If climate change matters to you, talk about it
[This post supplements Chapter 12] This is a photo of Dr Joëlle Gergis, a person with the praiseworthy courage of her convictions.
She is a climate scientist, an award winning author and an internationally recognised expert on climate change. But at the peak of her career, she gave up the prestige and rewards of a position at one of Australia’s leading universities to concentrate on a task her knowledge and conscience would not let her avoid.
She explains why in her book, Highway to Hell: Climate Change and Australia’s Future; Quarterly Essay 94:
As a climate scientist who understands that we only have limited time left to avert disaster, I realised that I can’t wait until I have retired to speak out. When I told a trusted senior colleague what I had done, he shared a pearl of wisdom from Plato: “If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.”
Written for the general reader, Highway to Hell is a must-read book about something that matters enormously to all of us. In choosing to abandon her career in order to speak out about climate change, Joëlle epitomises Martin Luther King Jr’s maxim:
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
Of course, words alone are not going to arrest climate warming and prevent a climate catastrophe. For that, radical individual and collective action is required on many fronts and in many forms. Such action is imperative if we are to eliminate the burning of fossil fuels and arrest the build-up of carbon dioxide and other climate warming gases in the atmosphere.
But climate scientists and climate communication professionals agree that talking about climate change in daily life has to be part of any campaign to arrest global warming and to mitigate its effects. Unless and until the majority of us are talking in earnest about the climate crisis, ignorance, complacency, indifference, and contrariness will remain social constraints on effective climate change action
Climate communication researcher, Julia Fine, explains why. Any hesitancy to discuss climate change reinforces the incorrect perception that people generally are not concerned about it. This perception leads to a self-perpetuating spiral of silence and a widespread underestimation of peoples’ support for climate action and policies. By speaking up for the planet, we are helping shift the global conversation towards making change happen.
But let’s face it. For many of us, talking about climate change, especially with people we don’t know, can be challenging. Climate change is a topic that can arouse strong views and feelings. It’s not easy to push back against strong opinions, deal with awkward silences, absorb negative feelings or find the confidence to speak up about something that greatly matters. Poorly handled, a climate change conversation can result in discord, anger and hard feelings.
But it doesn’t have to be this way – far from it. Climate change conversations can be friendly, cordial and enjoyable. It is a matter of how the conversation is conducted – of having the right approach.
So, what is the right approach? The answer, I found, lies in guidelines that have emerged from research and the experience of professionals whose business it is to talk about climate change.
When I went searching for the guidelines, I found that they are not all in the one place but scattered across a variety of publications. Why don’t I pull the guidelines together, I thought, and share them in a couple of blog posts?
This I set out to do, soon realising that there was too much material for two or even three posts. The guideline statements themselves are succinct, but when an explanation of how to apply them is added, they require more space than a blog post can provide.
What I have done instead is to prepare a separate, free-standing document, rather unimaginatively titled: Guidelines for Having Constructive Conversations about Climate Change. With space constraints relaxed, I have included in the document a supplement containing commonly made false statements about climate change, along with factual information that can be used in fashioning responses. The supplement also contains suggestions for initiating climate change conversations.
I have included only guidelines that are evidence based and/or derived from the experience of professional climate communicators (Who better to provide guidance about climate change conversations than professionals in the business?). Sources I found particularly helpful include:
- The Climate Outreach organisation’s guidelines for talking about climate change in daily life.
- European Climate Pact, How to talk to people about climate action
- An article by Dr Nicholas Badullovich in the journal, Climate Action,which details the perspectives and insights of Australian practitioners engaged in climate change communication.
I am happy to make my guidelines document free to anyone requesting it. All you have to do is simply go to the contact page and provide the basic information requested (full name and message are optional) and press submit. A pdf copy of the document will be yours.
I hope my compilation of guidelines will contribute is some way to the vital task of increasing talk about climate change. I have chosen to share the compilation for another reason as well. I am seeking comments and suggestions for strengthening the document. I have a background in health communication, but I am aware that, in relation to talking about climate change, I am still learning.
