Source: BBC World Service
URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02mnn29#auto
Date: 31/03/2015
Event: Are We Tired of Talking About Climate Change?
Credit: BBC World Service
People:
Helena Merriman: BBC World Service - this is Helena Merriman with The Inquiry. This week: Are We Tired of Talking About Climate Change? Now, Inquiry regulars will know that we normally start this programme with a story. This week, we can't - and that's because our question is about a story that's gone missing. We've noticed that the world's media seems to have dropped something - climate change. Yes, there's the odd story here and there. But a subject that dominated the news five years ago seems to have largely disappeared.
Since there's a consensus, amongst the majority of the world's scientists, that temperatures are rising, most likely driven by human behaviour, we wanted to know why climate change coverage has been drying up. Are we tired of talking about it? If so, why?
Male voice: Part 1: A Disappearing Story.
Max Boykoff: In the late 1990s, I was living in Central America, in Honduras, working in agriculture. And Hurricane Mitch, a Category 5 hurricane, tore through the entire region.
Helena Merriman: This is Max Boykoff. He's telling me about a defining moment in his life - 26 years old and on a volunteer project in Honduras.
Max Boykoff: I was down in the southern part of Honduras and had gathered with a number of community members. We could sense this ramping up - we lost power and started to see the heavy rainfall.
Helena Merriman: That rain resulted in floods, killing over 10,000. When he got back to the US, Max Boykoff started a PhD, looking at what made places such as Honduras vulnerable to hurricanes. As his interest in the environment grew, he started looking more closely at how the media covered it.
Max Boykoff: I was looking around for this kind of research looking at the quality and content of media coverage of climate change, and I realised that this hadn't been done, to date.
Helena Merriman: Since no-one else was monitoring climate change coverage, he started a project himself. It's called -
Max Boykoff: The Media and Climate Change Observatory.
Helena Merriman: It's based at the University of Colorado and it's the only one of its kind.
Max Boykoff: This is a project that monitors 50 sources around the world, across 25 countries on 6 continents. And what we seek to do is put our fingers on the pulse of the ebbs and flows of coverage of climate change, over time. So we monitor this, month to month - it's not an exhaustive reading of all media accounts everywhere around the globe, across all platforms. But rather, this is just a way to get us talking productively.
Helena Merriman: The project started 10 years ago.
Max Boykoff: In 2004, there were relatively low levels of coverage. Around 2006 into 2007, there was an uptick in the amount of coverage. There was a high water mark in 2009.
Female newsreader: The UN climate change conference has opened in Copenhagen. Representatives from over 100 ..
Male newsreader: Delegates from around the world gather in Copenhagen, for the largest global warming conference in history...
Male newsreader: Denmark welcomes the planet to the conference designed to save the planet. We'll hear live from...
Male newsreader: Facing a clock some say has ticked down to zero, today 192 nations came together, to take on a potential global catastrophe...
Connie Hedegaard: This is our chance. If we miss this one...
Helena Merriman: For a few months, climate change was everywhere. It was the story of the year. But then -
Max Boykoff: From that high water mark to 2014, coverage has dropped. It's dropped 36% globally, it's dropped 26% in the US and as much as 55% in the UK.
Helena Merriman: Does that suggest that we're getting tired of talking about climate change?
Max Boykoff: Is this getting to be a topic that doesn't garner as much attention as it once did? There may be something to that.
Helena Merriman: Anecdotal evidence backs up those numbers.
Max Boykoff: Within the last year, here in the United States, National Public Radio reduced its environment reporting team, from three to one reporter. So we see examples of this unfolding quite regularly. There's certainly newsroom pressures, there's shrinking time to deadline, there's reduced resources to cover complex issues such as climate change, that require a certain level of investigation, a certain level of familiarity with the contours and the nuances of the topics.
Helena Merriman: Online news sites are, in some cases, stepping in to fill the gap. If you know where to look, there are hundreds of them covering climate change. But it's becoming harder to bump into that kind of coverage. Mainstream news outlets aren't reporting climate change as they were, back in 2009. So what happened? Why the drop?
Male voice: Part 2: The Trauma.
