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by Matthew Nisbet<\/p>\n
Medium<\/em><\/a> We have focused too heavily on public mobilization and exposing denial, ignoring other strategies likely to accelerate societal change.<\/em><\/p>\n More than 170 countries pledged as part of the 2015 United Nations climate treaty to keep global temperature rise this century to lower than 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels and to strive to remain below 1.5C.<\/p>\n At the time, a diversity of experts voiced\u00a0doubts<\/a>\u00a0about the UN\u2019s framing of climate change \u201csuccess\u201d in terms of overly ambitious temperature targets. For these experts,\u00a0wrote\u00a0Nature<\/em>\u00a0magazine<\/a>, even the Paris treaty\u2019s proposed 2C goal was \u201cso optimistic and detached from current political realities that they verge on the farcical.\u201d<\/p>\n When the UN followed the Paris meetings by asking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to evaluate the goals set out by the agreement, the same experts worried that scientists risked their credibility if they were to paint an overly rosy picture of what it would take to achieve the agreed upon targets.<\/p>\n Yet the IPCC report released this week is the exact opposite of sugar coating, revealing instead that the temperature targets established by the 2015 UN Paris treaty are tragically\u00a0more aspirational\u00a0<\/a>than realistic.<\/p>\n For countries to achieve the 1.5C goal, concludes IPCC scientists, global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions would need to be cut 50% by 2030 and entirely by 2050.<\/p>\n In 2017, CO2 emissions worldwide rose by nearly 2 percent\u00a0and are on track to rise again\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>this year. At this rate, estimate IPCC scientists, the world will pass the 1.5C threshold sometime around 2040, risking trillions of dollars more in damages and millions more lives lost from climate change impacts.<\/p>\n News coverage of the IPCC report has been nothing less than dystopian, warning of a runaway monster. \u201cWe have 12 years to limit catastrophe, UN warns<\/a>,\u201d was the headline at\u00a0The Guardian<\/em>. \u201cThe world has just over a decade to get climate change under control, U.N. scientists say<\/a>,\u201d echoed the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>.<\/p>\n These apocalyptic headlines come\u00a0as new Yale\/GMU polling<\/a>\u00a0shows that although a strong majority of Americans are increasingly worried about climate change, they are also expressing diminishing hope that something can be done.<\/p>\n For those of us who study climate change politics and communication, and for advocates and philanthropists who have relied on our advice to inform strategy, the latest IPCC report is reason for deep introspection about the current state of research and the need for bold, new thinking.<\/p>\n For too long, as scholars, we have focused narrowly on general public attitudes, evaluating by way of opinion polls or experiments strategies to more effectively communicate climate change risks.<\/p>\n Like many environmentalists and philanthropists, our research has been motivated by a desire to create a sense of public urgency, believing that intensifying voter pressure on elected officials was the key to policy change.<\/p>\n But in doing so, we have never adequately articulated the conditions by which public mobilization might translate into effective public policy action.<\/p>\n Nor have we examined closely the process by which political elites, those in the best position to make decisions about our collective future, might come to agree on the same effective policy approaches\u00a0but for different reasons<\/em>.<\/p>\n As scholars, our unhealthy obsession with the psychology and communication strategies of \u201cdeniers\u201d has also reinforced a bunker mentality among climate advocates that is highly resistant to legitimate criticism or alternative ideas.<\/p>\n The result is a discourse culture that substantially reduces opportunities for developing effective policy and technology approaches on climate change that broker support among not only liberals, but also moderates and conservatives.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Blinded by denial<\/strong><\/p>\n But one of the limits to open discussion about novel paths forward is that as a scholarly community we have become obsessed with research intended to expose the faults in conservative psychology, the duplicitous nature of fossil fuel companies, and the many ways in which Fox News and right-wing think tanks seed \u201cdenial,\u201d and engage in a \u201cwar on science.\u201d<\/p>\n This research has in turn infected mainstream journalism and commentary, in which readers at outlets like\u00a0The Guardian<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0The Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0are consistently left with the impression that \u201canti-science,\u201d \u201cdenier\u201d Republicans may in fact be cognitively incapable of reason or compromise on behalf of clean energy policy, similar in nature to Holocaust deniers.<\/p>\n It\u2019s difficult to imagine today, but a decade ago, scholars were actually debating the wisdom of calling those who oppose action on climate change \u201cdeniers.\u201d<\/p>\n In a 2008 interview with PRI The World, I suggested that the term \u201cdenier\u201d was counter-productive. Resorting to extreme language and name calling in the climate debate not only inflames tensions among opponents, I argued, but for decision-makers on the center-right struggling to come to terms with climate change as a societal priority, resorting to \u201cdenier\u201d rhetoric misses the opportunity to more persuasively connect the issue to commonly shared values, or to fashion compromise around policy approaches.<\/p>\n \u201cA\u00a0perennial topic<\/a>\u00a0with no end in sight, the debate over such language can quickly turn into name-calling over name-calling,\u201d\u00a0observed<\/a>\u00a0journalist John Wihbey in 2012, creating \u201can inward-gazing meta-discourse changing no one\u2019s views or practices, and perhaps only solidifying them.\u201d<\/p>\n That year geographers Max Boykoff and Saffron O\u2019Neil in a letter to the\u00a0Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences<\/a>\u00a0(PNAS) raised concern about an\u00a0earlier study<\/a>\u00a0at the journal which had divided experts into \u201cconvinced\u201d and \u201cunconvinced\u201d camps, interchangeably using the terms \u201cdeniers,\u201d \u201cskeptic,\u201d and \u201ccontrarians\u201d to refer to the unconvinced.<\/p>\n \u201cContinued indiscriminate use of the terms will further polarize views on climate change,\u201d warned Boykoff and O\u2019Neill, \u201creduce media coverage to tit-for-tat finger-pointing, and do little to advance the unsteady relationship among climate science, society, and policy. Read more …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Matthew Nisbet Medium October 10, 2018 We have focused too heavily on public mobilization and exposing denial, ignoring other strategies likely to accelerate societal change. More than 170 countries pledged as part of the 2015 United Nations climate treaty … Continue reading
\nOctober 10, 2018<\/p>\n