The facts are not enough. We are never going to be able to address global warming effectively if we don’t win the hearts of people, as well as their minds.
In the a movie A Few Good Men, a film about honor and integrity, one of the protagonists, when the truth is demanded of him in a heated exchange, responds, “You can’t handle the truth!” Many people, it seems, can’t handle the truth about global warming.
We have been telling people that truth for a long time now. As a humanist, I conceive of the truth as an explanation resulting from the best available evidence we have, based on a sound conceptual framework. I know that this sort of truth, because it is based on scientific processes, will evolve over time as we get to know more, but I prefer it to other types of beliefs about the truth which seem remarkably intransigent to evidence and reason.
Many of us, concerned that our continued pollution of our atmosphere is going to destroy life on Earth and, long before that, make human existence on this planet utterly miserable, have tried to use reason and facts to convince people to act before too late. We have used an abundance of evidence to argue that our planet is in danger. We have warned, we have cajoled, we have lobbied. We can counter the spurious arguments that deny climate change and its likely impact or that assure us that we need not panic yet.
We can quote a reputable organization such as NASA, who have shown that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely to be due to human activity. Most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position. We can point out that NASA data shows that we have experienced rapid warming in the past few decades: that 2016 was the warmest year since 1880; and that the ten warmest years in the 138-year record have all occurred since 2000. The four recent years were the four warmest.
We can refer people to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on the benefits, impacts and challenges of keeping global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels: a lengthy, thorough account, which cited over 6,000 references. The result of years of intensive research, it also took account of the latest information on climate change. The report was a collaborative effort involving 91 authors from 44 countries and 130 contributing authors. It was intensively scrutinized: it received a total of 42,001 expert and governmental review comments. Hundreds of scientists from diverse backgrounds were mobilized to produce this report.
However, the huge body of evidence about the extent of global warming seems to have little impact on the views of many people. Cold logic does not appear to be winning the day. Why is this so?
The Role of Human Nature in Damping down Support for Action on Global Warming
Many people—indeed most people—do not want to hear the message. Many of us are in a dilemma which we respond to in different ways. We don’t want global warming to happen, yet we don’t want to give up anything. We are simply unwilling to make the sacrifices required to save our planet.
The easiest way around this dilemma is to talk yourself into believing that there is a worldwide conspiracy, concocted by thousands of scientists and other otherwise rational people, to convince us that we should radically change our behavior, otherwise we are doomed. Obviously, this is a socialist* (*insert any group you are fearful of in this space) plot to gain power. Mind you, you can hardy blame people for believing this when it is touted by some sections of the media. This appeals to people who can’t accept that all those left-wing environmentalists might have been right. The pay-off of believing this is that you can go on living your life as normal.
Another approach is to deny that climate change is happening. As Mark Twain might say, reports of our impending doom have been greatly exaggerated. The climate is not really changing or, if it is, then that change is a natural process that has been going on for millennia. We will have plenty of time to adapt. A few geologists take this position. Books have been written to convince waverers that there is no need to panic. Again, some parts of the media are keen to use such arguments to debunk global warming—they appeal to people who want a good reason not to take global warming seriously. The pay-off, again, is that you can go on living your life as normal.
Another approach is to choose arguments that suit your position. To cherry pick the science. For example, global warming might be happening, but we really don’t have to change what we are doing in any radical way. We can have clean coal. Renewable energy is so limited that is it is not worth investing in. There is an easy way around the problem of global warming that doesn’t involve limiting fossil fuel use. These arguments, and more, have been comprehensively refuted, but they appeal because they give the illusion that there is a rational basis for not acting promptly to prevent catastrophic climate change. The pay-off? You’ve guessed it. You can go on living your life as normal.
Then there is the optimistic approach. Yes, global warming is happening, but scientists will come up with a solution before the Earth becomes uninhabitable. Necessity is the mother of invention. Our children will find a way to deal with global warming. We will collect CO2 in massive amounts from the atmosphere. Hydrogen powered cars will save the day. The problem with global warming is that it is time critical and it could reach a point of no return. Why take the risk of being so optimistic that we delay action on climate change? Because, that way, we can put aside the inconvenient truth of global warming and go on living our lives as normal, enjoy having children and grandchildren and feel positive that a solution will be found.
A very common approach to global warming is just to ignore it. We can believe it is happening and be worried about the increasing occurrence of droughts, out-of-season wildfires, record maximum temperatures, the lack of formerly reliable rain and the increased frequency of wild weather, but it is hard to be alarmed for too long when life is so full and demanding. We hope that other people will solve the problem, and in the meantime we live our lives as normal.
