Climate Change Denial

How could I resist boosting my hits by using the word PORN on the blog?! The excuse is a very interesting report by the Institute of Public Policy Research which argues that “climate change alarmism might even become secretly thrilling – effectively a form of ‘climate porn’” www.ippr.org.uk/ecomm/files/warm_words.pdf

The papers can’t resist the word either. The Independent happily gives it a headline then sniffs in the editorial that “the word ‘porn’…is a cheap way of securing a headline, masquerading as a serious piece of analysis”.

Not fair. The report, “Warm Words: How are we telling the climate story and can we tell it better” is a very valuable analysis of the semiotics of climate change and how language contributes to climate change denial.

It identifies three distinct repertoires (descriptive systems of language) that are being used in to describe climate change in media and information materials:

Alarmism - “typified by an inflated or extreme lexicon..[which].employs a quasi-religious register of death and doom [and] excludes the possibility of real action or agency by the viewer of reader.

Settlerdom – “which rejects and mocks the discourse and invokes ‘common sense’ to dismiss climate change as too fantastic to be true”. A sub category, called ‘British Comic nihilism’ by the IPPR, is a ‘sunny refusal to engage in the debate, typified by comic musings on the positive possibilities of a future with climate change’. See my last two postings for examples.

Pragmatic Optimism–Examples include: “techno-optimism”- which promotes business-as-usual technological solutions like biofuels;  “David and Goliath” which recycles endlessly the tired Margaret Mead quote about a few people changing the world; and “Small Actions” which encourages small personal actions but ‘can be lacking in energy and may not feel compelling”.

The IPPR is quite right. Bombarding people with the bad news makes them feel powerless and defensive. Backing it up with the admonition to change your lightbulbs then undermines the power of the issue. It’s like saying “smoking kills, so why not cut down a little”. And, again like smokers, there are a vast numbers of people who say ‘stop telling me to give up my little  pleasures’, ‘they’ll come up with a cure’, ‘can’t believe what you read in the papers’ and so on.

The IPPR advocates a change in communications: targeting groups in terms of their own values, especially recognizing that many people are esteem driven; using the language of  ‘ordinary heroes’; and using metaphor to enable emotional engagement.

I am less sure that a change in language will solve anything much. Whilst I do not doubt the power of language to frame a debate, I believe that people adopt arguments and language according to their existing world view. Nihilistic or evasive language is therefore a reflection of wider currents of despair, denial, or optimism.

The real issue is the profound disconnection between what we know and what we do. Nihilism and the refutation of the science seek to resolve the disconection by reducing the scale of the problem. The ‘advocacy of small changes’ seeks to resolve it by reducing the scale of the solutions. Alarmist strategies fail because they actually increase the dissonance by increasing our perception of the problem.

What we need is personal and collective action that is in proportion to the scale of the problem. When looking for solutions, the danger with reframing the language we use is that we are still reinforcing the intellectual side of the balance – the “what we know”. As motivational research shows time and again, it is often more effective to get people doing the right thing before giving them the language to describe why they should do it. 

Despite this, we continue to look to language as the best means to energise and motivate change- hoping that it we try hard enough can find a formulation that works. The UK Department for Environment has recently awarded £2 million to community organisations to communicate climate change. It was adamant that funding as only available for “attitudinal change” not “behavioural change”- in other words, awardees could use language to persuade people of the scale of the problem but were forbidden to lead them into any substantive personal action (other than to talk about it some more).

We do not need elaborately crafted rhetoric to get people making the necessary changes- we can start to create change through an effective combination of sticks and carrots. If the vast cost of the Iraq War (£6 billion in the UK to date) had been put into domestic energy efficiency and microgeneration there would building activity on every street, and every household could feel that they are part of huge and sweeping changes. They would then be far better prepared to hear about the problem.

We are depending on language because there is no real political will on this issue and we therefore need to persuade everyone to make their own contribution- and let’s face it, how far would any war get if it had to be funded by public subscription?