Timescale and Emotion
In addition to being about facts, science, policy, technology and governance, climate change is very much an issue of human emotion. Not that human emotions will change the governing laws of the atmosphere, but human emotions will effect our behavior, and consequently our response to the challenge on many levels, our continued emissions of greenhouse gases and our adaptation to the consequences of climate change.
Emotionally, there’s a lot about climate change that is very depressing and that seems very disempowering. This much is undeniable. But I think it’s really important to have a commitment to maintaining a grounded, productive and where possible, optimistic mindset on this important topic. In the last sentence, I put the emphasis on being grounded and productive more so than on optimism, because I think that regardless of what pathway of emissions we take and regardless of how bad things get, it is important for society to emotionally and psychologically “stay in the game”, rather than disengage. To quote UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ rhetoric this past year, “we are in a fight for our lives”. That’s the right metaphor – people who are a fight for their lives don’t generally give up or surrender – they keep adapting to the challenges they face no matter how difficult those challenges are because they have no other choice. I do think there are some reasons for cautious optimism in an overall bleak picture, but the engagement with the issue cannot be contingent on metrics of progress. I also think the resilience of the human spirit is cause for optimism in itself. There are plenty of other things about human nature that are cause for depression – but we homo sapiens are capable of remarkable perseverance and innovation in certain circumstances.
When the ability or interest to maintain an engaged, serious, grounded, productive, pragmatic mindset breaks down, people usually either tend to disengage from the subject or tend towards either climate denial or climate defeatism. This happens because it is very easy to feel overwhelmed by the scope of the problem – the geographic scale, the temporal scale and the powerful forces at work that continue to push us in a problematic direction. When people feel overwhelmed with reality as it is and without agency to do anything about it, there’s a human tendency to either “throw in the towel” (defeatism) or to construct alternative realities that are more convenient (denialism). Neither are constructive. If enough people buy into either denialism or defeatism, the end result will be the same bad outcome – a disengagement from the problem and a failure to do what could have been done to avert the worst outcomes of climate change.
Denialism is sometimes a dissociative response to the scale of the problem, but it is more often a byproduct of the confluence of dis/misinformation and the tendency of human beings to engage in confirmation bias. Most climate change deniers around the world are political conservatives and Republicans. They are inherently suspicious of “big government” (except when it comes to military spending and telling women what to do with their bodies – but that’s a different story). Large scale government economic stimuli (like the recently passed US Inflation Reduction Act) to stimulate job growth coupled with new regulations are almost always considered a bad idea by conservatives. The same can often be said about climate adaptation: many conservatives dislike the idea of large scale investment in funds to help poor people either in the US or overseas. Rather than question these tenets of conservative thinking or work constructively with liberals to find “free market” solutions to climate change, it is often easier for this group to reach the conclusion that the problem of climate change itself is a fiction, because they are so vehemently opposed to the “solutions” on the table.
But to return to the issue of defeatism, while I think that too much defeatism is a bad thing, too much naive, irrational optimism and certain draconian “solutions” are also very problematic in their own way.
American journalist, novelist, National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Jonathan Franzen wrote a defeatist article in the New Yorker in 2019 entitled, “What if We Stopped Pretending?” Physicist, climate scientist and Gates Scholar Kate Marvel, who is based at the NASA-GISS facility in New York wrote a rebuttal article, shortly thereafter, entitled, “Shut up Franzen“. Both articles had subtitles: Franzen’s was “The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.”. Marvel’s was, “Climate change is real, and things will get worse. But because we understand the driver of potential doom, it’s a choice, not a foregone conclusion”. I read both articles after going to a talk that Kate Marvel delivered on the Lamont campus of Columbia.
After reading both articles, I was struck by how much they agreed on in the actual text of their writing, despite the diametrically opposed titles and tones of their opening rhetoric. Clearly, both of the authors were trying to be provocative with their titles and theses. But both authors agreed on how serious the problem is, how much worse it’s gotten in the last 40 years or so (despite increased global awareness), and how much worse it could get – depending on what choices we make and critical sensitivities and unknowns in the climate system.
I absolutely agree with Marvel that the defeatist tone of Franzen’s title and frankly the defeatist message in some of the writing are very counter-productive, even though Franzen is clearly a deep believer in climate change, and even as a non-scientist has educated himself fairly well on the topic. Marvel’s message of empowerment and choice is also critically important and should be the focal point of effective climate communication. At the end of Marvel’s talk at Columbia, she basically described herself as an optimistic person by nature and as wanting to use the knowledge of the climate system as a motivation to “get to work”. This is admirable, important and constructive. But the form of that work needs to informed not only by an understanding of climate science, but also of human nature. Franzen captured some important realities in his writing that Marvel (and many other climate scientists) do not address adequately. Franzen captured an understanding of the nature of human beings and institutions, inertia baked into many human systems and the more pressing challenges that most people have and connected the dots to the most likely scenarios for emissions and temperature rise. I agree with him that the probability of meeting the optimistic 1.5C target set out in Paris in 2015 is vanishingly small and the likelihood that we will limit emissions enough to stay even below 2C is also very small. I also agree with him that most people who are climate “non-believers” are no less caring towards their family, friends and neighbors than those who understand and accept the scientific narrative of climate change.
