Don't Even Think About It (18 page)

The e-mail scandal shows the power of words and the frames they trigger. The main allegations revolved around a single phrase in the e-mails: “let’s use Mike’s trick to hide the decline.” The decline can be readily explained (it is a decline in tree growth, not temperatures), but it was the use of the word “trick” that triggered the frame of deceit. “Trick” is being used here in a specific scientific usage to mean a clever and elegant solution, but was understood by the lay public in its more common meaning of fraud. The fact that “Mike” was the much-abused climate scientist Michael Mann added an identifiable and familiar enemy to the story.

This is just one of a number of dangerous false friends (words that sound the same but mean something different) that bedevil climate change. In general scientific terminology, uncertainty, theory, error, and manipulation all have far more precise meanings in science than in general use. All the terms in the core lexicon of climate change (anthropogenic, albedo, aerosols, radiation, emissions, greenhouse gases, mitigation, adaptation) emerge from within the scientific discourse without any consideration for their framing. The words
enhance
and
positive
suggest an increase or change to scientists when, to the general public, they suggest an improvement.

It is the U.S. scientist Wallace Broecker who has the dubious claim of having invented and then first used both of the core terms for this problem in a single 1975 article: “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?”

Having two terms is, in itself, a problem, generating confusion and a politicized battle to promote the term that each side assumes will serve its interests. In the late 1980s, the United States and Saudi Arabia lobbied during the world climate negotiations for the language of early resolutions to be changed from “global warming” to “climate change” on the assumption that this sounded less emotive and, more important, had less connection to the burning of fossil fuels.

In an internal memo to Republicans in 2003, communications consultant Frank Luntz argued that the term “climate change” sounds more moderate and controllable. As evidence, he cited one focus group participant saying that climate change “sounds like you’re going from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.” The Bush administration duly followed his advice, and President Bush adopted the term “climate change” in all subsequent speeches. Ironically, climate deniers now accuse environmentalists of seeking to suppress the phrase “global warming” because, they claim, temperatures are no longer increasing. Maybe they should all have waited for some better research: Testing conducted with greater rigor shows that Republicans are more likely to believe in “climate change” than in “global warming.”

Environmental campaigners hate both terms and seek, intermittently, to introduce new phrases. Earth scientist James Lovelock for example, complains that global warming sounds like “a nice duvet on a cold winter’s day” and advocates for the term “global heating.” Other proposals have included “global weirding” and “global climate disruption,” and Al Gore has contributed neologisms like “climate chaos,” “climate crisis,” and more recently, “dirty weather.”

However, although neither “global warming” or “climate change” is ideal, neither is disastrously bad either, and “climate change” has a sufficiently bland emptiness that it allows people to fill it with their own meanings. Seth Godin, a communications specialist, wonders whether calling it “Atmosphere Cancer” or “Pollution Death” might not have garnered more concern. It’s unlikely, since to anyone conservative the terms sound outrageously biased, and to anyone else they sound like heavy metal bands.

Language around climate change is constantly evolving as users experiment with new combinations. “Climate” becomes the single-word signifier for the wider problem (climate crisis/scientists/skeptics/deniers), and the word “carbon” becomes the signifier for the emissions that cause it, such as the term “carbon neutral,” which was chosen by the 2006
New Oxford American Dictionary
as its “word of the year.”

“Carbon” is a dead and emotionally meaningless word without aspiration or inspiration, so, like the element itself, this word is particularly prone to forming compounds with other words. A team at Nottingham University studied the growth and spread of thirty-four new “carbon” phrases in the media and Internet. It started in the 1990s with technical accounting terms (budget, market, credit, allowance, tax). By the early 2000s, it became associated with terms for personal consumption (friendly living, conscious lifestyle, diet), and more recently, it merged with more morally laden meanings (addiction, guilt, dictatorship, indulgence, crusade, morality).

It is unfortunate that the most common compounds of all,
high carbon
and
low carbon
, are used to differentiate lifestyles, economies, and technologies. “High” is a universal frame for status and power. We say high-class, high-end, high quality, high achievement. “Low” is a universal frame for inferiority and social failure. No matter how much you try to bend it, “high-carbon living” sounds intuitively like having champagne in a penthouse and “low-carbon living” sounds like drinking cold tea in a dank basement.

In 2007 the U.S. Supreme Court decided that carbon dioxide could be defined as a pollutant and subject to regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency. In all his speeches, President Barack Obama has duly promoted a new carbon compound, the term “carbon pollution.”

This is part of a deliberate and intelligent attempt to reframe climate change in terms of health, purity, and progress. “Carbon pollution” triggers the deep frames of dirt, corruption, and illness; in contrast, “renewable energy” is promoted as a “clean” energy with associations of cleanliness, freshness, and bright sunlight—and by association, with health, life, and youth. This time, at least, all the narratives, frames, and metaphors line up perfectly, and this is supported by focus group and survey research showing bipartisan support for “clean energy” and action against pollution.

This does not mean that people will readily regard climate change as a form of pollution. Carbon dioxide is hardly ideal as a “pollutant.” It is invisible, odorless, and harmless to human health. Generations of schoolchildren have been taught that it is a natural gas that is vital for life on Earth and that is directly linked with industrial progress and plant growth. Back in the 1950s, Harrison Brown, an atomic scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, claimed that we could double food production by increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. His project, which was endorsed by Albert Einstein, proposed ringing the world with huge coal-fired “carbon-dioxide generators.” It was an insane experiment that we seem to be determined to carry out to the letter.

