Climate scientists and communicators are practicing science denial when they continue hammering away at the dire news about global warming without also helping audiences understand what they can do about it, says veteran climate scientist and communicator Katharine Hayhoe.
“I have a study authored by over 250 scientists in 63 countries saying that doom and gloom creates more clicks and shares, but it’s the absolute worst at motivating people to act,” Hayhoe told The Energy Mix Tuesday, after delivering a keynote address to the annual meeting of Ottawa’s Community Action for Environmental Sustainability (CAFES). But “there are many people who fully accept the physical science of climate change, yet they flat-out deny the behavioural science,” she added.
“You know what? That’s actually science denial.”
Hayhoe, chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy and a distinguished professor at Texas Tech University, said it’s dangerous for governments, pollsters, and regular citizens to treat climate change as a “separate bucket at the end of the list that we’ll get if we have time and money after the rest.” It’s a mindset that holds climate change apart from other top-line issues like affordability, health, housing costs, equality, Indigenous rights, food and water, or nature protection, and more, when in fact “climate change is the hole in every other bucket”—which means “we can’t fully address those issues if we leave climate change out of the picture.”
But that doesn’t mean pouring out a steady diet of dire science for friends, family, or colleagues, on the wrong assumption that they don’t already see climate change as a serious concern. Climate advocates too often think the majority still need to be convinced that climate change is real. But Hayhoe said research paints a different picture: a small proportion (about 8% in the United States, she said) inside the “bubble” of active climate concern, a relatively small group at the other extreme who are unconcerned, and a solid majority who understand the challenge but are staying silent—often because it’s hard to confront a scary problem that you don’t know how to solve.
“There’s a huge gap between who’s worried and who understands how it affects them,” she said. “But then there’s an even bigger gap between people who understand how their life is being affected and people who understand what the solutions look like.” The net result: “We’re rapidly heading in a direction where more and more people get worried, then they get more and more paralyzed because they don’t know what solutions look like.”
Climate hawks won’t break through to that large, silent majority with a “wheelbarrow of scary facts,” Hayhoe told participants in an online session where much of the chat was taken up with participants citing the latest scary warnings from scientists. “I have the biggest wheelbarrow you can imagine, and if that worked, I would do it all day long.” But the evidence shows that fear and anxiety make most people withdraw, freeze, or give up rather than taking action, “which is the opposite of what we want them to do.”
The alternative is to connect with people by conveying that they aren’t alone in what they know about climate change (not nearly) and they aren’t wrong to be worried—but then listening to what matters most to them and helping them discover how they can contribute to the solution. That shift from head to heart to hands “changes our sense of efficacy, which changes our ability to act,” Hayhoe said. “The connections are clear as a bell, but we’re missing the boat. When you know the boulder is already rolling downhill in the right direction—that’s efficacy.”
In her day-to-day work, “I do provide people with updates, since I am a scientist and that’s what I do. But it has to be counterbalanced with information about solutions,” she told The Mix. “The more worried and paralyzed people get, the more desperately they seek silver bullets,” and “the more they aren’t willing to do the slow and patient work of adding up all the silver buckshot into a truly sustainable solution. They want to just leap right over and find a fix.”
Which means it’s good news that there are so many varied steps that people in different settings can take to help get climate change under control.
“We have so many pieces of silver buckshot that it means there’s a way for everybody to be engaged in climate solutions. And there are climate solutions that address so many other issues at the same time,” she said. “But until people actually connect it to the people, places, and things they love, that psychological distance is still going to be there. And we make decisions from [the heart], even scientists. Not from [the head].”
The same approach works with governments and institutions. More and more organizations, cities, countries, and businesses are taking “the long view that investing in clean energy and climate action is a way to ensure that you come out ahead,” Hayhoe said. “If you look at what China is doing, for example, they’re investing for the long term.” And a Canadian living in the United States, “I agree that protecting our sovereignty is very important.”
But no country will achieve those goals if it fails to address climate risk, or to recognize the massive technological shift—”a revolution as large as the revolution from buggies and horses to cars”—that is already under way. “If we don’t get ahead on that, we’re going to follow rather than leading. And it’s really hard to maintain sovereignty if you are not at the cutting edge of technology and energy.”