Don't Even Think About It (15 page)

As I continued to speak to people working in other disciplines, I found that, curiously, climate change happened to be the perfect problem from their perspectives too. Economists like Lord Stern describe it as the “perfect market failure.” The moral philosopher Stephen Gardiner describes it as the “perfect moral storm.”

This view was writ large in a major conference held at Yale University in 2005, which concluded that climate change is “almost perfectly designed to test the limits of any modern society’s capacity for response—one might even call it the ‘perfect problem’ for its uniquely daunting confluence of forces.”

So, is climate change really a perfect problem from all of these perspectives? Or does it just seem that way because the narratives that are constructed around it embody, so perfectly, the interests of the people who shaped them? This is an important question because defining climate change as the “perfect problem” triggers frames of powerlessness and hopelessness that feed denial.

In terms of proximity (one of the greatest cognitive obstacles), climate change is a mid-range problem. There are always threats that are even more distant in time and space. Down the road from me in Mid Wales is the Near Earth Objects Information Centre, which tracks extraterrestrial objects that might collide with Earth. It is a small, plain building that looks rather like a brick retirement bungalow. This is not so surprising, because the center is mostly funded out of the army pension of its director, Major Jay Tate. He and his doughty team of volunteers seem to be unable to get any decent funding for a threat that has no corporate interests (as the environmentalist Bill McKibben likes to say, no one makes fifty-five billion dollars in the meteorite industry) and that is so distant, so uncertain, and to many people so unlikely, that very few people take it seriously.

Except, strangely, climate change deniers. One of the center’s strongest supporters is Benny Peiser, the director of leading British denial think tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Ten years ago, Peiser, who warns constantly about the exaggerated risk of climate change, was alerting anyone who would listen that a half-mile-wide asteroid, named NT7, was heading straight for Earth. In recognition of his contribution to asteroid worry, the International Astronomical Union named a six-mile-wide asteroid in his honor: 7107 Peiser is officially listed on NASA’s website. Peiser’s own website, meanwhile, routinely savages NASA’s climate scientists.

Another enthusiastic supporter of the center is U.S. Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican from California, who has been working hard to convene a House hearing on protection from “near Earth objects,” which he describes as a “real and tangible danger.” Rohrabacher is, however, adamant that we do not need any protection from climate change, which, he says, is categorically
not
caused by carbon dioxide. He has even suggested facetiously that prehistoric climate variation was caused by “dinosaur flatulence.”

Whatever they say, climate deniers are clearly not rejecting climate science because of scientific uncertainty or the exaggeration of the threat. One is rather inclined to think that their entire pool of worry has been displaced by large rocks.

Nor is action to slow climate change impossibly costly: We may be reluctant to change our way of life, but everyone can remember what it was like to live in a society with lower emissions, and we all know that it was not that bad—in some ways it was better. By all of the indices, happiness in developed nations peaked in the early 1970s, when Americans drove 60 percent less and flew 80 percent less. Was it so bad? The really important things: family, friends, community, faith, joy, excitement, laughter, passion, and beauty could, if anything, be enhanced in a low-carbon society. And sex is, beyond any argument, entirely carbon neutral.

So addressing climate change may be challenging, but it is not the perfect cognitive challenge by a long stretch. Problems that are without any precedent, or are reported by entirely unreliable sources, or affect our closest relationships—now those are the hard ones. The 1956 sci-fi film
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
ends with the disheveled Dr. Miles Bennell desperately trying to persuade the FBI that his friends and children had been taken over by aliens who hid themselves in giant sea pods. Now it really would be hard to get anyone to believe in that.

Then again, strangely, some people do. In 2012 David Icke, a new age guru, managed to fill the largest football stadium in the UK for an eleven-hour monologue on the takeover of shape-shifting reptilians from the constellation Draco. Apparently these “Reptoids,” who now rule the world, have taken human form and include the Queen, Al Gore, and the entire Bush family. Icke describes climate change as a “monumental scam,” showing, once again, that people can believe just about anything if it lines up with their worldview.

Taking a step back, climate change has many aspects that are considerably less daunting than they might otherwise have been. These are not reasons to be cheerful but perhaps reasons to be somewhat less despondent.

For example, it is extremely fortunate that climate change is occurring now, during the longest prolonged peace in the developed world since the emergence of the modern nation state, and at a time when we have the combination of technology, wealth, education, and international cooperation that might be able to respond to it. This is not perfect timing, but it is just about as good as it could be. What is more, the countries causing climate change will also be impacted by it. While this clearly has its own misfortune, one positive result is the increased likelihood of action by these countries. If that self-interest did not exist—if, say, the extreme impacts were concentrated entirely in Africa—I fear that developed countries would do absolutely nothing.

So climate change is very difficult, but not
perfectly
difficult. In theory we can deal with this—it is all a matter of degree. Humans are smart, but are we smart enough? We are cooperative, but are we cooperative enough? Those people who understand and get passionate about this issue are numerous, but are they numerous enough? We have a little time, but is it enough?

