This blog entry is about the status of the term "climate change" in public discourse. I began with a little searching to get a sense of how the term does or doesn't show up in discussions of natural disasters. Here are a few results:
· In March, 2019, Nebraska experienced record flooding. The Missouri, Platte and Elkhorn rivers all crested at record heights, breaking records set as recently as 2011. I watched videos of political figures such as Senator Jim Scheer commenting on what they’d seen during visits across the state. To a person, they were solicitous, concerned, ready to go to Washington with requests for disaster relief. No one mentioned “climate change.”
· People in California who lost their homes in raging fires over the past couple of years were often pictured as plucky, tough people, ready to rebuild. The attitude, certainly the implicit hope, is that the fires were an anomaly. “Fires happen”. Some said the government should have cleared out the underbrush.
· The billions of dollars in damage along the gulf coast caused by hurricane Michael a year ago will be substantially covered through disaster relief from the Federal government. How much of that funding will be devoted to replacing structures and infrastructure that will suffer a similar fate when the next hurricane strikes?
In the early 1930s, when the Great Depression had tightened its grip and the economy was falling apart, Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted a range of bold federal policies aimed at restoring confidence in banks and putting people back to work. He had to fight political enemies and economic conservatives every inch of the way, but in time people’s outlooks and expectations changed from despair to hope. It was the age of the New Deal. The arguments against the federal government addressing “climate change” are not unlike like those that were advanced by big business interests against FDR’s New Deal. They include the dictum that the government should not be involved in addressing such matters; the markets will make adjustments to changing conditions of whatever sort. Today, resistance to government-centered, comprehensive and socially just health care, or to reform of the criminal justice system, reflects the same thought patterns. But how do markets actually work in addressing broad social needs? Businesses are for the most part profit-oriented and short-term in outlook. There’s not much room for a broadly-based social welfare orientation. Though the private sector can be, and often must be, participating partners in government-funded and operated programs, it should not be counted upon to formulate and execute broad social programs.
On the other hand, the private sector can’t help but be involved in addressing a challenge that penetrates as deeply as climate change into the nation’s economic and social life. Unfortunately, a large swath of the corporate world doesn’t wish to accept that it has particular roles to play. At a minimum, corporations should behave as good citizens (Corporations are now “citizens”, aren’t they?), conserving energy and adopting climate-friendly policies and practices. Businesses involved with transportation or the technologies of energy generation must be involved; climate change impinges directly on their bottom lines. Then there are companies whose operations directly affect climate change by dint of the products being produced or the manner in which their operations are being carried out. Three big ones are fossil fuel production and consumption, mining, and land use and food production. The last of these promises great benefits from mitigating climate change, but industrial agriculture has shown little interest in abandoning its many destructive products and practices.
Despite all the talking and writing about climate change, there is not enough public concern, enough impetus for action. Which brings me back to the concept of the American zeitgeist, the intellectual, moral, or cultural spirit of our time. I agree with George Lakoff that we must reconsider the ways in which climate change issues are framed. We can start with the realization that support for needed change is limited by the public conceptions of “climate change” itself. In January of this year, Yale University issued a report entitled Climate Change in the American Mind: December 2018, as part of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. The report is a veritable blizzard of data relating to changes in beliefs and attitudes over the past several years regarding climate change. Here is a small sampling of the results:
· Seven in ten Americans think that global warming is happening, up about 10% since March 2015.
· Americans are increasingly certain that global warming is happening—51% are “extremely” or “very” sure, an overall increase of 14% since March 2015.
· About 70% of Americans admit being at least “somewhat worried” about global warming. Of those, about 30% are “very” worried.
· About seven in ten Americans say the issue of global warming is either “extremely”, “very” or “somewhat” important to them personally, while about three in ten say that it’s either “not too” or “not at all” important to them personally.
· Fewer than half of Americans perceive a social norm in which their family and friends expect them to take action on global warming.
· Only one in five Americans is aware that more than 90% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening.
What can we do with this information? The Center made an effort in 2014 to identify which messages on climate change were effective. Although the work was carried out several years ago, many of the results remain of interest. One that stuck out for me is related to the last bullet point: when many of the subject groups were told that a high percentage of all climate scientists are in agreement that humans are contributing to climate change, the polarization between higher educated liberals and conservatives was reduced by nearly 50%.
