of the social consensus that is essential for meaningful action to minimise these risks. While claims of a collapse in public opinion are exaggerated, there is no denying that scepticism about the nature and seriousness of climate change has increased – rather than decreased – in recent years.
Where public opinion about climate change could once be characterised as a state of mild concern, it has now become an amiable – or even disinterested – shrug. The more sophisticated analyses of trends in public opinion point to a clear link between the priority with which politicians and the media have treated climate change (linked to the economic crisis), and the weight it is assigned by members of the public. The issue has moved from centre stage to somewhere barely visible in the wings. Is it any surprise people have stopped paying attention?
Climategate – the illegal release of private emails from the University of East Anglia – has also been critical, but not for the reasons most people assume. It did not have a widespread impact on public opinion – but it has almost certainly created a reluctance to engage among climate scientists and other science communicators. Anyone who puts their head above the parapet knows that they may be subjected to a barrage of criticism.
This is a difficult time to communicate about climate change. But communicate about it we must – because it isn’t going away. So what are the priorities?
There is an urgent need to re-build the confidence of scientists to talk about their work, and its implications for society. This means working with early-career, emerging scientists who are passionate about their work and want to share it. Media-savvy, down-to-earth scientists don’t just emerge out of the ether: they need to be trained, supported and rewarded for being willing to engage beyond the ivory towers.
We also cannot ignore the ideological roots of a great deal of climate change scepticism. It is too simplistic to say that climate change scepticism is a product of political conservatism, but there are clear and consistent links between conservative views and elevated levels of uncertainty about climate change, and the Tories are easily the most sceptical of the three main parties.
Why are political conservatives more likely to downplay the risks of climate change? One possibility is that climate change has simply not been communicated in a way that resonates with conservative values and beliefs. Whereas those on the left can see obvious co-benefits in taking action to tackle climate change (initiatives to tax big polluters, for example, inevitably mean targeting the wealthy), there has so far been little for right-leaning folk to identify with.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. There are policy solutions – and ways of framing the problem of climate change – that sit more comfortably with a conservative perspective. It is here that the business case for climate change – green jobs – is most likely to be effective. But there is also an urgent need to identify the conservative values – perhaps security and belonging, or an appreciation of the beauty of the natural world – that chime with arguments for tackling climate change.
Finally, the NGO community has to find innovative and original ways of approaching the subject with an increasingly jaded audience. The era of big asks may be over: dashed on the rocks of international summits that failed to deliver on their promises. That doesn’t mean that climate change campaigning is a lost cause – but it does mean that campaigners need to ditch the language of catastrophe and the images of polar bears, and engage with the public in a way that speaks to their everyday values and concerns.
Underpinning the entire challenge of public engagement is the need to ensure that climate change communication is trialled and tested using rigorous empirical research, that the latest academic evidence on communication is synthesised and disseminated to the people who need it, and that bridges between climate scientists, social scientists, and climate change communicators are re-built and nurtured.
Without a focus on better communication, the danger is that the gap between the scientific and the social consensus on climate change will continue to grow.
“It is here that the business case for climate change – green jobs – is most likely to be effective.”
That might be a case of playing on their home turf. Free market enthusiasts are more likely to know about that one.
Creating jobs has never been a problem — you can employ half the unemployed people to dig holes and the other half to fill them in again — the problem has always been creating the wealth to pay them with. Wealth is created by doing or making things that people want, for less effort. People exchange the things they can make more efficiently for the things you make more efficiently, and everybody benefits. It is the creation of wealth that free market conservatives have their eye on, not jobs or even profits.
The concept of ‘Green Jobs’ is founded on the idea that if it takes more people and more effort to produce the same amount of electricity, that doing it that way will result in more people being employed. The question, though, is where does the money to pay them come from? The answer, of course, is from taxpayers and consumers, who pay more for taxes and energy and the goods produced by means of energy, and hence have less to spend on other goods that it was once somebody’s job to make.
Any scheme for producing fewer goods for more effort will, taken over the economy as a whole, destroy jobs. You create some in one sector, and remove a larger number of them across many others.
Conservatives can see straight through that. The differences in response are between the free market conservatives, who are concerned about the cost to society, and the protectionist conservatives, who see an opportunity to profit personally at the expense of society by means of favourable (to them) regulations and subsidies.
It’s symptomatic of the current approach to climate science communication that its most vocal practitioners are not even aware of how their target audience is likely to interpret their messages. They produce hypotheses about why people are sceptical, and then act on them as if they were already proved true. They don’t think to ask the sceptics, and express surprise and disbelief if told that they’ve got it wrong. Partly I think this is because the two sides so rarely engage constructively with one another; the interactions marked by hostility and dismissal. I applaud any attempt to inject some science into the study of this important question.
I ask you to imagine a cartoon of a business meeting where the leader says:
“While the end-of-the-world scenario will be rife with unimaginable horrors — we believe that the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit.” — Mankoff http://www.cartoonbank.com/2002/and-so-while-the-end-of-the-world-scenario-will-be-rife-with-unimaginable-horrors-we-believe-t/invt/125540/
Let’s not kid ourselves about the tremendous manipulation of public opinion regarding global warming. Influencing public perception is a ruthlessly necessity of doing business. It is an action completely without ethics — but it is a huge industry.
So we must first discover (by scientific determination) whether there is a damn thing we can do about it. It may be too late. It most certainly is too late to save everyone in the world. People are already dying. Who is it that needs to be convinced that global warming is real? Is that a communication that we should be working on constructing?
Science is properly concerned with discovering “how bad” and “how soon”. Trying to convince those who are stubborn and willfully ignorant, is a waste of their effort. And I suspect that it is a manipulative tactic to lure scientists into the role of lecturing idiots or trying to convert deceptive avarice.
We are stepping into a future where millions will die from climate related problems, drought, famine, heat, flooding, disease, etc. Arguing about reality is less important than working to adapt to the situation. Communicating climate is so we can seek mitigation, justice, adaptation and possibly to prepare for suffering and acceptance of something possibly beyond our control.