Climate Change: A Tale of Two Narratives
“… It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.” — Charles Dickens, Tale of Two Cities
In a popular TED talk about the transformative power of classical music, Benjamin Zander, director of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, tells a story of two salesmen who went to Africa in the 1900s to research the market for shoes.
One sent a telegram back to Manchester that said: “Situation hopeless. They don’t wear shoes.”
The other wrote: “Glorious opportunity. They don’t have any shoes yet.”
Media stories on the big climate report on 1.5 C from the IPCC released in early October were mostly of the “situation hopeless” variety. The main message readers got was “We have 10 years to fix this, or we are f-ed.”
On Twitter, scientist Glen Peters asked his followers how the report had been received in the world’s media. Author Jigar Shah replied “it is the worst rollout I have seen in ages”, while journalist Stephen Leahy said “The IPCC’s job is to take stock of the science.”
Shah continued: “Instead of talking about the extraordinary progress we have made in these areas, they come out with a doomsday report that basically every physiologist on the planet has said just shuts people down.”
This is an unusually harsh take on what is without doubt an epic effort on the part of the scientists, who work on a volunteer basis in such assessments. Furthermore, the scientists didn’t ask for the report. It was the world’s governments, meeting at COP21 to negotiate the Paris Agreement, who made the request.
Scientists were given a gruelling timeline: 18 months, 91 authors from 40 countries, assessing 6,000 papers, 10,000 review comments.
Earlier this year, I sat down with IPCC author Heleen de Coninck to preview part of the report, and found much to feel good about in some of her messages. But those messages were drowned out at the launch on October 6 by the onslaught of “its worse that we thought” headlines.
It’s worth pausing to revisit her comments as a counterpoint to those headlines.
She notes that the 1.5 C report tries to be less focused than its predecessor — the Fifth Assessment Report — on the predominant “techno-economic view of the world that is based on the assumption that the economy is optimizing on abatement (or GHG reduction) costs.”
“They (the Integrated Assessment Models) rarely allow actors to show behaviour other than economically rational behaviour, and innovation is not represented very realistically. For instance, they didn’t predict the drop in costs of solar energy, or wind energy, that we’re seeing now.”
“We nuance the modelling outcomes in two ways: one being more hopeful — that you can do much more with innovation and lifestyle change than the models suggest — and the other more pessimistic — that the feasibility of negative emissions technologies, which play a prominent role in modelling of 1.5°C, from a social science perspective, might not be as viable as the models assume.”
Let’s sit with that statement for a second. “You can do much more with innovation and lifestyle change than the models suggest.”
I didn’t see too much reporting on 1.5 C that focused on this, sadly. Yet it is what the public needs urgently to hear in order to break free from this paralyzing “shutdown” mindset.
Three days after the launch of the IPCC report, I attended a public event in Toulouse, France where a group of scientists, mostly from the modelling community, had agreed to talk about the findings of the 1.5 C report.
I have worked for over a decade on communicating climate change, and was eager to see how this important report was landing with the public. The first scientist to speak showed a visualization of temperature anomalies arranged by country from 1900–2016. Gasps of horror rippled across the room — which was packed to capacity of 150 people on a Thursday night — starting from the late 1990s when the chart starts to skew mostly red.
I started to feel a disconnect between “don’t they already know this?” and my own emotional state, which was also tipping into overwhelm/overload in sympathy with the reactions around me.
The next trigger for the audience was this chart.
The young couple sitting next to me said after the event that this was the chart that killed them. “This net zero emissions goal by 2050. I had no idea.” “We’re not going to make it. There’s just no way. It’s terrifying.”
People all around me started gazing at their phones, and chatting rudely to block out the disturbing information. I looked at the faces of a group of young women, probably around 20, sitting in the front row, and their faces had frozen into a mask of powerlessness and fear. They asked no questions during the evening, but continued to sit there, shellshocked, motionless. My own daughter is the same age, and it made me sick to the stomach that they weren’t able to act on their emotions to ask questions about their future.
Question time was equally depressing. Mostly middle-aged white men saying that what the scientists were showing was impossible because it was incompatible with capitalism, this was de-growth and it would never happen. After two and a half hours of this, the mood was palpably bleak. Most worrying of all, no one had ventured to ask: “How will we do this?” It suggests that they had all concluded it was impossible.
What would it have taken for this event to be an opportunity to build an emotional connection with the audience?
Now, I must point out that scientists who do public outreach are the minority, and they are the ones who deeply care. Showing up to do such events is a voluntary act. The public too, had the best of intentions. They came on a week night and stayed for two and a half hours to try and learn something big, something important about the future.
I watched as one of the scientists, who had just arrived earlier that day from Korea, where she had been a part of the gruelling week-long negotiations with representatives of the world’s governments to approve the summary for policymakers for release, sat just minutes before she was about to present. She was falling asleep from jet lag and fatigue — this is a testament to the dedication of all the IPCC authors.
Yet, tragically, scientists and the public failed to connect.
Several weeks before the launch of the IPCC report, at a conference in San Francisco hosted by California governor Jerry Brown, a radically different narrative on exactly the same issue was presented to an audience of politicians, city officials and businesspeople.
I urge you to start watching at 41.52 minutes. It lasts around 10 minutes.
Christiana Figueres opens. “I’m going to tell you a story. A story of a journey that we’re already on. A story about exponential transformation.” Personally I am already feeling a lot better about myself and the future when I hear this.
The presentation describes major progress in a number of areas: renewable energy, electric vehicles, financial instruments that are powering decarbonisation, divestment, carbon pricing. More and more businesses and cities making ambitious commitments.
What remains to be done in the next 12 years is summarized in a new report called the Exponential Climate Action Roadmap*, compiled by a team of researchers led from Scandinavia. In essence, it maps out 30 solutions to halve emissions by 2030 across all sectors. Look at those charts: how do they make you feel?
Closing remarks from Figueres. “The moment has come from knowing that it is achievable, to actually achieving it.”
“It is an invitation to all of you to join the exponential journey.”
While this particular summit moment had the benefit of two extraordinarly charismatic individuals perfectly paired to complement eachother at the level of logos (Rockstrom) and pathos (Figureres) and a set of eye-popping visuals on a gigantic stage, the basic narrative elements are available to anyone who is trying to explain what the 1.5 C report means for our future, and how we can have agency as individuals.
There is only one guiding principle. How do you want people to feel after hearing your talk?
Recently I listened to a podcast with Manish Chandra, CEO of mobile shopping platform Poshmark. He argues, persuasively, that it will be difficult for any company to scale their business unless they make a deep emotional connection with their customers. Thinking about tackling climate change as an exponential journey is no different. People have to first deeply connect with the idea and believe that its possible, in their heart of hearts, before those purply charts can become a reality.
*Full disclosure: I was involved in promoting this report at the conference.