Then there are the believers. We accept that global warming is a real threat to our existence and that it is already having a big impact on the Earth. Without immediate action, future generations will live in a very hostile world and life on Earth may not survive. So we do what we can. We try to use more renewable sources of energy, recycle things and support environmental groups advocating for action on global warming. We may even attend demonstrations or write to the newspapers or to our political representatives. But do we really sacrifice very much, or do we live our lives pretty much as normal?
A dedicated group of people put a lot of time and effort into trying to convince governments and other influential people, as well as the general public, that we need to take global warming seriously and implement far reaching changes as soon as possible. They point out the undeniable facts of global warming and the catastrophic impact it will have if we don’t act now in a concerted, coordinated and co-operative way. This is a painstaking and frustrating process, as people seem quite capable of denying the undeniable. Rationalization is a human specialty. It masks the fact that our views on global warming may be more influenced by our emotions than our reason. Activists need to take this into account if they want to shift people from their comfort zones to a commitment to addressing climate change even if it requires significant sacrifices.
Are you prepared to make the sacrifices needed to keep global warming to 1.5°C?
How would you feel if governments were to say that from the year 2020 all fossil fuel cars would be totally banned from cities, and the price of petrol doubled to pay for the development of renewable energy sources. What if we could only use petrol-driven cars at weekends and then only if they had two or more passengers? What if all coal mining were to cease immediately and other fossil fuels were banned within the next ten years? What if we were required to have solar panels on our roofs and install rainwater tanks to supply our drinking water? What if a limit were set on consumption and a very high tax placed on luxury goods, cars, clothing and travel? What if 50% of our taxes were to be spent on addressing global warming and plastics were totally banned? And not only that: what if we had to take in ten times the refugees we presently accept and provide triple the amount we now give in foreign aid to help poorer countries cope with global warming? What if our average standard of living dropped to what it was in the 1950s?
Would you rejoice because this would be better than a global meltdown and because future generations are worth the self-sacrifice? Or would you bitterly oppose such changes as unfair, draconian and unnecessary?
I think it is a mistake to gloss over the sacrifices required to overcome the challenge of global warming. We will all have to move out of our comfort zones and things will change quite drastically. Fear of change leads people to deny and ignore global warming.
It is our nature that has caused us to end up with a global warming disaster that will soon be beyond our influence. Because we ignored the warning signs; because we are not very good at thinking and acting for the long-term future; because many of us don’t have a good grasp of science, probability and risk assessment; because action on global warming conflicts with the self-interests of powerful people; because effective action requires too many sacrifices; because it is politically undesirable; and because when it comes to trying to understand complex problems many of us take the easy way out and rely on our prejudices or the media to tell us what to think.
A humanist approach can help because it seeks to move us along the spectrum of human nature to where actions are based on reason and evidence and a recognition of our common humanity. It acknowledges we are on our own and must solve the problems that confront us. It advocates that we should treat people as we would be treated—not just those people alive now, or the people we personally care about, or the people in our own countries—but especially those vulnerable people—both here and now and in the future—who will be most impacted by global warming and the transformative changes needed to address it.
Instead of cajoling and blaming people for not acting to mitigate global warming, we could have non- judgmental conversations with people from all walks of life. We could listen. We could accept people’s fears and resistance to change and acknowledge that addressing global warming will come at a price. We can talk about the facts and the various options and present the alternatives. And we can appeal to people’s courage, altruism and compassion. We need everyone on board, we need consensus and we need a mass movement if we are to have any hope of preventing catastrophic global warming.
Can we do this? Yes. We have done it before. In the past, people have sacrificed everything for a worthy cause. Think of the sacrifices of those who ended slavery, the suffragettes who gave women the vote, the unionists who stood up for the working man, the intellectuals and scientists who stood up for freedom of thought. Think of the extraordinary effort that ordinary people made during the Second World War, to fight absolute tyranny. People can unite to fight a common threat for a just cause. There has never been a cause more just or more pressing than saving life on Earth from annihilation.
Thanks for post!
I’d have probably rephrased what you articulated as, https://areomagazine.com/2018/12/14/appealing-to-hearts-and-minds-on-the-subject-of-global-warming/
The issue of global warming is very acute today. After all, the situation in the world is getting worse every day. If you are interested in understanding why this is a real problem of mankind, you will find the answer on this website.
Global warming is leading to rising ocean water levels as well as droughts in some parts of the world. These phenomena cannot go unnoticed, they will, in any case, affect the flora and fauna, which will eventually disappear.