Jennifer Morgan: I'm Jennifer Morgan, I'm the Director of the Climate Change program at the World Resources Institute. I direct a program of about 50 staff around the world, that are working on solutions to climate change. I represent us at the UN negotiations, the Kyoto Protocol - I think I've been to thousands of meetings, over my 20-year career, on these issues. Millions of hours, 20 years... [Laughs.]
Helena Merriman: Hundreds of those hours were spent at that UN summit in Copenhagen, six years ago, at the peak of media interest in climate change. What happened at that meeting plays a crucial part in this story.
Jennifer Morgan: Copenhagen was supposed to be the moment when over 190 countries came together and agreed a new, legally binding agreement to address climate change. It was very much a great excitement and anticipation of really trying to finally get a global agreement, since the Kyoto years.
Helena Merriman: And so what was it like, when you got there? Do you remember that, sort of, first scene when you got through the door?
Jennifer Morgan: Oh, I remember it, I can paint it now - walking in with a colleague of mine I'd been working with for years, and just looking at each other and saying "Okay, we're here. Okay, we have to do it, we have to get this done. We have to grasp this moment - these moments don't happen very often". [Sound of people chanting "Listen to the islands!"] The scene itself, in the conference centre, it was very dynamic - there were many, many students there that had come in from around the world. So you would have, in some moments, kind of impromptu little demonstrations or speeches by some of the delegates. [Sound of female delegate animatedly talking.] I remember the delegate from Tuvalu who was a real hero for youth, giving a press conference and getting cheers. Plus you had all of the kind of what they called "side events", workshops happening on research that people were doing - it was very much of a kind of an open trade fair.
Female delegate: ...get away with anything less than a legally binding treaty!
[Applause and shouts of "Legal treaty now!", "Legal treaty now!"]
Jennifer Morgan: You had these rooms, where negotiators would sit for hours...
Helena Merriman: ... and hours, and hours... After about a hundred of those hours, the carnival atmosphere began to fade. It became clear the negotiations weren't going to plan.
Jennifer Morgan: In the middle of the second week, normally what happens is that options started to get narrowed down and you can, kind of, see the package emerging. And that wasn't happening, and that's when I think we all started to get very concerned.
Helena Merriman: At the end of the two weeks...
Male newsreader: Last-minute scramble in Copenhagen - is a climate change deal still possible? Obama demands action, not talk, but the talks continue, with no sign of an agreement...
Male newsreader: The UN summit is said to be teetering on the brink of failure...
Female newsreader: Well, reports from the Danish capital suggest that negotiators have so far failed to resolve differences about the size of emissions cuts, and...
Male newsreader: Two weeks of strenuous talks on climate change in Copenhagen wound down with an agreement, but it was non-binding. Was it to avoid an utter failure? And what comes next?
Helena Merriman: China's chief negotiator had been barred by security, for the first few days, sessions routinely suspended in the name of finishing on time, developing countries said they'd been ignored and the EU was missing from a final meeting, where a last-minute non-binding deal was drawn up.
Jennifer Morgan: It was terrible.
Helena Merriman: What was the mood, immediately following the conference?
Jennifer Morgan: An exhausted defeat... Just the fatigue, particularly from the European side, and just wanting to take a break for a while, from this international diplomacy stuff. You have to think about these negotiators - their families hadn't seen them, you know, the personal sacrifice - it sounds crazy but, just in believing in trying to make something happen, I think it was a trauma, just to put so much blood, sweat and tears into it.
Helena Merriman: So traumatic that in the years following the summit, many politicians avoided the subject altogether.
Jennifer Morgan: After Copenhagen, I think there was a sense of: there needed to be a bit of a time-out, on the world leaders' side of things. So it went into, you know, definitely a very low level of attention, for a few years. The relationships of heads of state, after Copenhagen - some were quite strained. Even months after, when I had some meetings with heads of state, I just found that the level of trust and, kind of, just a - almost like being psychologically burned by this, had stuck around, and I think that's also had a real impact on the willingness of these individuals to stay engaged.
Helena Merriman: Just as the media had tired of talking about climate change, so had world leaders. It dropped off the agenda at summits and conferences. As well as recovering from the trauma of Copenhagen, politicians had their hands full with Syria, the economy and Ukraine. But is that all there is to it? Or is there something more fundamental going on?
