In February I penned an article arguing that fear-based climate messaging often drives people to despondency and apathy rather than climate action. In this post, I’d like to offer a counter example of how positive, thoughtful climate messaging can inspire people to want to do better. I am grateful to the students and teachers at St. Margaret’s school, Minister George Heyman and the students in my EOS 365 (Climate and Society) class for participating and contributing to an intergenerational conversation on climate change on Monday, March 4, 2024.
EOS 365 (Climate and Society) is a course I developed at UVic and first offered in 2009. The lectures follow the chapters in the book Keeping Our Cool: Canada in a Warming World that I first published in 2008. In the course I survey the climate system and its interaction with past, present, and future societies, including the onset of agriculture/domestication of animals in the Holocene, the rise and fall of early civilizations, the Anthropocene and global warming. Early in the course I teach a module on science communication. I emphasize that if one wants to advance lasting climate solutions, then one must bring people with you rather than alienating those who may not wish to prioritize climate action. I point out that politicians are elected to represent everyone, not just their support base, and so policy makers need to listen and respond to the views of all stakeholders.
I also suggest to the students that whether or not society wants to deal with global warming really boils down to one question:
Do we the present generation owe anything to future generations in terms of the quality of the environment we leave behind. Yes? or No?
Science can’t answer that question. But science tells us why this is ultimately the question that needs to be asked. If the answer is yes, then we have no choice but to immediately take steps to decarbonize energy systems for the consequences of unchecked emission growth are profound (widespread species extinction and unparalleled geopolitical instability). If the answer is no, then who cares about global warming?
In class I also note that formulating climate policy is often inconsistent with a four year political cycle as the effects of the policy decisions made today will not be felt in the political lifetime of those making the decisions. Yet these same politicians will not be around in the future to be held accountable for the decisions they did or did not make. And so policies with demonstrable short-term outcomes often take precedence over climate policy. Allocating resources to advance short term “wins” will allow you to point to your political successes in a few years and proclaim “I was responsive to your needs; please re-elect me and I will do more”. It’s next to impossible to do the same with climate policy. But I would argue that there is a moral and ethical imperative to advance climate solutions now if society believes in the importance of intergenerational equity.
Building on the themes of effective climate communication and intergenerational equity, I hosted an event in EOS 365 on March 4 inspired by the Grade 7 (and 8) students at St. Margaret’s School, Victoria BC. Four generations were involved in the conversation: 1) the St. Margaret’s students; 2) the UVic students; 3) the teachers from St. Margaret’s; 4) the Honourable George Heyman (Minister of Environment and Climate Change Strategy) and me.
On February 1 2024, I attended St. Margaret’s Grade 7 Environmental Summit and was blown away by the insight and creativity of the students. The Grade 7 class had been learning about the socioeconomic and environmental ramifications of global warming. Students took on the role of an affected party (e.g. firefighter, fisher, pilot, business owner etc.) and researched how global warming was going to affect them. I listened to numerous testimonies from the Grade 7 students who role-played their chosen characters and was taken aback by their insight and how effectively, and articulately they were able to communicate their stories.
The highlight of the event for me was was when the Grade 7/8 St. Margaret’s choir sang a rendition of an SOS from the kids in front of all those in attendance.
My March 4 class began with the St. Margaret’s grade 7/8 choir, led by Mike Keddy, setting the tone for the rest of our conversation by once more singing an SOS from the kids. At the end of the song, and as the final words “you can do better than this” were sung, Mike Keddy held up a Montreal Canadians pennant (indeed one can do better than that).
We were keeping things light and continuing the playful banter that had started at St. Margaret’s School when I noticed middle years teacher Michael Jones had decorated his classroom with some Edmonton Oilers swag. Michael arrived at my class wearing his Oilers jersey, while the TA for the class Katherine Martin proudly sported a Toronto Maple Leafs sweater. She was joined by middle years teacher and fellow Leaf’s fan Meaghan Thompson who showed up with a Leaf’s cap.
And of course, while noting the obvious irony, I adorned my Oilers jersey.
