From "Cry Wolf" to crying together

It’s the first day of May, in the midst of spring. The month of April has felt long and cold in Sweden, with early spring flowers still in bloom and a very gradual greening in nature. This is despite the fact that the globally the world is getting ever warmer with new heat records every month for the last half year. And while the perception has been that the spring has been chilly and late, mean temperatures in Sweden have actually been above normal all month. To me, this again shows how hard it is to communicate the ongoing climate disruption caused by our carbon emissions. 

This was also the subject at a recent lunch with two of my colleagues, where the small talk turned into a rather heated discussion. The subject was if and how we are capable of “doing the right thing” when it comes mitigating climate change, exemplified with eating less meat and reducing airplane flights. Being somewhat obsessed with the science behind climate change and the consequences of the ongoing global warming, I drove my arguments perhaps too hard, as indicated by the way  a man sitting next to us joined the discussion. 

Many have described climate change as a wicked problem. We have to sacrifice today in order to enable a better futurer for generations to come, not knowing if our efforts will pay of. There are few good role models for this kind of behaviour and even when we can intellectually understand what we need to do, it is hard to follow suit. Actually it is as hard as going on a diet for a person with a weigh problem (as it has been described, I can not say since I have no personal experience). But many studies show that understanding the need to diet is one thing, the decision to start is another and to actually follow through is yet another. There are many psychological mechanism that can block our attempts. One of the problems is that when you are on a diet you feel the pain long before you reach the gain. And the “carbon austerity” we need to accept if we are going to stabilise the climate is a similar problem.

If we feel that it is all pains to save the climate we might not do it, not from ill will but from pure psychological reasons. The Norwegian psychologist and economist Per Espen Stoknes has written about this in his book "What We think about when we try not to think about global warming”.  

In the book and in radio interviews with Per Espen that I have been listening to, he elaborates about the psychological mechanism that enables us to avoid a major and potentially catastrophic problem like global warming.  The five “D’s” in his model are: 

• Distance - Time, physical but also social distance allows us to see the problem as “some other time, some other place, for someone else”. It is becoming increasingly clear that polar bears are not an effective way of communicating the effect of climate change since very few people have been standing on icebergs. Also, stating what will happen in 2100 is way beyond our horizon, especially if we believe that problems will mostly affect the inhabitants of small islands on the other side of the world
• Doom - The concept of cry wolf is well known, most of us have heard the story about the shepherd boy that cried wolf to get some action going. But after some time, no one would believe in the threat any longer and when the wolf really came, no one would come to his aid. This also explains why as science has become more clear about the dire strait we are heading for, the public and political interest has vaned. 
• Dissonance - It is not easy to “walk the talk” so we push away the facts and rationalise that what we are doing is not that bad. Skipping beef and air travel is not an easy task, as the discussion with my colleagues showed
• Denial - This is a self-defence against those who want to change the way we live and act. It is not about lack of understanding the facts, its about finding ways to make them irrelevant.
• iDentity - We as humans almost always choose identity over facts, if over group, faith or ideology tells that eg raising taxes is bad, then we will reject that solution. If however, someone we trust proposes the same thing we may well accept it. 

So what to do? Fight the windmills like a Don Quijote or just give up? Maybe hope that things will turn better, since hope is a strong emotion that will make us endure hard times. But hope can also be pacifying. We can hope that it will be good weather tomorrow but we have no influence whatsoever over the outcome, it is a come what may situation. But hoping that the climate will be stable a decade from now, that is something different. The decisions today will determine the fate of the climate in coming years.  

One reason that I myself feel strongly motivated to engage in the issue of climate change, or climate disruption as I prefer to call it, is that I have actually been standing on an iceberg in Antarctica. When I see reports about how climate change affect penguins it is easy for me to connect to the picture of a long row of Adelaide penguins walking over the ice to their nesting grounds. But very few have had this experience so we need something closer to home to engage us and make us understand the need for change.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nicola-ruane/what-is-the-business-case_b_9806782.html

According to Stoknes, the five strategies for better climate communication are: 

1. Social - Use the power of social networks
2. Supportive - Frame the message with positive emotions
3. Simple - Make it easy to do the right thing
4. Storytelling - The power of stories is something you find in all cultures
5. Signals - Use indicators for feedback of the response

I will come back to these strategies but today I will dwell a bit on the storytelling. We really need new stories that engages and motivates us to face the facts and deal with climate disruption. I myself know that powerpoint presentation may rule the world but will not change what we are living. To avoid the distance we need connection, something I wrote about already in one of my first blog posts. I have also ventured into digital storytelling as shown here and I think a lot more can be done here.

However, there are many stories of apocalypse and post apocalypse like Mad Max. And while these stories may touch us, they are also easy to dispel as being unrealistic. Therefore, another part of storytelling could be to look back in history, there are many lessons for us to learn from what previous climate changes have done to societies. We may feel that our present civilisation is technically developed and would not cringe from changing temperatures. But if climate disruption causes lack of food and rising water we are still at the mercy of nature. 

Still, as Stoknes writes, the doom stories is not what will motivate us. Maybe the task today for philosophers, poets and writers would be to create a vision and a story for a sustainable planet. We need both to accept and grieve that fact that we are changing Earth and find way to create a new vision for a better future. I have searched for such stories but only the old novel “Ecotopia” from 70’s comes to my mind. Maybe a good life does not make an exciting movie, but remember that most epic dramas have a happy ending when the hero or heroine has returned home. 

For today I will end with one promising sign. Last year the UN adopted the Sustainable Development Goals or the SDGs. These goals set out a path towards 2030 where most all aspects of society are included. The SDGs have become something that many companies are incorporating into their business agenda. And I think one reason for that is that the SDGs allow for good communication and storytelling on how to move forward. Saying that a company or a university together are striving for SDGs 3) good health and well being and 4) quality education is a far easier story to sell than saying that we aim to go from IPCC RCP 8.5 to 2.6!

That is one story to reflect upon....