There is no shortage of compelling literature about climate change. Elizabeth Kolbert and Bill McKibben are two of the best practitioners. Kolbert’s game-changing Field Notes from a Catastrophe opens with the story of how residents of the tiny Alaskan village of Shishmaref are abandoning their homes because progressively warmer temperatures delay the seasonal freezing of the Chukchi Sea. As a result, those living near the Chukchi are vulnerable to storm surges featuring 12-foot waves capable of carrying their houses into the sea.
In Eaarth, McKibben warns that our home planet is already irreversibly altered by climate change: “In 2003, France had the kind of heat wave that will become the new normal as the decades roll on. Not only did thirty thousand people die because of heat stress, but corn production fell by a third, fruit harvests by a quarter, and wheat by a fifth. The jovial notion that we’ll compensate by simply moving farther north eventually becomes absurd.”
To save what is left of the only planet we have, McKibben builds on the argument he made in Deep Economy, in which he urged readers to connect more with local communities and be more resilient. Though he concedes: “If you think about the cramped future long enough, for instance, you can end up convinced you’ll be standing guard over your vegetable path with your shotgun, warding off the marauding gang that’s after your carrots.”
From there, it’s a just a short hop, skip and a jump to the dystopian future envisioned by the likes of James Howard Kuntsler and Richard Heinberg.
In Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World, an apocalyptic manifesto of left-wing paranoia, Heinberg writes:
Perhaps, as I have indicated already, the collapse of industrial societies is at this point unavoidable. Still more distressing is the likelihood that the collapse will not occur in a measured, controlled manner. … Our first instinctual thought must inevitably travel along the lines of personal and family survival. Where should we go? What would we need? What sort of climate, how much garden space? What would be our water source? Should we stock up on guns and ammo?
It doesn’t take long, following that path, to arrive at a dead end. It is difficult to plan for personal survival in the context of unpredictable social chaos. If I have a garden but my neighbors are hungry, I must either defend my land with deadly force or watch my crops disappear. But what if someone else has more guns, or comes when I am asleep?
With children to raise and bills to pay, how―really, now―how are we supposed to respond?
Stephen and Rebekah Hren responded by digging in their heels and building a passive-solar house constructed entirely of clay, sand, and straw. Unfortunately, their new home was located 30 miles away from their jobs and their daily commute consumed the equivalent of a month’s worth of electricity. Attempts to grow their own food and raise chickens turned out to be much more difficult than anticipated. Meanwhile, they missed their friends, all of whom still lived in the city.
To their credit, the Hrens turned their experiment in off-the-grid living into a book of lessons for anyone interested in reducing their carbon footprint. The Carbon-Free Home contains 36 projects that take motivated do-it-yourselfers through the process of basic energy conservation to recycling laundry graywater.
My own response to climate change has been much less constructive than the Hrens’ and is best described as paralytic horror. My compulsive reading on the topic combined with evidence that climate change has arrived (Hurricanes Katrina, Irene, and Sandy; New England’s winter of 2015; deathly European heat waves; that flooding in Pakistan) have convinced me that we are on a fast track to doom. In bleak moments of contemplation, I am haunted by a passage from How the West Was Warmed, a collection of essays from experts in science, business, and the environment documenting Colorado’s landscape:
Like most scientists, I have long been aware of the hypothesis that the burning of fossil fuels in the last two centuries has unnaturally increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Still, I didn’t make much of the connection between my study of ancient greenhouse ecosystems and modern climate change. … This changed for me in 2005 with the flooding of New Orleans in August and the severe reduction of Arctic sea ice in September. The first event showed the potential scale of natural disasters, while the second event made it clear that the polar regions would be where the effects of global warming would first become obvious. I remembered my summers in Ellesmere Island. Looking for insight from the Greenland ice core records, I found the studies of Richard Alley from Penn State that showed that a major warming event 11,600 years ago had happened in less than three years.
Think about that: Less than three years.
Better yet, don’t think about it.
And this is the problem, isn’t it? When you think this problem through, you realize that you are better off just not thinking about it. Or, as an essay in the London Review of Books about George Marshall’s new book on climate change (titled, appropriately enough Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired To Ignore Climate Change) notes: perhaps we are literally incapable of thinking through the issue.
Most discussions of climate change start from the curious assumption that if we can just give people the information they need, they will demand action, and then the politicians will have to take action, and then we can begin tackling the problem.
Of course, this approach is scientifically proven not to work. On an episode of The Brain Science Podcast, Dr. Carol Tavris, author of Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), explains why to host Ginger Campbell, MD:
People are forever saying, ‘What is the matter with that person? We’ve provided them with completely clear evidence that they’re wrong on this point. Why aren’t they saying, ‘Gee, thank you so much for this information …’ Well, you know what people are more likely to say, don’t you. They’re going to tell you to go and get lost, and take your stupid study with you.”
…
[Cognitive dissonance] is the mental discomfort we feel when two ideas are in conflict with each other, not in harmony. … So, it is dissonant if you believe the world is flat and someone gives you evidence that actually, no, it’s a cube—OK?—some evidence that is discrepant with something that you believe. You will feel a state of dissonance. It’s very uncomfortable, and we are motivated to reduce it.
