Menu
Ireland's political and cultural magazine
66May 2015
I’ve tried this out on a few friends and it is true: the
conversations fizzle out after a few minutes unless you
can get people interested in talking the detail about
energy policy or intergovernmental negotiations (this
rarely happens). They definitely don’t want to get into
the detail of how scary it might all get. But is this
because they don’t want to know, or that they do know
somehow, but are willing to invest a lot of emotion in
denying the truth?
These are the questions George Marshall takes up in
his new book ‘Don’t Even Think About it: Why Our
Brains are Wired to Ignore Climate Change’
(Bloomsbury Press, ). As a former Greenpeace
activist, and now a ‘climate communications expert’
Marshall sets out to understand how it is that we are
collectively in denial about the most serious problem
of our time. Marshall is convinced there is a good psy-
chological or evolutionary explanation for our
inaction. He explains that essentially we are wired to
act on the basis of primitive emotional responses,
whilst we analyse information more slowly through
the cognitive centres of the brain. The effect of this is
to make some threats more real and immediate than
others. The issues with the greatest salience are those
that are here, now and contain a clear visible threat
from an identifiable enemy. Social cues compel us to
pay attention to some issues not others. Without sali-
ence or social cues, climate change sits outside the
analytic frame that we apply to make sense of the
world around us, he explains.
Added to all this, climate
change and the vast science
around it can make it easy to
select truths on an à la carte basis
through cognitive bias, confirma-
tion bias and mis-categorisation
– all of which helps keep the
extent of the problem on the edge
of what he terms a “pool of
worry” that we all have anyway
about the usual things (bills, jobs,
elderly parents etc). Climate
deniers in particular have misled
the public by setting up false
debates based on partial or incorrect information
knowing that sowing the seeds of doubt and dissent
leaving us both confused and worried, but unsure of
what to do.
Marshall’s big ideas are for climate communicators
and policy makers to zone in on the role of stories and
myths (especially religious ones): the means by which
the emotional brain makes sense of the information
collected by the rational brain. When non-experts
make sense of complex technical issues, they make
their decisions on the basis of the quality of the ‘story’
or ‘narrative fidelity’ rather than on the quality of the
information. Whilst the ‘good’ guys in this story get
tangled up in complex and defensive explanations and
talk about raising new taxes (always a bad communi-
cation strategy), the ‘bad’ guys win the argument by
talking about the ‘American way of life’. Essentially
deep community values, however conservative, are
W
ITH all the seemingly urgent messages
in the media about climate change and
need to reduce emissions, there is an
astonishing cultural silence about the
issue. Climate changes will affect us
readers of Village magazine, no doubt in our lifetimes,
never mind the lives of our children and grandchil-
dren, as evidence mounts that even current extreme
weather events can be attributed directly to climate
change. Yet we don’t talk about it, we don’t discuss it,
and according to a Royal Society for the Arts survey in
, only a fifth of the respondents were convinced
there even was a problem. Only percent of the
sample had ever spoken about climate change and, of
those percent did so for less than ten minutes;
percent for less than minutes. This poses the ques-
tion whether, as Clive Hamilton puts it, climate denial
is due to a surplus of culture rather than a deficit of
information.
Few can even bring
themselves to talk
about it – or it
seems anything
without a Disney
ending.
By Sadhbh O’Neill
Lethal aversion to
discussing climate
ENVIRONMENT Book Reviews
Climate denial
is due to a
surplus of
culture rather
than a deficit
of information
“
May 2015 67
more persuasive and socially binding than bad, com-
plicated news. Helpfully, Marshall quotes Frank
Luntz, the US GOP pollster and strategist as saying
that a compelling story has the following rules: “sim-
plicity, brevity, credibility, comprehension [by which
he may of course mean comprehensibility], consist-
ency, repetition, repetition, repetition… “. Marshall
explains also that a successful storyline contains sim-
plicity of cause and effect, a focus on individuals or
distinctly defined groups, and a positive outcome.
When will Disney make a climate movie, I wonder.
That is what is needed here.
In the meantime, other writers outside even the
science-fiction genre are beginning to do the work of
telling us the story of our present, from the perspec-
tive of the future. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway,
famous for their devastating assault on climate
deniers in ‘Merchants of Doubt’ () have written a
new book about what is happening to our climate and
possible future scenarios if we fail to act on time.
