Chasing More Than Ice
A few days ago I saw a movie called Chasing Ice (http://www.chasingice.com). The movie documents the efforts of a former
climate skeptic to photograph the rapid melting of world’s glaciers (yes, James
Balog was a genuine skeptic, now he is an advocate. I suppose watching glaciers disappear before
your very eyes has a way of changing your mind). Overall, the movie has the general theme of most
advocacy movies - it brings to life the very real consequences of not taking
action. But in many ways it is a very
different type of advocacy movie. This
movie has very little messaging and simply let’s the viewers see the evidence for
themselves, in this case thousands of photographs of glaciers melting away collected
over several years.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this movie lately, not so
much about the powerful images (and they are powerful) but more so on the idea
of climate change messaging. Crafting
effective messaging is something that all advocacy work struggles with, but it
seems that developing strong climate change messaging has been especially
tricky. This became even more evident as
I’ve been talking to friends who are attending the renewed climate change
negotiations going on now in Doha, Qatar. Although these negotiations are attempting to
address difficult science, legal and social issues associated with crafting a
global climate change agreement one issue that always comes up is: How to change strongly held viewpoints on
climate change back at home?
Negotiators are instruments of their country, and will echo their
homegrown public and political viewpoints at the negotiation table.
So clearly there is a need to improve climate change
messaging, but how? I found an article
in the Stanford Social Innovation Review that provides some interesting insight
into exactly this question. The article
is titled “Climate Science as Culture War”: (http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/climate_science_as_culture_war)
The article is written by a social scientist, who makes the
case that in order to successfully move climate change action forward we need
to move beyond a scientific consensus and work on achieving a social
consensus. However, creating this social
consensus is a daunting task, mainly because it requires fundamental shifts not
only in how we think of climate change, but also in how we view the world and
our place (and impact) within it.
Specifically, the three facets that make up this challenge are:
- Much of the public does
not view greenhouse gas, unlike other pollutants, as inherently
harmful. In fact, the creation of
greenhouse gasses is directly linked to success and prosperity.
- We do not fully appreciate
our impact on the global ecosystem.
- Assuming we accept the
creation of greenhouse gas as a bad thing that has serious detrimental
effects globally, what are our ethical responsibilities?
These three facets represent what the article refers to as
an “existential challenge” that illustrates the “magnitude of the cultural
debate that climate change provokes”. And
it’s this existential challenge that climate change advocates must address to
create a social consensus. The article
proposes various methods that can be followed to create a consensus based
discussion to move towards a social consensus, which I am not listing here but
I encourage those interested to read in more detail. However, the essence of the article is that to
move the debate forward we can’s just focus on the science, we need to
understand and address the cultural underpinnings of the various viewpoints on
the science. As an engineer I’m partial
to the pure science (any excuse to use my scientific calculator), but having
worked on climate change policy for a while (and even having an interesting
climate science debate with a Member of Congress) the suggestions in this
article are very well taken.