So, will this attempt to reframe carbon as
pollution
be successful or make any difference? Possibly, but as Dan Kahan of the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School would say, the primary pollution of the issue is from the social meaning that people create rather than the terms themselves. Frames amplify social meaning, not replace it. In any case, things often thrive with bizarrely inappropriate names. RadioShack? Craigslist? Sometimes you just have to work with what you have.

The other building block of narrative is metaphor. Through metaphors, we mobilize our most “available” previous experience to make sense of new information. Metaphors are usually culturally coded, and the choice of a metaphor is itself a social cue, drawing on a back catalog of associations and meanings.

While it is the case that climate change is unprecedented—no human action has altered the very climate itself—the way we think about it involves precedents. As far our brains are concerned, there really is nothing new under the sun. On occasion, communicators just throw the whole lot at it in the hope that something sticks. As one blog said recently:

“The inhabitants of planet Earth are quietly conducting a gigantic experiment. We play Russian roulette with climate and no one knows what lies in the active chamber of the gun.” If the Nazi's constructed gas chambers for millions of victims, ongoing climate change threatens to turn the entire Planet into an open oven on the strength of a Faustian Bargain.

Phew.

Everyone likes to talk about World War II—the most recent experience of mass mobilization for a common purpose against a common enemy. The cover of the April 2008
Time
magazine special issue titled “How to Win the War on Global Warming” was a parody of the most famous photograph of the war, the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, except that this time the soldiers are raising a tree, not a flag.

The Second World War provides an inspiring model for cooperation and shared sacrifice against a common threat. It lives on in climate communications in quotations from Winston Churchill, Rosie the Riveter, the home front, and the holocaust.

Deniers draw on the same wellspring of metaphor. Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, with typical inversionism, says that the struggle over climate change is “a desperate last-ditch Battle of the Bulge type effort by the forces of darkness.” He is talking about good versus evil, Allies versus Nazis, who, in this case, are standing in for environmentalists and their liberal allies.

Godwin’s law, created by Mike Godwin in 1990, states that in any long online discussion, regardless of its topic or scope, someone inevitably makes a comparison to Hitler or the Nazis. No current issue is quite so plagued, on both sides, by resurgent Nazis. Al Gore draws a parallel between fighting global warming and fighting the Nazis. William Gray, a skeptic professor at Colorado State University, says, “Gore believed in global warming almost as much as Hitler believed there was something wrong with the Jews.” The writer Michael Crichton and the skeptic Richard Lindzen freely compare climate science with Nazi race theory.

NASA climate scientist James Hansen went even further when he described the trains loaded with coal heading for power plants as “death trains—no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.” After a complaint from the Anti-Defamation League, Hansen later apologized. No such apology was forthcoming from Andrei Illarionov, an adviser to Russian president Vladimir Putin, who called the Kyoto Protocol “an interstate Auschwitz.” Illarionov had previously rejected the phrase “interstate gulag” as too moderate, and, one suspects, still a little too close to the Russian bone. The best atrocities are those committed by other people.

Because climate change is a wicked problem, these metaphors then frame how we come to think about the issue as a whole. If we think of climate change as a ticking bomb, we see it quite differently than if we think of it as a fever, or a gamble, or a new Apollo space mission or a World War II battle. In each case, we imagine different causes, outcomes, and solutions.

But all of these framings are misleading. They encourage us to see climate change as a finite challenge that can be cured, overcome, or won rather than as an open-ended and irreversible condition that can only be managed. This shapeless multivalent issue readily takes on the form of the metaphors we apply to it and, as I will argue later, this can create a dangerous illusion of familiarity.

22

Communicator Trust

Why the Messenger Is More Important than the Message

In 2007, Greg Craven, a
science teacher at an Oregon high school, posted a nine-minute video on YouTube with the teasing title “The Most Terrifying Video You Will Ever See.” Craven is the unlikely successor to the seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, who sought to “weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is.” With his flipchart and marker pens, Craven weighs the pros and cons of action on climate change and concludes that we should all believe in it because, as Pascal said, if you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.

Craven, though, is no highbrow. He comes across as entirely relaxed, friendly, sincere, somewhat goofy, and utterly trustworthy, chatting in his light cheerful way with the kitchen clutter clearly visible behind him. Craven tells his viewers that in the Internet age, they can take immediate action by simply passing on his video to their friends. This simple admonition not only promoted his homemade video but also anointed it with the social proof of peer referral. It has now had more than six million views, making Craven one of the most successful climate change communicators of all time.

If words are frames and stories are the medium, then the person who communicates them becomes the most important and potentially the weakest link in the chain between scientific information and personal conviction. This sense of trustworthiness is a powerful bias and is entirely driven by the emotional brain and our intuitive ability to separate friends from foes. We ask ourselves: “Is this someone who I can trust on this issue?” “Is he or she honest and knowledgeable?” “Does this person appear to share my concerns and worldview?” and “Is this person approaching me with openness and friendliness?”

This is why, even though three-quarters of Americans still trust climate scientists as a source of information on global warming, they are nearly as inclined to trust television weather forecasters who are greatly less qualified as scientists but have a far more friendly, familiar, and approachable public profile. Unfortunately they also have a disconcertingly high level of climate denial. In a 2010 survey, only half of television weathercasters surveyed believed that climate change is occurring and more than a quarter believed that it is a “scam.”