The guidelines the document invites you to consider are:
- Have appropriate and flexible goals and objectives for your climate change conversations
- Be authentic
- Respect the person you are talking to
- Enjoy the conversation
- Strive to understand the other person by asking questions and listening actively
- Prepare to be interrupted and misinterpreted
- Exercise self-control
- Centre the conversation on the other person
- Avoid statements that convey directly or implicitly that climate change is a matter of belief rather than science
- Tell stories about the lived experience of climate change, especially your own
- Talk about your own climate actions
- Learn from the conversation
- Keep having climate change conversations and seeking support
Don’t let the length of the list daunt you. The guidelines are not asking you to learn new skills, but to adapt skills you already have to the novel and variable demands of conversing about climate change with all kinds of people, including those you may have only just met.
Also, don’t be daunted by the thought that you don’t know enough about climate change to talk about it. Look again at guideline 10. It is about climate change stories, yours in particular. The stories you have to tell about the direct and indirect effects of climate change on you personally and on those you care about are likely to be as effective as factual information. People find it easier to relate to stories than to facts and figures.
But if you feel the need to strengthen your climate change knowledge and your confidence to share it, the document contains information to help you.
The Supplement in the document covers 21 false statements about climate change, along with information that can be provided in response. The following are examples:
‘The climate has always changed’
It’s true that Earth’s climate has shifted over millions of years, swinging from ice ages to warm periods. But the speed at which today’s climate is heating up is unlike anything in the planet’s past and certainly in human history.
Past changes happened over thousands, sometimes millions, of years. Now, we’re seeing dramatic warming in just decades. Natural factors, like volcanic eruptions or cyclical changes in the Sun’s energy, can affect climate, but scientists have carefully measured these and found they can’t explain the rapid changes we see today. Instead, it’s the vast amounts of greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil, and gas that are responsible for the current crisis.
‘Climate change is happening, but it is not caused by humans’
Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane are produced naturally. Their presence in the atmosphere stops some of the heat from the Sun returning to space. This heat warms the planet’s land masses and oceans and thus helps to sustain life.
Geologic records indicate that global temperatures and the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have moved in step over the last 800,000 years. Temperatures have risen as the concentration of greenhouse gases has increased, with the sharpest and unprecedented increases in both greenhouse gases and temperatures occurring in the past 150 years.
This exceptional increase coincides exactly with the Industrial Revolution, which has driven a massive increase in the burning of fossil fuels to provide the energy that rapid industrialisation demanded. Greenhouse gases are the by-products of the burning of fossil fuels.
Since 1850, almost all the long-term global warming can be explained by greenhouse gas emissions from energy production, manufacturing, transport and other human activities such as cutting down forests and livestock farming. Human emissions and activities have caused around 100% of the warming observed since 1950, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
While there are natural factors that affect the Earth’s climate, the combined influence of volcanoes and cyclical changes in the energy from the Sun would actually have resulted in cooling rather than warming over the past seven decades.
‘It is pointless Australia doing anything about climate change because it emits only a tiny fraction of the world’s total emissions’
While Australia’s absolute emissions are relatively small (1.02% of the world’s total), it is the third largest exporter of fossil fuels. It is also among the world’s highest emitters per capita. As individuals, Australians are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than the citizens of most other countries.
The average Australian household emits around 14 tonnes of greenhouse gases every year, half of which is from electricity generation. That’s equivalent to having three cars on the road for a year.
A simple and relatively cheap way that all Australians can make a difference is by switching our electricity to “green” power. This means using power generated from clean renewable sources such as the Sun, wind, hydro and bio-waste, rather than coal, gas or diesel.
If Australia reduced its carbon emissions to zero along with the other 40 or so small emitting countries, the result would be a 40% reduction in the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions – an enormous impact!
By gradually (over the next three decades) phasing out its fossil fuel exports, Australia would give major emitting countries a massive incentive to de-carbonise their manufacturing, energy production and transport.
-oOo-
Now, it’s over to you. Remember all you have to do to get your free copy of the guidelines is simply go to the contact page and provide the basic information requested (full name and message are optional) and press submit.
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