Climate crisis! Why aren’t we panicking?

Imagine sitting in a café, enjoying a coffee with friends. Suddenly the peace and harmony are shattered by a loud explosion. In a state of panic you act instinctively by running away from the center of the explosion, but as you flee in panic, something very odd is happening. Of everyone in the café, only you and your friends are running. Everyone else is staying put and acting as if all is normal. Confused, you look once more at the evidence and begin to sound the alarm to those around you: “An unchecked conflagration is threatening the structural integrity of this establishment at the approximate rate of 14 meters a minute.”

We scientists have an ingrained fear of being alarmist. When it comes to the climate crisis, this noble instinct is deadly.

All predictions for the next several hundred years agree on an unprecedented shift in our climate and ecological integrity. Life systems on earth are on the precipice of collapse. Millions, possibly billions, of people will suffer dreadfully as they try to relocate to safe havens from the ravages of coastal inundation, desolate oceans and abject poverty. War over water, climate ‘events’, summers from Hell, drought driven famines and species extinction loss will be the new norm (Jamail Dahr 2019; https://www.dahrjamail.net/) This is not sensationalist journalism trying to sell a story but rather an evaluation of the facts as we know them.

If the climate crisis is potentially devastating to life as we know it, then how are we staying so focused on the ordinary and mundane? One option is that we are underplaying the reality. This might partially be the result of ‘mitigating speech’ by scientists. The term ‘mitigating speech’ highlights how some cultures ‘sugar coat’ or use politeness to moderate information exchange. In the airline industry, cultural differences between cockpit staff and ground crew has resulted in a compromises in safety and nowhere is this more critical than in an industry where planes are commanded to take off and land with high precision. In one famous example, 73 people died in a plane crash when the pilots used calm voices and unclear language to try to alert air traffic control. When the pilots failed to sound alarmed or use clear terminology, the controllers missed the emergency and the plane ran out of fuel.

In medicine, a 2016 study showed that nearly one third of malpractice complaints involve some level of miscommunication. Forty four percent of these cases ended in “high-severity injuries, including death.”

Similarly scientists have known about an impending climate tragedy for over 50 years but have been reluctant to be seen as alarmist or even as over stating their observations. The culture of science demands a conservative and measured approach to connecting results and theory with impact. But when we are the ones charged with alerting ground control to the emergency, our very calm and coded language is very likely a part of the problem.

One of most influential papers on climate science, written by Manabe and Wetherald in 1967, is (underwhelmingly) called “Thermal Equilibrium of the atmosphere with a given distribution of relative humidity”. Whilst describing a strong signal of impending doom, the paper’s language is essentially measured and polite. Perhaps the paper title might have been better off as “Polluting the turbulent atmosphere will cook the planet”. Sadly this title would have been laughed at until now — and that’s precisely the point. We as a scientific community are prioritizing our culture of measured language above clear and present danger.

Not all is lost. The recent initiative by leading journals, such as Nature, to write a plain English summary of key articles is a major step forward. However the articles continue to roll out titles that only make actionable sense to the science community. Recent leading papers include “Time and ecological resilience: can diurnal animals compensate for climate change by shifting to nocturnal activity?”, “A globally coherent fingerprint of climate change impacts across natural systems.” and “Large-scale thermal biases and vulnerability to warming in the world’s marine fauna”.

Directly linking science to policy and action is a new — and for many, a frightening — approach that will have dangers relating to scientific integrity. However, it’s a needle we need to thread. Recent publications on the Great Barrier Reef highlight the effectiveness. In 2018 an article published by Hughes et al. titled “Global warming transforms coral reef assemblages” was translated to a popular article titled “Great Barrier Reef saw huge losses from 2016 heatwave” (Schiermeier 2018). This science message dominated the news coverage and sparked outrage at the hypocrisy of government environmental policy.

Good. It should. We should be outraged and we should panic. The house is on fire and we have an obligation to state this in the clearest possible terms. This will require shifts in not only language, but in where we publish, how we treat colleagues who sound the alarm and in how we measure the success of our work by linking it with public shift and impact on policy.

For inspiration on the kinds of simple, unifying messages that cut through noise, we can look to Dr. Jason Box.

Dr. Box is a well-respected climatologist and professor of glaciology who, in 2014, read about plumes of methane releasing from the Arctic seafloor. Rather than release a densely worded statement of mild alarm, he put it simply in a tweet:

If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we’re f’d.

— Jason Box (@climate_ice) July 29, 2014

References and further reading:

Brysse, K., et al. 2013, “Climate change prediction: Erring on the side of least drama?”, Global Environmental Change, 23(1), 327–337

Hughes, T. P., Kerry, J. T., Baird, A. H., Connolly, S. R., Dietzel, A., Eakin, C. M., … & McWilliam, M. J. (2018). Global warming transforms coral reef assemblages. Nature, 556 (7702), 492.

Linde, C. (1988). The quantitative study of communicative success: Politeness and accidents in aviation discourse. Language in Society, 17(3), 375–399. doi: 10.1017/S0047404500012951

Schiermeier, Q. (2018). Great Barrier Reef saw huge losses from 2016 heatwave. Nature, 556(7701), 281–282.