Breaking the Ice

by Alyssa Pike

Turning the climate discussion into a shouting match doesn't do anything to solve the real problems we're facing.

Antarctic ice is melting

In a couple of weeks, I'm going to be getting on a military plane out of Christchurch, New Zealand on my way to Antarctica for six weeks. I'll be helping my professor,  Dr. Byron Adams manage soil ecology experiments that have been running for years.

It's an interesting time to be an Antarctic Nematologist. The ecosystems of these tiny worms, which have developed almost entirely around the concept of extremely little available water, are starting to flood. Not like a flash flood kind of flood, but ice is melting, and that water flows into glacial lakes, and as they get more water, those lake levels rise, encroaching on areas that had previously been parched for centuries. It's happening fast, and my professor and the rest of us in the lab aren't really sure what it's going to mean for our worms.

The Facts:

Of course, our worms getting irrigated is just one tiny aspect of a huge concern: Climate Change. It's a hot button issue. Scientists say that the climate is changing at an unnatural rate. A lot of people don't believe that, and that's a problem. Objectively speaking, having a populace fundamentally divided about whether or not our planet is in serious trouble is not a great place to be. So how did we get here? How did the changing climate become such a big concern for scientists, and how have people become so divided on it? In order to have a chance at understanding that, it's important to have some understanding about what climate scientists are trying to tell us.

The Eocene Epoch, last thermal maximum

The climate changes. The climate has always changed. Life on Earth is pretty much dependent on gradual changes in climate, and therefore ecosystems. Our planet oscillates between "green-house periods", or periods of time where there are no ice sheets at all on the planet, and "ice-house periods", where there are ice sheets on the planet. These periods are strongly (but not only) correlated to what kinds of  gasses are in our atmosphere. Abundance of gasses that trap heat in the atmosphere (like CO2) lead to warmer temperatures, and abundance of oxygen in the atmosphere leads to a cooler Earth.

 The peak of the last green-house period was about 49 million years ago. We've been in an ice-house period for about 2.5 million years. During ice-house periods, there are glacial periods, and inter-glacial periods- in other words, the ice sheets that are present under ice-house conditions wax and wane in accordance with cycles described by a fellow named Milankovitch. We're in an interglacial period now, but here's the thing: the climate has stopped changing normally. Things are warming up in a way that, according to these cycles that have been very well described, they shouldn't be.

Climate scientists aren't trying to say that the climate is changing for the first time. They aren't even trying to say that the end of the world is upon us. They're saying that something is throwing the Earth's climate off of it's natural rhythm, and based on what we know about how the world warms and cools, humanity is playing a large part in that. But that doesn't seem to be what people are hearing.

The Problem:

The way I see it, the problem isn't that this information isn't getting out there. In a very cursory google search, I found pretty detailed information on everything I just described. The issue is the way  this information is being communicated. An article by Prajwal Kulkarni does a great job describing a lot of the challenges scientists face in communicating with each other and how that compounds the problems of communicating scientific findings to the general public. We just aren't that great at telling people what we know.

Since everything needs to be simplified, rhetoric becomes a bigger player in the conversation. Unfortunately, since climate scientists and those who support them are hoping for immediate action, they tend to fall into a blame centered narrative. More scientific reports aren't like this, but things aimed toward lay people, like a one question climate quiz I saw from Ben and Jerry's, follow a pattern of presenting data (with or without citation) and either implying heavily or stating blatantly that anyone who disagrees with the data must be idiots.

Baseless claims and wild accusations seem to be the
 bread and butter of the climate debate currently.

Naturally, people who are less certain of the data don't react to this very well. Because scientists and others have allowed attacks of ethos and pathos to overwhelm the logos of their argument, people fail to understand the simplified explanations of what's happening in the world. Instead, they feel like global problems are being blamed on them individually. They lose faith in the scientists (who, you could argue, are expressly alienating them) and end up distributing reductive memes like this one.

With those who support climate change arguing that anyone who doesn't agree with them is stupid, and climate change deniers pointing a finger of villainy at scientists, nothing is ever going to get done, and no real information is ever going to be exchanged.

The Solution:

The deep divide between those who understand climate change and those who refuse to believe it reminds me of the polarizing debates of the Reformation. As Protestants gathered their evidence that the Catholic church was corrupt, they fell into using incendiary tactics in order to encourage people to join their side. Consider this line from Martin Luther's "The Babylonian Captivity of the Church" sermon.

"From [a German Catholic friar] I shall doubtless learn a great deal, since he writes his dedicatory epistle to the Son of God himself: so familiar are these saints with Christ who reigns in heaven! Here it seems three magpies are addressing me..." (emphasis added)

It's not a very friendly discourse, and it caused the Catholics to retaliate in kind. Largely because of the inflammatory rhetoric used, the Reformation and the divide it caused became the main impetus behind war for centuries. It seems that no matter what century you live in, no one likes being called an idiot.

In this time, when so many issues are polarizing the populace, we can't afford to find ourselves at war over whether or not our world is dying. We have to work together to find truth. We need to mediate these conversations more kindly. Scientists should be more willing to provide context for their claims rather than pointing fingers, and climate deniers and skeptics ought to try to have a little more faith in the scientific community. If 97% of climate scientist are seeing what they say they're seeing, there's no time to waste. Who's fault it is at this point really doesn't matter, what matters is what we do from here. We can't allow rhetorical tactics to replace conversation. We all have to just... play nice.

Sources:

Antarctic Ice Melt
The Eocene Epoch
Communication in Science Article
Climate Denial meme
Ben and Jerry's quiz