We were honoured to have Minister Heyman attend the class. He had just announced that he was not seeking reelection in the next provincial election moments before we started, and EOS 365 was his first public appearance following that announcement. Once the choir had finished, Minister Heyman spoke about CleanBC and how is government was responding to the challenge of global warming and capitalizing on the opportunity it provides for innovation and creativity in addressing the challenge.
Minister Heyman kindly agreed to allow the EOS 365 and St. Margaret’s students to quiz him in a “kinder and gentler” version of Question Period. First, a St. Margaret’s student read out their prepared script. Unfortunately, in the time available I could only select six students to speak: SO was the CEO of the world’s largest oil company; SW was the heiress to Lululemon; DS was a climate scientist; AM owned a Victoria-based construction contracting company; LA was a young cosmetic designer and owner of an eco-friendly company; TA was a Victoria-based frefighter.
In advance of the class I had given six EOS 365 students copies of the scripts that were going to be read out (see the instagram reel at the end of this post). All six of these students were from the first cohort enrolled in UVic’s new BSc in Climate Science degree program. Each of these students asked the Minister a thoughtful yet probing question that they had prepared in advance and based on the script they were given. The Minister responded in an equally thoughtful way. I role-played the Speaker, and offered the class a supplementary question which was subsequently posed to the Minister. And so we proceeded to explore how the BC government was responding to climate change in six unique sectors.
This particular class was perhaps the most enriching and rewarding experience I’ve ever had while teaching at the university level. And I started teaching in 1986! My sincere thanks to the students and teachers at St. Margaret’s School, the Minister and his staff, and the BSc in Climate Science and other students in EOS 365 for making this event so successful.
My hope in organizing this event was to demonstrate to my class how positive, hopeful, constructive and solutions-focused climate communication can inspire others to want to take climate action. Too often, activists use fear-based messaging, or outrageous acts of civil disobedience, like throwing soup on a priceless Van Goghor disrupting traffic and creating chaos on local streets in an attempt to raise awareness as to the seriousness of climate change. As I have argued before, more often than not, such behaviour does little more than drive people to despondency and apathy rather than climate action.
This past weekend I received an email from a young adult from the US struggling with climate anxiety. Their email, and our follow-up conversation over Zoom, are what inspired me to write this piece.
As I wrote last year, one of the biggest surprises I found upon my return to the University of Victoria 1n 2021 after spending 7 1/2 years in the BC Legislature was the overall increase in underlying climate anxiety being experienced by students in my classes. I’ve been teaching at the university level since the mid 1980s. For most of this time, the students considered global warming to be an esoteric and highly uncertain distant future threat to others, somewhere else in the world – but not any more.
While I was not surprised that another young adult reached out to discuss their struggles with climate anxiety, their email was particularly thoughtful. It contained quotes that they had seen in the media or heard in conversations with their friends, and a link to a recent ITV Good Morning Britain interview with Canadian William Shatner, better known as Captain Kirk from the Star Trek series.
Mr. Shattner is 92. He is passionate about climate change. Yet I struggle to understand what he was hoping to accomplish in the interview. It was over the top, outrageous and, in my opinion, utterly irresponsible. For example, when asked by the ITV reporter “So you don’t think it is an overreaction to say we’re digging our own graves“. Shatner responded incredulously “No, no, no it’s not dramatic enough. We’re burrowing into our own graves” . “Really?“, the interviewer responded at which point Shatner lays into him: “I’m so unhappy that you don’t understand how imperative the situation is. We’re dying man, the seas are going to rise… to me I’m stupefied that you as being a reporter aren’t filled with that passion“.
Later in the interview Shatner berates the reporter “you failed to grasp the dire situation. We’re talking about 20, 30 years. We’re talking about .. are you married?“. “No” the interviewer replied. “Are you going to get married? asked Shatner, “possibly” was the response. Shatner pushed further: “Do you want children?”, to which the reporter replied “possibly, yes“. Getting the answer he was obviously hoping for, Shatner insisted “You want children. Your children are going to have difficulty LIVING. Do you understand that?”
But here’s the kicker, when the reporter asked Shatner “what sort of changes have you made in your life, because you are so passionate about the climate issue, what are you doing differently now that you perhaps weren’t doing 5, 10 years ago.” All Shatner could come up with in response was this: “I haven’t eaten meat in 6 months. I was at a hamburger thing I got the other plant made vegan thing“. Really?