And how are we motivated to reduce it? Not by adjusting our beliefs. We reduce it by spinning the facts to fit our beliefs. We do this to such an extent, Tavris explains, that cognitive dissonance actually makes us stupid (though she does not put it that way):
Once we have a belief, we see the information that will confirm that belief, and we stop seeing what we don’t want to see, don’t expect to see, have no wish to see. That’s the blind spot in how we perceived what other people say and do, how we evaluate our own behavior. We just have that blind spot. We want to see the evidence that confirms our beliefs, and we want to minimize, we want to forget anything that is dissonant or discrepant.
Not surprisingly, this is exactly how it plays out with climate change politics. Presenting people with the facts, Kingsnorth writes in his review of Marshall’s book, “is almost completely the wrong way round.”
From Don’t Even Think About It:
Everyone, experts and non-experts alike, converts climate change into stories that embody their own values, assumptions and prejudices. … When asked about recent weather in their own area, people who are already disposed to believe in climate change will tend to say it’s been warmer. People who are unconvinced about climate change will say it’s been colder. Farmers in Illinois … emphasised or played down extreme events depending on whether or not they accepted climate change.
Therefore, political conservatives who see the issue of climate change as a liberal plot (with former Vice President Al Gore at its center) to raise taxes and restore Jimmy Carter’s solar panels the the roof of the White House, are simply never going to believe that houses are falling into the Chukchi Sea because of warmer temperatures.
Even though it is, in fact, true that houses are falling into the Chukchi Sea because of warmer temperatures.
So imagine my shock when I was unexpectedly presented with information that directly conflicts with my belief that climate change is the apocalyptic crisis that Bill McKibben portrays it to be, and that I found this information so persuasive and compelling that I have actually changed my mind about climate change.
While listening to an interview of science writer Matt Ridley (author of The Rational Optimist) by economist Russ Roberts on the EconTalk podcast, Ridley explained that the data used to create the infamous hockey stick graph was, in essence, cherry-picked. (The hockey stick graph shows the temperature of the earth over the last 1000 years. From the first year through the 19th century, it is essentially flat and then it shoots up dramatically in the 20th century as temperatures rise as a result of the unprecedented release of carbon fuels into the atmosphere. In 2001, the graph, which got its name because it looks like an upturned hockey stick, was included in the “Summary for Policymakers” section of the report on climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, and it was also included in Gore’s documentary “In Inconvenient Truth”―exposure that turned the graph into an iconic symbol of climate change.)
Now it turned out that there were two things badly wrong with [the data used to create the hockey stick graph]. One was that many of the data sets, the most dominant data set of all, was from bristlecone pine trees in the American West, which had been explicitly gathered by scientists who knew they were measuring a different phenomenon, namely the fact that overgrazing in that area had caused tree bark wounds, which resulted in rather rapid growth as the tree tried to cover up the wounds if you like–of course stripped bark. But any way, the point was nobody who was actually measuring the tree rings of bristlecone pine trees thought that bristlecone pine tree ring width reflected temperature. So that data shouldn’t have been used. And I’m simplifying a bit here–there’s a lot of other details and a lot of other data to discuss. But the second problem, if you like, was that the statistical filter through which the data was passed, called short-centering, resulted in any data series which showed a 20th century optic being vastly exaggerated. Being able to influence the final outcome more than a hundred times. In other words, the statistical method was–and this was beautifully demonstrated by Ross McKitrick and Steve Macintyre, Canadian economist and mathematician, basically, who were incredibly diligent in tracking this down. And they showed that actually this method was fishing out any data with a hockey stick shape and giving it undue emphasis. So, what happens if you leave the bristlecone pines out, and one other paper from the Gaspé Peninsula in Canada? And the answer is if you do that the hockey stick disappears altogether.
The only reason I was receptive to Ridley’s critique of the hockey stick graph is because earlier in the interview he compared it to the sloppy science that resulted in 40 years of hysteria about dietary fat:
And, of course, you know the whole point of science is that, as Richard Feynman famously said, ‘Science is in the business of proving that experts are wrong.’ And you know, until very recently, 97% of medics agreed that cholesterol was the cause of heart disease. Now, that’s gone. That theory is wrong. Pretty well everybody – well, not pretty well everybody, but gradually, most people are realizing that that just ain’t true.
I understand the dietary fat fiasco, and Ridley’s analogy created enough of an opening in my mind to consider what he was saying about climate change science. After listening to this episode, I read some essays by Ridley on the topic of climate change and started googling around. Imagine my surprise to learn that there have been multiple reports in credible publications ranging from Scientific American to MIT Technology Review about whether or not climate change is going to kill the planet before my children reach adulthood. Despite my consumption of information related to climate change, I had somehow missed all of this. Cognitive dissonance, anyone?
To be clear, Ridley is not disputing the fact that the climate is changing. But he does dispute the claim that climate change is the apocalypse in waiting. The distinction is significant. By taking the end of civilization out of the climate change discussion, we can legitimately bring hope and optimism into it.
We can also reframe the policy discussions taking place about how to best deal with the impact of climate change (the destructive hurricanes, the massive heat waves, and those houses dropping into the Chukchi). Is denying electricity to some of the most impoverished people on the planet in order to reduce carbon emissions a legitimate response to climate change? It might be if we are trying to stave off the end of the planet in less than 20 years’ time. But it is most certainly not otherwise.
The climate is changing. We need to adapt on an individual and societal level. But as we move forward, it is helpful to consider what science really is telling us―and what it is not. The rhetorical application of the apocalypse to this debate has not served us―or the planet―well at all.