As world leaders met at the United Nations in New York on Tuesday, they faced intense pressure to act. The discovery that North Korea has been secretly pumping climate-altering chemicals into the atmosphere in an attempt to destroy agricultural production across the US has sparked an international crisis. That is not true, of course. The summit, called by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, discussed dangerous climatic disruption. It is a disruption that may in fact lead to the collapse of many of the world’s main agricultural regions. However, since it is only dull old global warming, a subject swaths of the public seem to find less interesting than watching paint dry, the politicians do not have to worry too much about being held to account.
So why can we be confident that the North Korean scenario will lead to rapid political mobilisation while the huge threat we really do face will generate mere empty promises? This raises a larger question about our own psychology: Why do most people understand that climate change is a major threat yet, when asked to name the greatest dangers to civilisation, still seem unable to bring it to mind?
The primary reason is that our innate sense of social competition has made us acutely alert to any threat posed by external enemies. In experiments, children as young as three can tell the difference between an accident and a deliberate attack. Climate change confounds this core moral formula: It is a perfect and undetectable crime everyone contributes to but for which no one has a motive.
There is no outsider to blame. We are just living our lives: Driving children to school, heating our homes, putting food on the table. Only once we accept the threat of climate change do these neutral acts become poisoned with intention — so we readily reject that knowledge, or react to it with anger and resentment.
Even worse, climate change appears to contain a royal flush of other qualities that are notoriously hard for our brains to engage with: It requires immediate personal sacrifices now to avoid uncertain collective losses far in the future. The cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize for his studies of how irrationally we respond to such issues, sighed deeply when I asked him to assess our chances: “Sorry,” he said, “I am deeply pessimistic. I see no path to success.”
I would agree with him if indeed climate change really were uncertain, impossibly expensive to combat and located in the far future. It can easily seem so, if that is how you are determined to frame it. However, many economists, such as Nicholas Stern and Hank Paulson, George W. Bush’s former treasury secretary, see it differently. So do the 310,000 protesters who jammed 30 blocks of Manhattan, and the tens of thousands more in London last Sunday, shouting with heart-felt conviction that climate change is real, happening now and entirely actionable. For them, the real obstacle — memorably represented on one float in New York as a 15 metre-long octopus — is the oil and gas industry and its tentacles of political influence.
And herein lies the real challenge. Climate change can be anything you want it to be. It can be here or there, in the present or the future, certain and uncertain. It seems that we see climate change as a threat — and are therefore able to harness that innate reaction to an external enemy — only once it is poured into the mould of our familiar stories, with their heroes and villains.
So my fellow advocates for action create this enemy narrative with dramatis personae from our past struggles — corrupt politicians, malignant corporate executives, fat bankers, lazy journalists, slippery lawyers and an apathetic public. All the while, however, our opponents are mirroring these actions. During a raucous evening with the Texan Tea Party, I was told in predictably blunt language that liberal environmentalists are the real enemy and that we have invented this scam to extend government control. Like most conservatives, they failed to see that it is climate change itself that poses a threat to their values, freedoms and property.
This tendency to confuse the facts of climate change with the narratives constructed from them is just as common among politicians. I can safely predict that the leaders who had gathered in New York stressed the urgent need to control greenhouse gases, but remained mute about the $1,000 billion (Dh3.67 trillion) a year spent bringing yet more fossil fuel reserves into production. In 25 years of negotiations, no measure to control fossil fuel production has ever been discussed. It does not exist anywhere in the official narrative.
For the general public too there are gaps and blind spots. Most people have never discussed climate change with anyone outside their immediate family. A third cannot recall having talked about it with anyone at all. And, counter-intuitively, climate-related trauma seems to make people even more reticent. Speaking to the victims of Hurricane Sandy and the 2011 Texan drought and wildfires, I could not find anyone who could recall a recent conversation with their neighbours about climate change. Battered communities, it seems, find strength in the hope of recovery, and actively suppress any disheartening discussion of underlying causes or future threat.
So if we are to really mobilise action on climate change it is vital that we recognise that it exists in two forms: The scientific facts and the far more potent social facts of constructed narratives or deliberate silence. It is the latter that provide the basis on which we accept, deny or ignore the issue, reinforced by our innate need to conform to the norm within our social group.
Seen in this light, the situation is far from hopeless. Like the cycles that govern global energy and carbon systems, public attitudes are subject to positive feedback effects that can amplify small changes and result in rapid shifts. Strong visible protest and increased media coverage can break the climate silence and create wider engagement.
Above all, though, we need to recognise that the narrative we choose will shape what happens from now on. We may continue to fall back on our need for an enemy. But the very best story would be one of common purpose, based around our shared humanity.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
