This isn’t what climate change looks like
ANECDOTES PURPORTING TO SHOW EFFECTS OF GLOBAL WARMING CAN MISLEAD ON REAL IMPACT
Scientists who try to explain climate change to the public with emotional images of parched fields and stories about starving polar bears should stop because they are not only misleading and “ludicrous,” but they may actually do more harm than good, according to new psychological research.
Science communicators should only use stories and images that reflect long-term trends that are unambiguously attributable to climate change, such as rising sea levels or retreating glaciers, according to a new paper in the journal PLOS Biology.
“Snowballs, igloos, a cold winter in Egypt, or a starving polar bear do not satisfy those criteria,” according to psychologists Stephan Lewandowsky and Lorraine Whitmarsh of the University of Bristol.
On the contrary, images of an apocalyptic future “may actually demotivate audiences, triggering denial or apathy instead of engagement.”
Simple anecdotes, images and memes can be misleading “because not all droughts and parched landscapes can be unambiguously attributed to climate change,” they write. “How can we legitimately use the anecdotes and images that we, as humans, find so alluring and convincing without risking scientific inaccuracy?”
It is an old conundrum, and to solve it, Lewandowsky and Whitmarsh draw a contrast between two ways that people evaluate risk: by how one feels, and by what one knows.
When these two contradict each other, it is the feeling that tends to win out, with bizarre effects, such as underestimating the risks of things we enjoy (like alcohol consumption), and overestimating the risks of things we feel less positive about (like genetic modification).
In the political issue of climate change, the picture is complicated by the fact that emotions are easy to come by, but scientific trends take decades to prove, and are complicated to explain. Shortterm weather is also so variable that there is always some extreme sounding anecdote available somewhere, from a spring snowstorm to a winter heat wave.
Anecdotes are easily exploited. In 2015, for example, James Inhofe, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, brought a snowball into the Capitol inside a plastic bag.
“I ask the chair, do you know what this is? It’s a snowball, just from outside here. So it’s very cold out,” he said.
Then he threw it to the president of the Senate. It was February in Washington, D.C.
“Although scientifically ludicrous, Senator Inhofe’s snowball stunt may have resonated with the public, given that people are known to be readily influenced by anecdotes, images and experiences,” Lewandowsky and Whitmarsh write.
They problem, as they put it, is that snowball represents weather. It does not represent climate change appropriately, in the way a retreating glacier does.
So if scientists want to use “legitimate illustrations” of climate change, and not be “counterproductive,” they must give up their scary, pity-inducing pictures of starving polar bears and dead crops. Those are, in their scheme, just “weather,” like Inhofe’s snowball. They are noise that obscures real data.
“Not all starving polar bears are starving because of the deterioration of their Arctic habitat,” they write.
Images of them, however, are common.
Last year, for example, when a picture of an emaciated polar bear circulated on the internet, Catherine McKenna, Minister of Environment and Climate Change, wrote in a tweet: “THIS is what climate change looks like.”
In reality, it was just what a sick old bear looks like. “It’s far more likely that it is starving due to health issues,” polar bear biologist Andrew Derocher said. Another scientist observed that polar bears have no predators, so when they die, it is usually of starvation.
The trouble is that, if a sick bear is the narrative face of climate change, then a healthy bear can just as easily be the face of denial.
It was the same old story a decade ago, when a photo by Amanda Byrd of Mushing Magazine went viral. It was on newspapers around the world, on the day the United Nations issued a major climate change report.
The photo, taken in summer from Canada’s flagship icebreaker the Louis S. St-Laurent, shows two polar bears on a melting ice floe in the Beaufort Sea, north of Barrow, Alaska.
“Their habitat is melting ... beautiful animals, literally being forced off the planet,” said former U.S. vice-president Al Gore in a presentation of his film An Inconvenient Truth, with the photo on the screen behind him. “They’re in trouble, got nowhere else to go.”
This was not even close to true. “It’s just too cute to be true,” a spokesperson for Environment Canada said at the time. “You have to keep in mind that the bears are not in danger at all. It was, if you will, their playground for 15 minutes, you know what I mean?”
Those bears were, as Lewandowsky and Whitmarsh argue, illegitimate emotional triggers.
“The crucial attribute of legitimate triggers is that they capture the long-term trend that characterizes climate change, rather than short-term phenomena or random events,” they write. “Moreover, the triggers must be representative of a global pattern rather than a ‘cherry-picked’ result.
“Biologists hoping to raise awareness of climate change risks to biodiversity should consider the evidence of how best to communicate climate change to ensure that they are not delivering counterproductive messages.”