These indications of how climate is perceived show that we’re far from having an informed public. The fact is, people don’t really know what “climate change” is. Some ideas from philosophy and language theory have helped me understand why this is so. Start with the fact that “climate change” is not a physical thing, like a tree or chair. Rather, it’s a social construct, a term employed to reference a complex set of processes, occurring at many places and on different time scales, and jointly shared on the basis of shared assumptions. Familiar examples of social constructs are “money”, “war”, or “human trafficking”. Because such constructs are many-faceted, people don’t all have the same idea of what each one is. A man who served on desk duty in the Pentagon during World War II would have a different idea of “war” than a marine who’d gone ashore at Iwo Jima.
Nebraska has seen flooding before. It’s thus not obvious that a farming family in Nebraska experiencing flooding in 2018 would associate that event with a long-term trend of global scale when they know little of the underlying scientific consensus. How should ranchers in the southwest, where prolonged dry conditions are a natural part of life, view an especially dry spell? Records of the past based on ancient tree-rings indicate that at times the Southwest has experienced protracted droughts that lasted about 50 years, longer than the 1950s and 2000s droughts that caused economic losses to agriculture and ranching. So it’s reasonable to ask whether we should look at recent weather patterns as symptomatic of climate change. They may be, but historical records reveal that such episodes have occurred in the past. As humans have multiplied and spread themselves over the planet, they’ve taken to living in places susceptible to episodic natural events: droughts, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados, extreme heat. Sheer population increases guarantee that episodic occurrences in the future will result in a larger loss of life and greater damage to the built environment. They’ll be talked and written about in relation to climate change, but will the public arrive at better understandings of how the planet is changing long-term?
The legendary philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, wrote: “What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see.” That idea has been expressed in many different ways: we see what we know. When the farmer and his family experience flooding in Nebraska, they know it from family history as something seen before. Our challenge is to convey climate change in a way that people are encouraged to see episodic events as part of larger sweeping changes of global scale that will eventually override the shorter-term variations to produce irreversible secular change.
Secular changes are long-term and unidirectional. Climate scientists are quite sure that some changes in climate experienced in recent times are appearing for the first time in what we might call “modern” human history, extending back say 100,000 to 200,000 years. For example, the oceans are warming; they haven’t been this warm since the last interglacial warm period, about 129,000 to 116,000 years ago. That’s a secular change. Correspondingly ocean levels are higher than they have been since that long-ago period.
Another secular change, a stark product of unprecedented warming, is shrinkage of the Arctic ice cap. It is predicted that by mid-century it will disappear altogether during the summer months. This is not an episodic event. All the evidence suggests that the Arctic ice cap has been present year-round for the past 2.6 million years, long before there were any humans around to notice. Loss of Arctic ice has already produced noticeable year-by-year weather changes across the continents. More consequential changes are predicted to appear when the ice disappears altogether.
According to data from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the average global temperature on Earth increased by about 0.8° Celsius (1.4° Fahrenheit) since 1880. The Arctic, however, has warmed 4 or 5 times that much, producing the shrinkage of Arctic ice we’ve just noted. In recent decades the relatively warmer Arctic air has also warmed the permafrost, a permanently frozen layer below the Earth’s surface. Permafrost consists of soil, gravel, and sand, bound together by ice. It covers much of the northernmost land.
The changes described in these examples are secular; long-term, consistent shifts with long-lasting effects. I believe that the best place to begin in communicating the reality of climate change is to talk about these big-picture, long-term, changes. For example, one could start with what scientists tell us about the oceans:
· Ocean levels are rising. That secular change will lead to the disappearances of low-lying atolls in the south Pacific that have been inhabited for thousands of years, and by the end of the century will effectively inundate many coastal regions with large populations.
· The ocean is warming. That secular change is producing episodic changes, such as more powerful hurricanes, and bleaching of coral reefs, which are vital to the ocean’s support of marine life.
· The ocean is becoming more acidic because it’s absorbing the increasing amounts of atmospheric CO2. That secular shift is affecting living systems, such as marine creatures with shells.
The key is to stress that the most salient naturally occurring events, the ones that grab our attention, are episodic—they come and go. They’re dramatic when they show up, and we can expect that they’ll likely happen again. The secular changes come on gradually. They don’t announce themselves as abrupt or traumatic, but they’re the causative agents for more powerful and frequent episodic events. The secular changes are the quiet, big ones already mentioned, and these:
· increases in greenhouse gases that will cause continuing warming of the planet.
· continuing acidification and warming in the oceans described above.
· declines in freshwater resources.
· loss of arable land.
· declines in species diversity that will affect food production and the quality of the planet’s ecosystems.
These shifts and related declines in the natural world threaten our survival on Earth. Some are so far along that there will be no escaping their effects, but we can work to mitigate the changes and plan on how to deal with them. To save humanity from the worst of what is to come, we have to focus intently on what scientists are telling us, and start acting.
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