Male voice: Part 3: Our Ancient Brain.
Robert Gifford: My house happens to look out over the Pacific Ocean, and so, from a North American's perspective, I'm literally at the edge of the world, looking across 10, 15,000 miles of ocean over to Japan, and so it feels like I'm on the edge of the world. But I think it gives me, kind of, a broad perspective.
Helena Merriman: The kind of broad perspective that helps, when you're an environmental psychologist. This is Robert Gifford - he teaches at the University of Victoria in Canada. And he's been looking at why those amongst the general public who accept a link between human behaviour and climate change aren't then doing much about it. Is there something about the way our brains are wired, that makes climate change a turn-off? Eight years ago, he started compiling a list of these psychological barriers.
Robert Gifford: I will now list those off for you. Number 1: ignorance. Number 2: environmental numbness. Number 3: uncertainty. Number 4: judgemental discounting. Number 5: optimism bias. Number 6: lack of perceived behavioural control. Number 7: ancient brain.
Helena Merriman: Seven reasons - quite enough to be getting on with. But, over the years, he's discovered more.
Robert Gifford: Number 8: world views. Number 9: system justification. Number 10: suprahuman powers. Number 11: techno-salvation. Number 12: social comparison and norms.
Helena Merriman: And more...
Robert Gifford: Number 13: perceived inequity. Number 14: sunk costs... perceived program inadequacy. Number 20: reactants.
Helena Merriman: Twenty - a nice, round number. But...
Robert Gifford: Number 21: denial. Number 22: functional risk... Number 30: confirmation bias. Number 31: dispositional pessimism.
Helena Merriman: If you know of a 32nd reason, do let him know. In the meantime, we're going to home in on just four of the 31. First up - our ancient brain.
Robert Gifford: According to the neurologists, our brain physically hasn't developed much for about 30,000 years, so at that time we were mostly wandering around the savanna or places like it, and our main concerns were very immediate - feeding ourselves right now, worrying about anybody who might try to take our territory. There was very little thinking, at that time, about what might happen in 5 years, 10 years or 100 kilometres or miles away - it was all very here and now.
So, we still have the same brain. And we are capable of thinking about the future, obviously, we're capable of planning. But the kind of default is to stick into the here and now, which is not very good for thinking about climate change, which is a problem that, for many people, is more in the future and further away, or at least we think it is.
Helena Merriman: And then there's environmental numbness.
Robert Gifford: Well, as any advertiser knows, if you don't change your message, people will just tune out. And so environmental numbness is: yes, I've heard that message before and so we're open to - always open to new messages and pay more attention to new messages. So, if governments or policymakers repeat the same message too often, people just tune out, after a while.
Helena Merriman: We also tend to tune out when we feel helpless, he says. He calls this "perceived behavioural control".
Robert Gifford: "What can I do about this global problem? I'm just one person, and there's 7 plus billion people on the planet - I just don't have much control over this, so therefore I'm not going to do much about it, because my contribution - even if I did everything - wouldn't make much difference. I'm a drop in the bucket, or less."
Helena Merriman: And amid those feelings of helplessness and numbness, when a climate change story comes along with elements of uncertainty, we don't handle it well.
Robert Gifford: Uncertainty is a really big problem. We've learned, in my own laboratory, from experimental evidence, that when people feel a bit uncertain about an environmental problem - in terms of climate change, if the future temperature might vary from half a degree increase to one and a half degrees increase - people say "Well, it's probably only going to be half a degree increase, so I'll keep flying to some tropical place." It's a kind of natural human tendency to kind of interpret information in a way that suits our personal interests.
Helena Merriman: These natural human tendencies - interpreting information in a way that benefits us, being unimaginative about long-term risks, becoming numb to a repeated message and switching off when we feel helpless - make us ill-suited for maintaining an interest in climate change, whatever our views on the subject. And those are only four of the 31 psychological barriers on Professor Gifford's list - a list he describes as the diagnosis of a problem. He says if environmentalists want people to stay engaged, it's up to them to find a solution. And that's exactly what our next expert witness is trying to do.
Male voice: Part 4: An Inconvenient Story.
