Things are not hopeless when it comes to climate change.
Katharine Hayhoe professor at Texas Tech University and author of a book on climate change and a scientist who has participated in evaluating science for the International Panel on Climate Change. She is a climate scientist who spends a lot of time trying to persuade evangelical Christians in the Bible Belt that the issue is serious and should be addressed. Those are her people and she is one of them.
Hayhoe did a study on possible reactions to the issue of Climate change. Here is the range of possible reactions: alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, doubtful and dismissive. She said alarmed and concerned had risen from 2008 to 2000 while cautious has remained the same, disengaged has declined from about 12% in 2008 to about 8% in 2020 and doubtful and dismissive have remained the same at about 11% and 7%. The good news here is that even though we often believe the loudest voices rejecting the science are the biggest problem, but the dismissives are only 7%. They carry a lot of notice and traction on social media but actually their numbers are low.
In other words, “93% of us are not dismissive.” Remember she studies Americans! And only 7% of the Americans are dismissive (or were at the time of the study a couple of year ago). There is clearly some room for hope here. That means in the United States, the categories of alarmed, concerned and cautious mean ¾ of the population fit into those categories. Isn’t that huge? Isn’t that many more than we would have thought?
What then is the problem? According to Hayhoe it is the fact that we have not personalized the risk. We know that the civilization is at risk. We know polar bears in the Artic are in danger. We know the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are both in jeopardy, but we by and large don’t yet know how we are in jeopardy too. “We haven’t yet connected the dots about how it matters to me as a Mom, as a neighbor, as a citizen, as a person who works in the industry. That is what we need to do.
We have to drive it home. We have to own the problem. This is one of the things I always like about Hayhoe. She brings in psychology. Psychology of how we think, react and deal with problems. Those are important.
As well, we don’t know what we can do about climate change. We like the idea of saving polar bears but how do we do it? As Hayhoe said,
“And if we don’t know what we can do about an existential threat to the civilization as we know it, metaphorically our human defence system is just to pull the covers up over our heads. We need to be empowered. We need to understand that we as individuals have agency. And that agency begins by using our voices.”
Professor Hayhoe understands that people have the same issues with regard to the coronavirus: “the parallels between climate change and coronavirus are unmistakable.” That’s why she was sad, but not surprised when reactions to Covid-19 and the vaccines became politicized. This is also the case in the UK and Canada. None of us are immune to this either. We have to have earnest real conversations with each other.
How do we begin these conversations? As she says,
“We begin with the heart, not the head. We start with something we agree on rather than something that we disagree on. If we can find something we agree on and begin that conversation with a sense of mutual respect, e.g. that I care about my child and you do too, I care about where I work or live and so do you. Or perhaps we are both passionate about a certain activity such as sports or knitting. All of these concerns are connectors. To begin the conservation on the footing of mutual shared values and respect, together, and then connect the dots to how climate change is affecting what we already care about because we are a good parent, or business person, or a concerned citizen. And always what is already happening and what can be done at the levels of our spheres of influence.”
This is Hayhoe’s recipe for successful discussions to dissolve polarization and animosity. I think it makes sense.