I am very disappointed in Mr. Shatner. He has a platform, a public profile and the potential to influence people of all ages. Yet he chooses to use this platform in a completely unhinged way to imply the world only has 20 to 30 years left because of climate change and other anthropogenic environmental influences.
Now I recognize some will just dismiss my concerns by saying he’s just an old guy with odd views that shouldn’t be taken seriously. Unfortunately, such views from his position of influence do a lot of damage and undermine the efforts of so many who recognize the seriousness of climate change yet reject his outlandish prognostications. His words would land like a 16 ton weight on younger generations. How dare he espouse his unhinged views about the end of the world when all he has done is not eaten meat for six months. The hypocrisy and demonstrable lack of leadership is shameful.
Ritchie, a senior researcher at the Oxford Martin School, lumped people into four general categories based on combinations of those who are optimistic and those who are pessimistic about the future, as well as those who believe and those who don’t believe that we have agency to shape the future based on today’s decisions and actions.
Ritchie persuasively argued that more people located in the green “optimistic and changeable” box are what is needed to advance climate solutions. Those positioned elsewhere are not effective in advancing such solutions.
More importantly, rather than instilling a sense of optimism that global warming is a solvable problem, the extreme behaviour (fear mongering or civil disobedience) of the “pessimistic changeable” group (in which I include William Shatner) often does nothing more than drive the public towards the “pessimistic not changeable” group.
Mr. Shatner is not alone in channelling his own climate anxiety in ways that drive people to despondency and apathy (we’re all doomed and there’s nothing we can go about it – the red box). But unlike most, he speaks from a very large podium.
Next time Mr. Shatner wants to decry the state of the world from his personal, rather than scientific, perspective, perhaps he could tell us more about what he is doing about climate change from his position of privilege. Leadership involves demonstrating through your own actions what you are expecting in others. Failing that, Mr. Shatner’s is just taking a page out of Granpa Simpson’s playbook.
My colleagues Karin Kvale, GNS Science, New Zealand, Natalia Gurgaczand I published a piece in The Conversation last week. It is reproduced below as Facebook appears to be blocking the reposting of Canadian news articles.
The window for cutting emissions to keep warming at internationally agreed levels is closing rapidly and it seems logical to conclude that any “extra” fossil carbon from plastic contamination will be a problem for the climate.
Our research examines this question using an Earth system model. We found carbon leaching out of existing plastic pollution has a negligible impact. The bigger concern is the production of new plastics, which already accounts for 4.5% of total global emissions and is expected to rise.
Organic carbon leaching from plastic pollution
In nature, plants make organic carbon (carbon-hydrogen compounds) from inorganic carbon (carbon compounds not bonded with hydrogen) through photosynthesis. Most plastics are made from fossil fuels, which are organic carbon compounds. This organic carbon leaches into the environment from plastics as they degrade.
Concerns have been raised that this could disrupt global carbon cycling by acting as an alternative carbon source for bacteria, which consume organic carbon.
A key assumption in these concerns is that organic carbon fluxes and reservoirs are a major influence on global carbon cycling (and atmospheric carbon dioxide) over human timescales.
It is true that dissolved organic carbon is a major carbon reservoir. In the ocean, it is about the same amount as the carbon dioxide (CO₂) held in the pre-industrial atmosphere. But there are key differences between atmospheric CO₂ and ocean organic carbon storage. One is the climate impact.
Atmospheric CO₂ warms the climate directly, whereas dissolved organic carbon stored in the ocean is mostly inert. This dissolved organic carbon reservoir built up over many thousands of years.
When phytoplankton make organic carbon (or when plastics leach organic carbon), most of it is rapidly used within hours to days by bacteria and converted into dissolved inorganic carbon. The tiny fraction of organic carbon left behind after bacterial processing is the inert portion that slowly builds up into a natural reservoir.
Once we recognise that plastics carbon is better considered as a source of dissolved inorganic carbon, we can appreciate its minor potential for influence. The inorganic carbon reservoir of the ocean is 63 times bigger than its organic carbon store.
Plastics carbon has little impact on atmospheric CO₂
We used an Earth system model to simulate what would happen if we added dissolved inorganic carbon to the surface ocean for 100 years. We applied it at a rate equivalent to the amount of carbon projected to leach into the ocean by the year 2040 (29 million metric tonnes per year).
