Dear
all,
I
thought you might be interested to see this, some
initial thoughts about the relationship between
extreme climate events and attitudes to climate
change. There is an additional commentary on the piece
by Andy Revkin in his dot earth blog. http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/
George
Marshall @ 2:07 pm Edit This
In the
wake of extreme heat, droughts, and Hurricane Sandy,
many people are assuming that, at last, there may be
the critical mass of extreme weather events that
will tip public opinion towards action on climate
change.
This is
based on the long held assumption that extreme
climate events will increase awareness and concern-
and this would seem logical considering that climate
change suffers as an issue from distance and a
consequent lack of salience.
I have
heard many scientists, including the former UK chief
scientific advisor Sir David King, go further and
argue that real public and political attention
requires such events. Climate change campaigners
are already building their public communications
around this assumption (for example a viral campaign
‘advert’
contrasts Romney’s ludicrous
nomination speech with Sandy).
However
this assumption deserves to be challenged. Climate
change awareness is complex and strongly mediated by
socially constructed attitudes. I suggest that there
are some countervailing conditions- especially in
the early stages of climate impacts. It is important
to recognise that many of the social and cultural
obstacles to belief are not removed by major impacts
and may, indeed, be reinforced.
A few
weeks ago I was in Texas interviewing people in
Bastrop where, in 2011, the worst
fires in Texas history (by a
tenfold margin) destroyed 1,700 homes. The fires
were directly related to the extreme drought and
record breaking temperatures that struck central
Texas in 2011. Causal links are always hard, but
even the state climatologist, John Nielsen-Gammon
(who surely has one of the hardest jobs in climate
science) made a cautious connection
between climate change, the drought and the fires. I
did six interviews in Bastrop: with the mayor, the
head of the Chamber of Commerce, the editor of the
local newspaper and with three people who had lost
everything they owned in the fires.
It was
very interesting that not one of them could recall
any conversation about anthropogenic climate change
in relation to the fires. The mayor, who said he
accepted climate science, found that there was
little interest or willingness among people to make
this connection and it seems he felt it politic not
to push it.
People
did note that there was a change in the weather and
most anticipated that the drought and fires could
happen again. But they weren’t really interested in
talking about this- what they really wanted to talk
about was their pride in their community, the value
of their social relations, their resilience and
their personal and collective capacity to overcome
challenges. They had recovered remarkably fast and
the local economy had grown (boosted by government
recovery grants and insurance payments). The county
is doing very well and continues to grow-
incredibly, after entirely repeatable wildfires
incinerated the homes of a third of the residents,
it is said to be the fourth fastest growing county
in the US.
I would
argue that the responses in Bastrop are entirely
consistent with what we know about the way that
people respond socially and cognitively to disasters
and climate change.
Disasters
can reinforce social networks (and with them
established norms and worldviews)
In
disasters, especially in areas with strong
communities, people tend to pull together and show a
remarkable and inspiring sense of collective
purpose. This is nicely reflected in
Rebecca Solnit’s excellent book, a Paradise
Built in Hell
We
know, though, that attitudes to climate change are
strongly correlated with political and ideological
worldviews (see for example the
work of Dan Kahan and the Cultural Cognition
Project ). We can therefore
anticipate that a stronger cultural cohesion could
make it even harder
for ideas that challenge existing worldviews to be
voiced or accepted- creating even further obstacles
for the acceptance of climate change in societies
that are currently skeptical.
And we
could anticipate that extreme events might also
reinforce existing concern in places that are
already disposed to accept climate change. It will
also be very interesting to see how Hurricane Sandy
affects attitudes to climate change of both people
inside and outside affected areas. Given than
attitudes to climate change are often held as part
of a political identity, we cannot be surprised if
people in a politically left leaning area (and much
of the affected area is strongly Democrat) are
prepared to ascribe extreme weather events to
climate change. But this will not, of itself, be
evidence that extreme events changes attitudes.
Disasters
can increase social confidence and certainty.
Accepting anthropogenic climate change requires a
high degree of self-criticism and even self-doubt.
It requires a preparedness to accept personal
responsibility for collective errors and for entire
societies to accept the need for major collective
change. And, inevitably, this process of acceptance
would generate intense debate and conflict.
Disasters
may very well do the opposite and provide proof of
the worth of the existing social system- including
the existing worldview and lifestyle. The spirit of
pulling together and moving on generates a consensus
to suppress divisive issues and support the existing
society. Areas of contention or disagreement are
likely to be suppressed in the interests of social
cohesion or out of respect to people who have
offered kindness and generosity. After all, if your
current society and economic model has served you
well in a crisis you are surely less willing to
accept change.
We
could say, for historical comparison, that the
transition of Germany from a dictatorship to a
successful social democracy required the self doubt
and introspection that came with defeat. Britain and
the US won the war and with it a correspondingly
inflated view of their own global authority that
lasts to this day.
Disasters
encourage powerful and compelling survival
narratives (that can overwhelm weaker and more
complex climate change narratives).
People’s view of the world (and their place in it)
is shaped through narratives. Social groups seek to
negotiate shared narratives that are simple,
appealing and reinforce shared values. In so doing
they will reject or marginalise competing narratives
that might challenge their current worldview. (For
example just look at the competition of interpretive
narratives around Thanksgiving ! ).