If, today, people do not begin to respond to this problem, then in the near future we will face major problems related to the survival of people on the planet.
The invocation of the pseudo fact “97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree…” is more an obfuscation than a literal truth. Michael Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ is based on fudged data. It magically ignores The Medieval Climate Optimum (950-1250) when Vikings grew crops in Greenland, and it eliminates the Little Ice Age (1645-1759) when the Thames regularly froze over to demonstrate the temperature rise from 1930 to 2000. The hysteria of Apocalyptic Environmentalism is a plausible excuse to justify anti-capitalist third world agendas and post-modernist self loathing. In the end, CO2 is a marginal (0.4%) greenhouse gas… the Sun (our star) however drives climate on earth and throughout the solar system. The New Horizons Satellite has demonstrated this fact all the way out to Uranus, Pluto and most recently Ultima Thule. Climate is very likely, based on clearly recurrent solar cycles, and, if so, this planet may well… Read more »
Ms. Dangerfield, I applaud your effort to make the kind of call you make to advance the urgency of our need to recognize the existential threat posed by climate change. As I was progressing through your thoughtful and compassionate piece, I was thinking about certain conflict resolution models, especially inter-personal models, that I thought I might identify in a comment, for they seem quite relevant to the kind of discursive approach you advocate, one that starts with the premise that progress toward resolution of conflict must be predicated on recognizing the rationality and fears of opposing sides in a conflict. That is, taking each side’s concerns seriously. But after reading the comments here, and the comment strings on so many of the other articles I’ve read here at Areo in the last week or so, I realize this is not at all the forum I thought it was, or professes… Read more »
I think you do a good job of driving home the severity of the measures serious advocates of mitigating efforts prescribe. But I’m still lost as to why we should tank our prosperity in the face of climate change.
I don’t understand the automatic assumption that the prosperity of possible future people should be the priority, when current actual people would have to make such drastic sacrifices.
You went through many permutations of denialism, etc. But You didn’t address those of us who more of less believe the science and see no reason to make changes in light of it.
“The facts are not enough.” It’s so hard for me to get past this. There is an apparently tiny (unfortunately) minority in our world for whom facts *are* enough. That we should have to go through the machinations you suggest here is just so disheartening. Not that I don’t admire your intent …
Respectfully, I have some passing familiarity with climate models and they overpredict future outcomes. Implicit in your argument is that there have been several consecutive warm years __and__ that trend will continue unabated. Climate is effectively a random process, so assuming that the trend continues unabated is unwarranted (it’s also a periodic process, so that makes the assumption doubly silly.) The “… and will continue unchanged into the future” bias is also implicit in climate model software. Also, the evidence suggests that the atmosphere is pretty tolerant to CO2. After all, humanity has been putting exponential amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and there’s only a linear increase in global average temperature. If CO2 were so dominant, there would be an exponential-exponential relationship. Vulcanism has done much more climate and atmospheric damage in the last 10K years than humanity has — civilizations have been destroyed by volcanic climate change. Can… Read more »
Considering that the science behind climate change is supposed to be ‘settled’ there seems to be quite a number of well qualified scientists in the field who disagree. I don’t see how the likes of Lindzen, Curry, Morner, Dyson et al can be considered as ideologically biased ‘deniers’ either. I would urge everyone to get a balanced approach to this subject by reading what they have to say first. if you’re scientifically minded why would you not? Also, talking of ‘cherry picking’ data, this is done as much on the so-called ‘alarmist’ side of the argument as any other. Data quoted from carefully chosen start dates for example. Data with no explanation that it comes from computer models only, or has been ‘adjusted’ etc. etc. Has anyone here read the so-called ‘climategate’ emails? I have and believe some of what these guys do isn’t science – it’s activism. Maybe you’re… Read more »
The problem is of course that the amazing consensus among climate scientists of AWG does not say anything about what will happen in the future. We’re as species very bad in predicting because it is about the future. Computer models about chaotic systems are notoriously bad. We are even worse in government driven actions. Look at how Germany (arguably one of the most efficient and incorruptible countries in the world) spent €500 billion euros but will not achieve their goals and likely will increase their CO2 levels. Along the way they wreaked havoc on their once beautiful landscapes that are now littered with windmills. How much chance do lesser countries have? We need to be realistic, asking populations to give up their welfare for a clearly unachievable path is foolish. It is the same naive level as wanting people to be nice to each other so we have world peace.… Read more »
«The facts are not enough. We are never going to be able to address global warming effectively if we don’t win the hearts of people, as well as their minds.» – That’s exactly the reason I never believed in global warming. The way you try to prove its existence