This scenario likely overestimates the amount of plastics pollution. Current pollution rates are well below this level and an international treaty to limit plastic pollution is under negotiation.
We repeated the model simulation of adding plastics carbon both with strong climate warming (to see if plastics carbon might produce unexpected climate feedbacks that increase warming) and without (to see if it could alter the climate by itself). In both cases, plastics carbon only increased atmospheric CO₂ concentrations by 1 parts per million (ppm) over a century.
This is a very small increase, considering that current burning of fossil fuels is raising atmospheric CO₂ by more than 2ppm each year.
Direct emissions from burning plastic
We also examined the impact of plastics incineration. We used a scenario in which all plastic projected to be produced in the year 2050 (1.1 billion metric tonnes) would be burned and directly converted into atmospheric CO₂ for 100 years.
In this scenario, we found atmospheric CO₂ increased a little over 21ppm by the year 2100. This increase is equivalent to the impact of fewer than nine years of current fossil fuel emissions.
Relative to the current continued widespread burning of fossil fuels for energy, carbon emitted from plastic waste will not have significant direct impacts on atmospheric CO₂ levels, no matter what form it takes in the environment.
However, plastics production, as opposed to leaching or incineration, currently represents about 4.5% of total global emissions. As fossil fuel consumption is reduced in other sectors, emissions from plastics production are expected to increase in proportional footprint and absolute amount.
A legally binding plastics pollution treaty, currently under development as part of the UN’s environment programme, is an excellent opportunity to recognise the growing contribution of plastics production to climate change and to seek regulatory measures to address these emissions.
Limiting the use of incineration is another climate-friendly measure that would make a small but positive contribution to the goals of the Paris Agreement.
Of course, environmental plastics pollution has many negative impacts beyond climate effects. Our work does not diminish the importance of cleaning up plastic pollution and implementing stringent measures to prevent it. But the justification for doing so is not primarily grounded in an effort to cut emissions.
In May 2016, all 90,000 residents of Fort McMurray, Alta., were evacuated shortly before wildfires engulfed 2,400 homes and businesses with a total cost of more than $4 billion.
Let’s not forget the June 2021 heat dome resulting in temperature records being broken across British Columbia three days in a row. The heat wave culminated in Lytton, a village in the southern part of the province, recording 49.6 C on June 29, the hottest temperature ever observed anywhere in Canada and breaking the previous record by five degrees. The next day, wildfires engulfed Lytton, destroying more than 90 per cent of the town.
“The area burned by forest fires in Canada has increased over the past four decades, at the same time as summer season temperatures have warmed. Here we use output from a coupled climate model to demonstrate that human emissions of greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosol have made a detectable contribution to this warming. We further show that human-induced climate change has had a detectable influence on the area burned by forest fire in Canada over recent decades.”
It appears little has been done to prepare rural Canada for what’s in store as governments deal with immediate, rather than transformational approaches to wildfire management.
This, despite the existence of the national FireSmart program designed to assist homeowners, neighbourhoods and communities decrease their vulnerability to wildfires and increase their resilience to their negative impacts.
Pressure is certainly mounting on decision-makers to become more proactive in both mitigating and preparing for the impacts of climate change.
An Aug. 14 pivotal ruling from the Montana First Judicial District Court sided with a group of youth who claimed that the State of Montana violated their right to a healthy environment.
A similar case brought by seven youth against the Ontario government after the province reduced its greenhouse gas reduction targets has also been heralded as groundbreaking.
As the number of such court cases grow, governments and corporations will need to do more to both protect their citizens from the impacts of climate change, and to aggressively decarbonize energy systems.
While attention is currently turned to the evacuation of Yellowknife, it’s sobering to remind ourselves that they are not alone. The village of Lytton, burnt to the ground just two years ago, has been put on evacuation alert as wildfires approach.
Kelowna has just declared a state of emergency as the McDougall Creek fire starts consuming homes in the region. And this, coming on the heels of the 20th anniversary of the Okanagan Mountain Park fire, when more than 27,000 people had to be evacuated and 239 Kelowna homes were lost.