If there are any grounds at all for regarding climate change as a “perfect” cognitive challenge, it is not because of its specific qualities but because it is so
multivalent
—that is to say, it is so open to multiple meanings and interpretations. It provides us with none of the defining qualities that would give it a clear identity—no deadlines, no geographic location, no single cause, solution, or enemy. Our brains, constantly scanning for the cues that we need to process and categorize information, find none, and we are left grasping at air. But we still need these cues—we cannot deal with it otherwise—and so we create and impose our own. This is a dangerous situation, leaving climate change wide open for miscategorization, confirmation bias, and the opportunity for us to “believe what we want to believe.”

This is the reason, when asked why we are taking so little action on climate change, that everyone seems to shape the problem in his or her own image. Climate scientists say that people don’t understand the science. Environmental campaigners say that the political process is corrupted by oil companies. Oil companies say that the political process is corrupted by environmental campaigners. Mark Berliner, a professor of statistics at Ohio State University, says that our failure comes from our “aversion to statistical thinking.” And communications specialists such as myself say—lo and behold—that the main reason why people have not responded to this threat has been because of failed communications. If climate change really is the “elephant in the room,” it is a pitch-black room, and, like the blind men in the ancient fable, we are all feeling different parts of it and drawing our own, culturally biased conclusions about what they might be.

But the ambiguity of climate change extends even wider and threatens to infect those things that already seemed most safe, secure, and familiar. It suggests that the way of life that we associate with our comfort and the protection of our families is now a menace: that our well-meaning actions might hurt the ones we love, that gases we have believed to be benign are now poisonous, that our familiar environment is becoming dangerous and uncertain.

Drawing on folktales and horror stories, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, recognized the destabilizing psychological impact of something that seems to be almost familiar, yet is not. He called this
das Unheimliche
, usually translated into English as the “uncanny condition.” Climate change is inherently uncanny: Weather conditions, and the high-carbon lifestyles that are changing them, are extremely familiar and yet have now been given a new menace and uncertainty.

So we have a dangerous combination. Climate change is exceptionally
multivalent
, enabling a limitless range of self-serving interpretation. And it is
uncanny
, creating a discomfort and unease that we seek to resolve by framing it in ways that give it a familiar shape and form. These two factors combine, to add a third term to the mix, to make it an exceptionally
wicked problem
.

The concept of a “wicked problem” was first formulated in 1973 by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, urban planners at U.C. Berkeley. Originally they applied the concept to policy planning, though in recent years it has gained much wider currency because it fits so well with intractable global issues such as terrorism, financial crises, and, of course, climate change, which has often been called the “ultimate”  wicked problem.

Simple problems, what Rittel and Webber called “tame problems,” have defined causes, objectives, and outputs. Wicked problems, though, are multifaceted in every respect—they are incomplete, contradictory, and constantly changing. Tame problems may be very complicated, but wicked problems are
complex
. As a result, there is no point at which one has enough information to make decisions. Instead, wicked problems demand a continuous process of evaluation and redefinition.

Really, though, there is a no definitive definition of a wicked problem other than to say (take a deep breath here) that, by definition, it defies having a clear definition because it keeps evolving according to the solutions we evolve to solve it. You can’t learn about a wicked problem without trying solutions, but every solution you try creates new consequences and new wicked problems.

A problem becomes wicked when it is a symptom of a large chain of adjacent issues, with multiple partners, whose understanding of the problem is also dependent on their own different ideas for solving it. Thus, every different definition of the problem generates a different set of solutions. And every set of solutions creates a different definition of the problem.

We can define climate change as an economic problem, a technological problem, a moral problem, a human rights problem, an energy problem, a social justice problem, a land use problem, a governance problem, an ideological battle between left and right worldviews, or a lack of respect for God’s creation. Each approach will generate different responses, different ways to share the costs, and, especially, different language with which to justify action. Or inaction, because some people will refuse to accept that climate change is a problem at all. This is yet another quality that it shares with other wicked problems.

For Rittel and Webber, the fundamental rule for handling wicked problems is that they must
not
be treated like tame problems. Tame problems can be solved by a series of distinct steps: First, understand the problems, then gather information, then pull that information together, and then work out and apply solutions. For wicked problems, however, this type of scheme does not work. They argue that one cannot understand a wicked problem without knowing about its context, one cannot search for information without knowing the solution, one cannot first understand, then solve.

Climate change refuses to fit any structure of cause and effect because it is never clear whether one is looking at the actual cause, or a cause created by the way we have chosen to define the problem. Do we find climate change hard to accept because it lies in the future, or have we chosen to place it in the future to make it hard to accept? Is climate change really uncertain, or do we just tell it that way? Are the solutions too challenging, or do we just describe them as such?

So calling climate change the perfect problem is just another attempt to define it and tame it. Is it a perfect problem, a non-perfect problem, a non-problem? Or is it none of these things and just (choosing a word that best expresses our own biased interpretation) extremely, irrevocably, singularly, horribly
__________
?

Coda 2

It is again time to
recap what has been said so far.

I have shown that the processes of attention are fundamental to our thinking. We are “wired” to scan incoming information for the cues that tell us whether we should pay attention to it and how we can categorize it.

Many of these processes are innate and intuitive, formed early in our long evolutionary history. The issues with greatest salience—that demand our attention—are those that are here, now, and contain a clear visible threat from an identifiable enemy. I argued in the earlier chapters that the social cues provided by the people around us also compel us to pay attention and I have shown that climate change is often subject to a socially constructed silence that strips it of these cues.