So perhaps what’s really needed is a different conception of success and a different target. In my opinion, too much of the discourse has focused on the end of century temperature rise or the threshold GHG concentrations to not exceed. While these are important concepts, it’s too easy to fail to achieve these kinds of targets, acknowledge that failure has happened, but then be at a loss for how to do better. We need shorter time horizons in our thinking (next 10, 20, 30 years). We need a range of emotional and institutional responses to different forms and degrees of failure to the challenge and we need a range of emotional and institutional responses to different forms of success or different opportunities that may arise (eg. now that fusion research has proven it can produce more energy than it can consume, how quickly can we develop this technology to scale) .
By the mid-late 21st century, unless direct air capture of carbon can become a widely and massively scaled technology, we are almost certain to blow past 500 ppmv CO2 and 2C temperature increase over the pre-Industrial average – because of human nature and institutions and 8 billion people on the planet. Fine. We need to accept that. Now what? How do we stay in the game – institutionally, psychologically, emotionally? How do we stay in the game before those benchmarks are reached to minimize the risk or delay the date of those thresholds being crossed? What and how do we prioritize? What can we do now? What can we do in a few years? How do we shift our priorities if it seems that there are major ice losses in Greenland or the West Antarctic Ice Sheet? How do we shift our priorities as new technologies and innovations develop? How can we build resilience and adaptive capacity to the climate of today in a manner that is sustainable across societies? These are the questions we need to focus on more than when must carbon emissions peak in order to stay below a particular concentration or temperature benchmark.
On Greta Thunberg, Youth Climate Advocates and Meeting People where they are
I’m glad Greta Thunberg exists and that she and many other youth climate activists have said and done what they have said and done. I’m a little more skeptical about the value of some recent youth activist publicity stunts like defacing works of art in museums. But Greta Thunberg has educated herself admirably on the climate science, on the impacts and the consequences of climate change and the inefficacy of many policy ideas to date. Her public speaking is compelling, emotionally raw and her way of presenting the narrative of climate change in the international arena is more courageous, informed and eloquent than many people decades older than her.
With all this being said, there is a wisdom and a realism that comes from life experience that she lacks – in large part because of her youth. She understands the reality, seriousness of urgency of climate change quite well. What she doesn’t yet understand is how many people on the planet have other more urgent problems to address – and how the solution to many of those problems will make climate change worse (i.e. we can’t reasonably tell desperately poor people in Asia or Africa to not burn coal when that may be their only reliable source of energy and using energy is their pathway out of poverty). What she doesn’t fully understand is how our dependence on fossil fuels is not just a willful byproduct of misinformation by fossil fuel companies, but is in fact woven into almost every aspect of the life of almost every person in the affluent world – including her own (she’s from Sweden – presumably she spends a lot of her time in heated spaces in the Swedish winter – which may very well be heated by natural gas). What she doesn’t yet understand is that many people who are part of the climate change “problem” are decent hard working people just looking for a reasonable life (West Virginia coal miners and many oil platform workers are often low-paid laborers in risky jobs serving a public need and just trying to make their own ends meet).
Being a climate activist is a position of privilege. So is being comfortable enough that your risk exposure to climate damages is small. But what we really need is a discourse on climate response that meets people where they are. We need a discourse that doesn’t try to ask people to completely change their lives and world-views and priorities or to save the world. Rather, the discourse we engage should inform people of the issue and then gives them some small steps they can take in their own lives to feel like a part of the solution. There are ways in which activism can help hold leaders to account and incentivize larger commitments. But activism that is too strident and too focused on one issue without a broader societal context will be more divisive than helpful.
Climate and International Development
An emeritus professor at Princeton and who has African roots (Professor George Philander) has often spoken about how there is too much “doom and gloom” in the messaging about climate change and there are too many people from the affluent world presuming to give advice to people from poorer countries – particularly in Africa. I’ve had the privilege of many conversations with him over many years. He is a proponent of international science education and of trying to use the joy of discovery and understanding the natural world in different cultural settings as a bridge to build new connections and spur new innovation. He also feels that it is cruel to tell people already living in desperate poverty that their lives are likely to get worse.
This distinguished professor is certainly not in a state of denial about the seriousness of the climate change problem, or the severity of its impacts, particularly on the global South. But I think his emotional points are very well taken. In the discourse on international development, there has been a historical tendency for affluent nations to arrogantly presume to know best for poorer nations. In the discourse on international climate risk management, there has, at times been an effort by Western or affluent world institutions to focus on the negative storylines about damaging climate projections, without respecting and acknowledging the capacity for development, adaptation and innovation. This may be partly well-intentioned and partly rooted in science, but it portrays people in the Global South only as victims, lacking agency.
While a large fraction of the population of many countries in the Global South is engaged in subsistence agriculture, pastoralism and fisheries and consequently very vulnerable to the potential impacts of climate extremes, there are many ways in which economies, technology and institutions are evolving to adapt to the different pressures, as the climate risks are evolving. Many developing countries are likely to face increased adverse impacts of climate extremes in the future, but are also likely to see benefits of economic and institutional growth, economic diversification and growing connection with the rest of the world through technology in the digital era.
I don’t think national climate policies should be selfishly focused only on the interests of the country in question – there needs to be a more global perspective. But when it comes to the conversation between the global North and global South, while the global North needs to take a leadership role in green energy and carbon negative technology and needs to take its historical responsibilities seriously through mechanisms like the loss and damage fund, above all, institutions in the global North that are interested in being partners for international development need to listen to and learn from the experience of institutions in the global South.
This was certainly a significant part of the intention behind my and my colleagues’ work at IRI – we had a lot of engagement, collaboration and training with national meteorological services and tried very hard to make sure that the services we offered were demand driven and value added.
asclimateservices.org 