Canadians will take solace as summer turns into winter and the immediacy of our 2023 wildfire situation wanes. Unfortunately, it will be Australia’s turn next to experience the burning wrath of nature in response to human-caused global warming and the 2023 El Niño.
Rather than waiting to respond reactively to the next fire season, proactive preparation is the appropriate way forward. For as the old adage states: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Today I published an article in The Conversation concerning the headlines last week proclaiming the Gulf Stream could collapse as early as 2025. Facebook has decided to block reposting of news stories originating from Canada on their site, so I decided to reproduce the article here. Please go to the link above for the published online version.
“Be very worried: Gulf Stream collapse could spark global chaos by 2025” announced the New York Post. “A crucial system of ocean currents is heading for a collapse that ‘would affect every person on the planet” noted CNN in the U.S. and repeated CTV News here in Canada.
This latest alarmist rhetoric provides a textbook example of how not to communicate climate science. These headlines do nothing to raise public awareness, let alone influence public policy to support climate solutions.
This is also not the first time such headlines have emerged. Back in 1998, the Atlantic Monthly published an article raising the alarm that global “warming could lead, paradoxically, to drastic cooling — a catastrophe that could threaten the survival of civilization.”
In 2002, editorials in the New York Times and Discover magazine offered the prediction of a forthcoming collapse of deep water formation in the North Atlantic, which would lead to the next ice age.
Building on the unfounded assertions in these earlier stories, BBC Horizon televised a 2003 documentary entitled The Big Chill, and in 2004 Fortune magazine published “The Pentagon’s Weather Nightmare,” piling on where previous articles left off.
Seeing the opportunity for an exciting disaster movie, Hollywood stepped up to created The Day After Tomorrow in which every known law of thermodynamics was ever so creatively violated.
The latest series of alarmist headlines may not have fixated on an impending ice age, but they still suggest the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation could collapse by 2025. This is an outrageous claim at best and a completely irresponsible pronouncement at worst.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been assessing the likelihood of a cessation of deep-water formation in the North Atlantic for decades. In fact, I was on the writing team of the 2007 4th Assessment Report where we concluded that:
“It is very likely that the Atlantic Ocean Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) will slow down during the course of the 21st century. It is very unlikely that the MOC will undergo a large abrupt transition during the course of the 21st century.”
The 6th assessment report went further to conclude that:
“There is no observational evidence of a trend in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), based on the decade-long record of the complete AMOC and longer records of individual AMOC components.”
Understanding climate optimism
Hannah Ritchie, the deputy editor and lead researcher at Our World in Data and a senior researcher at the Oxford Martin School, recently penned an article for Vox where she proposed an elegant framework for how people see the world and their ability to facilitate change.
Ritchie’s framework lumped people into four general categories based on combinations of those who are optimistic and those who are pessimistic about the future, as well as those who believe and those who don’t believe that we have agency to shape the future based on today’s decisions and actions.
Ritchie persuasively argued that more people located in the green “optimistic and changeable” box are what is needed to advance climate solutions. Those positioned elsewhere are not effective in advancing such solutions.
More importantly, rather than instilling a sense of optimism that global warming is a solvable problem, the extreme behaviour (fear mongering or civil disobedience) of the “pessimistic changeable” group (such as many within the Extinction Rebellion movement), often does nothing more than drive the public towards the “pessimistic not changeable” group.
A responsibility to communicate, responsibly
Unfortunately, extremely low probability, and often poorly understood tipping point scenarios, often end up being misinterpreted as likely and imminent climate events.
In many cases, the nuances of scientific uncertainty, particularly around the differences between hypothesis posing and hypothesis testing, are lost on the lay reader when a study goes viral across social media. This is only amplified in situations where scientists make statements where creative licence is taken with speculative possibilities. Possibilities that reader-starved journalists are only too happy to play up in clickbait headlines.
Through independent research and the writing of IPCC reports, the climate science community operates from a position of privilege in the public discourse of climate change science, its impacts and solutions.
Climate scientists have agency in the advancement of climate solutions, and with that agency comes a responsibility to avoid sensationalism. By not tempering their speech, they risk further ratcheting up the rhetoric with nothing to offer in terms of overall solutions or risk reduction.
