The Psychology and Rhetoric of Climate Change

It strikes me that there's something self-defeating about the way that some climate change experts have started talking about emissions goals. For a while, 1.5C was seen as a critical benchmark that would serve to minimize some of the most devastating effects of climate change, even though many catastrophic effects would still have been "baked in" to our future. But over the past little while, I've noticed that the discourse seems to have changed; rather than talking about the importance of hitting the hard benchmark of 1.5C, scientists have softened the narrative, arguing that the closer to 1.5C the better. For instance, I just listened to a radio interview in which a scientist reaffirmed the importance of 1.5C, but then spoke of how even if we don't hit 1.5C, 1.6C is better than 1.7C, and so on. So, from the "hard" benchmark of 1.5C, we are starting to "soften" our goals into more of a gradation.

This change in narrative will no doubt serve to embolden climate change denialists. For instance, those who outrightly deny climate change will argue that the changing goalposts reveal that the science is made up, while the savvier denialists, who are increasingly replacing the outright denialists, will argue that these changing goalposts illuminate the uncertainty of the science and/or the political nature of these “arbitrary” goals. If we can roll back 1.5C to 2.0C so easily, why not to 2.5C or 3.0C, in which case, why have any goals at all?

There is something compelling about this denialist rhetoric. Given that we know with certainty that combatting climate change will require dramatic changes to human life (and to capitalist economies), and given that the science seems uncertain (or is made to seem so), climate change denialism plays quite well to our tendency towards inertia. That is, that which we are certain about seems to counsel inaction while that which we are uncertain about seems to counsel action, so that inaction seems like the truly rational choice. Obviously this is a misrepresentation of the truth, but the juxtaposition of certainty and uncertainty is a useful rhetorical tool.

However, in truth, this changing rhetoric doesn’t reveal any uncertainty in the science at all, but rather, it reveals something of the psychology of climate change scientists. For instance, during the radio interview with the climate change scientist, she repeatedly mentioned the importance of remaining hopeful in the face of the onslaught of terrible climate change news. In this case, she was referring to the depressing outcome of the COP26 climate change summit, whose toothless promises won’t even limit climate change to 2.0C. Worse yet, in the past, these kinds of summits have offered little more than empty promises. So, it’s doubly depressing, because even at the level of empty promises, the wealthiest nations in the world aren’t even bothering to promise meaningful climate change action.  We certainly don’t get climate change action, but now, we can’t even get hollow gestures. And this—if you know anything about the cataclysmic nature of climate change—is depressing.

Given this, it’s little wonder that psychology would govern how even scientists talk about climate change. When benchmarks are rolled back or modified, it’s not because the science has changed, but because scientists are trying to grapple with the irrational and terrifying nature of our political reality. In other words, the problem is not that the 1.5C benchmark is wrong, the problem is that there is clearly no political will to meet it. And when you know the science (when you know that even 1.5C is much too high a goal), but when you also realize that no one in power really cares, what else is there to do but to plead for any climate change action, regardless of how inadequate it is?

And so, rather than rending their garments over the willingness of our political leaders to sacrifice our world for the short term goals of reelection and corporate profit, many within the scientific community have decided to revise their goals, in the hope that we manage to do something rather than nothing. And this ultimately reflects their own despair. Like the mythological Cassandra, cursed to utter truthful prophecies but never to be believed, the scientific community has been warning us about the cataclysm to come but to no avail. The best we seem able to do, if COP26 is any indication, are a bunch of empty promises that even if fulfilled would be wholly insufficient. Scientists have been uttering their prophecies for years but we have yet to hear.

But beyond the mitigation of their own despair, the scientific community is also trying to mitigate our own despair too. Many of us take climate change seriously, even if, like me, we don’t understand its effects as well as we should. But we know that they are going to be terrifying, and that, for many, they already are. And witnessing the indifference of political and economic elites seems to be a recipe for widescale resignation rather than engagement. Consequently, the changing nature of our climate change goals also reflects the need to keep us engaged in the fight, because if more of us acknowledged the truth—that the future is dire and no one in power is willing to do anything about it—there is little other option but to despair.

Therefore, what climate change deniers see as evidence of the uncertainty of the science is actually the opposite. The changing of goalposts isn’t a sign that the science isn’t clear; it’s a sign that the science is so clear and the political will so obviously lacking that we have no choice but to continually revise our expectations downwards for fear of losing all hope. That is, the goalposts are changing because Cassandra is trying to keep hope alive. And the fact that this is happening—the fact that those who “know” are struggling with their own and the public’s despair—isn’t a sign that climate change isn’t serious. It’s a sign that there’s nothing more serious, and that things are only getting worse.

In thinking about this, I was reminded that this is really a perennial problem on the left. As with climate change, the leftist dream of a truly just world has often seemed hopeless, because more often than not, we’re on the losing side of politics—and for people in my generation and younger, this has been doubly true. As a result, there is a tendency on the left to say those things that help keep hope alive, rather than those things that might provide the clearest of analyses of our often despair-worthy reality.

Unfortunately, the things that we tell ourselves in order to keep ourselves fighting aren’t always the things that we should be saying in order to win political battles. In other words, the task of maintaining hope and the task of winning power are not the same, and we need to be able to better distinguish the difference between our own subjective needs and the objective political reality in which we operate. This isn’t to say that both projects aren’t important—subjective self-development and objective political engagement—but they are different, if often complementary, problems.

For instance, a better rhetorical strategy might be to be brutally direct about the nature of climate change; rather than revising our climate change expectations downwards, the better tactic might be to revise them upwards. In other words, rather than revising them from 1.5C to 2.0C, perhaps we should think of holding firm to the 1.5C benchmark (or even to a 1.0C benchmark), even though it’s likely that we will fail to meet them (and have probably already failed to meet 1.0C). But it seems to me like holding fast to firm benchmarks conveys a sense of urgency in a way that shifting benchmarks does not, even if this requires that we confront the despairing fact of our inadequate response. Yes, this might instill a sense of resignation in some, but it might also embolden others to take the kind of radical action that the situation truly warrants.

To my mind, the effect of the downward revision of our goals isn’t that we manage to keep hope alive, it’s that we manufacture a false sense of hope that is born from the seeming lack of urgency that these revisions imply. That is, even if we aren’t climate change denialists, it seems to me that these changing goals can only but breed the very inaction that they mean to combat, because they make the future seem less bad (or more hopeful) than it actually is. Better to face our failures and discover a sense of hope grounded in our actual reality, however bleak that might be, than to instill a false sense of hope by implicitly telling ourselves that things are less bleak than they are. After all, how else might we build political power if not by acknowledging the truth of our political reality? And that reality is not reassuring.

With this in mind, this approach might also be an approach that leads to the reemergence of a truthful, rather than a false, sense of hope. In politics, true hope doesn’t arise as a consequence of anything we’ve been told about the future, because even if true, these are just words. Instead, true hope only emerges from our own sense of empowerment, because the more that we feel in control of our destiny the more we feel hopeful about the future. And words can never have this effect. Instead, only democratic solidarity can instill this sense of hope, because it’s only when we feel apart of a democratic community that we feel like our future is really in our hands.

And for us, living right now and facing a truly cataclysmic future, it is only by facing that future and finding the urgency to act that we might find the hope that comes from acting together. It might not be what we want to hear, but it very well might be what we need to hear.