So a
complex and challenging narrative will have a very
hard time being accepted as social truth when it is
competing against a strong, appealing and highly
coherent narrative. In the case of Bastrop the weak
narrative is that the fires were caused (in part) by
weather conditions which were caused (in part) by
climate change which was caused (in part) by the
culture and behaviour of Bastrop residents.
It’s a
hard one to sell at the best of times, and a
disaster is the very worst condition for this
narrative because it is overwhelmed by a much more
attractive story: “we support each other, we are
surrounded by evidence of our love and kindness, we
are tough, we faced a huge challenge and we won
through…and we can do it again”. This does not just
speak to local pride, but the much larger mythology
of frontier town Texas.
And
there are other powerful narratives waiting in the
wings. In other disasters the most powerful
narrative can be one of blame- of the people who
started a fire (leading at times to the demonization
of a supposed arsonist), the government who did not
build the flood defences, the construction companies
who broke building codes, or the emergency services
who failed to do their job.
These
may well be valid arguments, but they also generate
an enemy and victim frame which is far more
compelling that anything offered by climate change.
“It’s their fault and I demand action against them
and restitution” is a much more compelling story
than “it may be my fault or our fault and I demand
that we work together to change the way we live”.
The fatal flaw of the climate change narrative is
that, uniquely among our major problems, it has no
clear enemy at all.
Disasters
are cyclical and create escalating baselines
Human psychology is strongly prone to creating
patterns and comparisons based on the ‘availability’
of comparable events. In terms of environmental
issues people tend to be very poor at noticing
decadal change (and certainly intergenerational
change) because of a
shifting baseline.
Disasters
create intense but isolated events after which, as
the people on Bastrop said, things go back to
‘normal’. The pain and loss of the event generates
an intensified desire that there be a ‘normal’ state
to which one can return, making it harder to people
to accept that there are larger changes underway.
The desire for stability makes people more prone to
see a disaster as being at the extreme end of
natural variations (that is to say part of a normal
cycle).
However,
any extreme event has also created a new baseline.
The next event will be measured against this
baseline and, if this is equivalent or lesser will
reinforce the idea that it was part of a normal
cycle. There is a good chance too that the
collective learning and adaptation to the previous
event will ensure that future events will be more
manageable and have lower human and economic
impacts. This too will reinforce ideas the
perception that such events are not escalating.
The
critical consideration in how events are perceived
is the relationship between an event and the most
recent comparable events, and the time that
separates them. Events that are far apart are
unlikely to be noticed, whereas we could assume a
greater perception of change around events that are
relatively recent, memorable, and clearly
escalating.
Well
this is true to a degree, but then there is a risk
of another problem for events that come too often…..
Repeated
disasters generate hopelessness and powerlessness
The ‘Paradise in Hell’ communitarianism pertains to
events that are relatively rare anomalies in an
otherwise confident and successful society. If
extreme events occur with regularity – especially if
they occur too regularly for communities and
economies to recover fully- they could generate a
sense of despair and helplessness.
I
suspect that the most likely response to regular
extreme events would be for people to move or to
bunker down into inward looking family and social
groups. This in turn would work against the outward
looking confidence required to take action on
climate change. People may, under these conditions,
accept the reality of climate change but if they do
so they will have to accept that actions to mitigate
emissions, even across the entire world, will not
prevent further more extreme and severe events.
Different
kinds of extreme climate may have different
impacts on public attitudes
It is
important to differentiate between different kinds
of climate event and suggest that they may have
different outcomes in public attitudes. Droughts and
heatwaves are extended conditions
that encourage
the perception that there is a long term change
underway (a change in the ‘normal’). What is more,
although they generate solidarity in suffering there
is far less of the ‘pull together’ cohesion that
occurs in major disaster events. We could reasonably
infer that they may be more likely to generate an
increase in concern about climate change.
This
conjecture seems to be borne out in recent
research from the Yale Project on Climate
Change Communication which
found an increase between spring and fall of 2012 in
the number of people who reported that had been
they had personally harmed by drought and heat waves
and a slight decline in those reporting harm from
other weather events. Overall the survey found a 5%
increase the number of respondents who would agree
that “global warming is affecting weather in the
United States”.
Conclusion
The relationship between climate disasters and
perceptions of climate change is complex as it is
mediated by socially constructed narratives.
This
means that campaigners and communicators should be
very wary of charging into areas affected by extreme
weather events and assuming that they have fertile
ground for increased activism around change. The
very opposite may be true, especially if they are
perceived as outsiders who are breaking into the
community (which may never have been stronger or
more united) and exploiting its suffering. It would
be hard to imagine anything more counterproductive
than an environmental activist organisation dropping
a banner in the midst of a conservative community
after a major disaster.
The
critical condition for affecting longer term
attitudes is the extent to which events are
translated into a socially held narrative that
speaks to people’s sense of their own identity. And
this requires a steady long term approach – waiting
until the dust has settled and working with trusted
local communicators who can make a case that the
single event fits into a narrative pattern of longer
term change.
George
Marshall,
[log in to unmask]
Director of
Projects,
Climate Outreach
Information Network
Rhwydwaith
Allgymorth a Gwybodaeth am yr Hinsawdd
[snip]