Joe Smith: I'm not sure that people need to engage with climate change at all.
Helena Merriman: Meet Joe Smith. You might be surprised to hear that he's an environmentalist. He teaches geography at the Open University, in the UK. He says it's not just how the media has reported the story of climate change that's made people switch off. It's the raw material itself.
Joe Smith: It's more or else unreportable, if you just describe it, on the page. It's complex, inter-disciplinary, the findings drip out over time, and the boundary between science and policy and politics is a very messy one. And, for all of those reasons, I think it's a real challenge for the media.
Helena Merriman: He's now working on several projects, trying to find ways of reviving public interest in climate change - and he's ruffling feathers.
Joe Smith: My message - that to communicate about climate change, we might not want to communicate about climate change - probably means I've dropped off a couple of Christmas card lists, and I think it's also true that criticisms of environmental NGOs, on my part, are a little unfair, because they've got a very long list of to-dos. But I do think there's some wasted effort.
Helena Merriman: Wasted effort, such as the fear narrative - the "greatest threat to humanity" story. In 2006, millions sat in front of Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth. It won awards and became a global phenomenon.
Al Gore: This is what would happen in Florida... Around Shanghai, home to 40 million people. The area around Calcutta, 60 million... Here's Manhattan - the World Trade Center Memorial would be under water. Think of the impact of a couple of hundred thousand refugees, and then imagine a hundred million... We have to act together, to solve this global crisis... Our ability to live is what is at stake...
Joe Smith: The idea that we will mobilise any more people with fear messaging is wrong. I think we've knocked at the door of everyone that might respond to such a thing, but you've then also got to ask whether it's an accurate and a full way of telling the science. I think it is more respectful to the nature of the science to say that it's one of humanity's most ambitious questions, of the last couple of decades and the next couple of decades.
Helena Merriman: Presenting the science as a finished piece of work - something that can no longer be argued with - is a mistake, he says.
Joe Smith: I think there was a tactical wrong turning, in suggesting that by insisting that "The debate's over, we can move on to the action" - it somehow implied that science was complete, that there were simply some facts on which we now stood. And that, of course, left lots of space for those people who have arguments about the actions on climate change to stand in the way of us having a proper public conversation about those actions, because they were able to pick apart minor details in the science. It's not just that climate science isn't finished, it's actually unfinishable.
Helena Merriman: His solution? Make the science exciting.
Joe Smith: You know, the rest of science - particle physics, cosmology - is allowed to be rather saucy. I would love to get to the point where we allow climate change science to simply be interesting, enchanting even. As fascinating as any area of science, because it's a hugely ambitious and compelling mission.
Helena Merriman: You don't need to talk about climate change head-on, he says. There are more compelling ways of talking about it.
Joe Smith: So, if you want to talk to a business person, you want to talk about energy security for their business or energy security for their nation. If you want to talk to a parent at the school gate, you want to talk to them about the health of their child, their experience of the trip to school - wouldn't they be happier walking and cycling? And that just gives you a feel for the way actually talking about climate change doesn't have to involve talking about climate change, to actually lead us to do some really, really substantial actions on it. We don't need to wear a climate change T-shirt.
Helena Merriman: Fewer T-shirts, then, and less talk of melting ice.
Robert Gifford: Most of us who are trying to do something about this have realised, for example, that the polar bear metaphor is not a great one. It's far away - yes, we have some sympathy for this poor polar bear but it's not close enough to our own lives.
Jennifer Morgan: I think there's definitely a shift in narrative, showing how much better what your quality of live can be with renewable energy - how you're going to get to work, what public transport is. If you connect that, it becomes something very real and, as we know, all politics is local.
Helena Merriman: Some environmentalists are doing this already, starting local, positive campaigns around food waste and second-hand clothes rather than warning about threats to humanity. And that's because, in answer to our original question, it's clear that we are tired of talking about climate change. It's slipped down the agenda, after that disastrous Copenhagen summit. But we've also been told that it's our psychological makeup that's to blame. It means that we're almost designed to switch off from the subject. So, in the coming years, perhaps the greater challenge for environmentalists isn't figuring out the science, but finding a way of telling a story about climate change that keeps us switched on.