What is interesting about ‘The Collapse of Western
Civilisation: A View From the Future’ (Columbia Uni-
versity Press ) is that it is a piece of historical
fiction, but written from the future, since this seems
to be the most narrative-faithful way of joining the
dots about what we are doing at the moment and how
it will impact on the future. Written from ,
years after ‘The Great Collapse’ the authors retell the
story of how civilisation collapsed first from inaction
and then from desperate efforts to reduce global
warming with failed geo-engineering experiments. It
is telling that the story is written from inside China,
whose centralised decision-making made recovery
possible.
Oreskes and Conway are not eco-authoritarians but
they do give voice to the desperation among climate
activists that our democracies are simply failing to act
effectively out of deference to fossil-fuel and other
interests, even when public opinion is solidly behind
abatement measures. What is missing from their his-
tory however, is real people: survivors, heros who
have adjusted and re-organised communities to be
resilient. Without real characters, we may well reluc-
tantly have to apply Marshall: we need individual
characters and a happy (not just barely-surviving)
ending. I suspect that a decent work of science fiction
would have done a better job at communicating such a
history, and would be just as scary. Presumably they
wrote the narrative deliberately to give the authori-
tarians the last word, as a chilling reminder to liberal
progressives that if they don’t stand up and take this
issue seriously, it will be left to militarised govern-
ments to take charge eventually.
Dr James Hansen of NASA whose book ‘Storms of
my Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Cli-
mate Catastrophe and our Last Chance to Save
Humanity’ (London, Bloomsbury, ) points to the
influence in US politics particularly of ‘special inter-
ests’ who seem to hold disproportionate favour with
key politicians, and who frequently become appointed
to key positions in administrations. As an astrophysi-
cist working with a NASA Earth sciences team,
Hansen was an important figure in developing expla-
nations for the underlying global-warming
mechanism from a scientific point of view. However
vocal and courageous he was in his voicing of con-
cerns, he got nowhere with the slippery Clinton-Gore
administration, and during the Bush Presidency NASA
press releases were effectively re-routed through the
White House Press Office for censorship.
Hansen and his team have made enormous contri-
butions to climate science through extrapolating from
paleoclimate records the likely implications of a rapid
temperature rise and loss of the Antarctic and Green-
land ice sheets. His work, often collaborated, since the
early s and as recently as last year offers an over-
arching explanation of climate change, just at a time
when controversies were threatening to undermine
the public’s confidence in scientists, especially in the
US. There is also something epic about anyone associ-
ated with NASA.
The news, I’m afraid, has worsened in the six years
since his first book was published. There is no prece-
dent for the rapid increase in the amount of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere but there is good evidence
from past climates that a rapid global warming may
bring about irreversible feedbacks including the disin-
tegration of the ice sheets. This is not only possible,
but likely to be already underway.
Bear in mind that when the Earth was last ice-free
sea levels were metres higher than today. The loss
of the albedo effect and many other feedback mecha-
nisms mean that we cannot afford to consider even a
degree warming as less than extremely dangerous:
Hansen even in made it clear that only a return
to a ppm CO level could be considered ‘safe’.
Since the beginning of human civilisation, our atmos-
phere contained about ppm but now we’re at
ppm, and we’re adding ppm of carbon dioxide to
the atmosphere every year.
When I first finished Hansen’s book, which is part
memoir, part summary of the evolution of climate
science, I will confess that I cried. I can compartmen-
talise bad climate news, which is necessary for all
concerned activists, but this is bad news that I defi-
nitely don’t have any evolutionary programming to
help me with. The picture he paints of runaway cli-
mate change is so frightening (imagine the Earth
becoming uninhabitable to all life, much like Venus)
and his scientific authority so compelling, denial is
positively attractive as an alternative.
Hansen’s inclination now after decades of failing to
get politicians from all major parties to listen is to join
the growing civil disobedience movement (Naomi
Klein calls it ‘Blockadia’ in her recent book). My
favourite example is that of Tim DeChristopher, who
successfully bid against fossil-fuel companies for gas
and oil drilling leases at a public auction by the Bureau
of Land Management. He successfully bid on par-
cels of land totalling $.m but not having the money
to pay for them, he was prosecuted and spent
months in jail. Now that’s climate justice for you! I’m
trusting you’ll forgive me that I could not find a Disney
ending to this article. •
ENVIRONMENT Book Reviews
When I first finished the
book by NASA’s Hansen
I will confess that I cried
at the picture he paints of
runaway climate change
and the Earth becoming
uninhabitable to all life
“
