Tag: Science Communication

I have been asked many times this last year what I think about Greta Thunberg and her Fridays4Future. Several times I have tried to explain the disorientation, bordering on desperation, that me and many colleagues gradually have found ourselves in. Rewind about 15 years, and I still then believed that science was finally winning over both the public and the decision makers, and that now, we would finally begin to gradually change our society in a direction that would reduce and counter the climate crisis, which was towering just ahead of us, and then enable us to build a sustainable society. When IPCC and Al Gore jointly won the Nobel peace price in 2007, that appeared to be the final nail in the climate deniers coffin.

Instead something very strange happened in the United States. I think future historians (if there are any) will consider it an exceptionally strange development. The fossil industry had then already been sponsoring climate change deniers for two decades. Since they appeared to fail, one would have thought they would give up. Instead, the Koch brothers and the rest of the fossil fuel industry played the role of doctor Frankenstein. With more of their oil money as new blood they morphed their supposedly dead climate denying servants into something new and ugly. Creating something called a Tea-party (officially in 2009) they infiltrated and took over one of the large political parties in the US. I know that the official Tea-party ideology included ideas of small-governments etc, that I can partly feel sympathy for, but behind the scene, big oil ran that movement. And big oil used the Tea party for their purposes without caring for the ideology or religion that drew many Tea party grass rotes. Within a few years it had become normal for a politician in the Republican party to deny the science and all the observations that supported a man-made climate change, and political suicide to talk in favor of actions to stop climate change. In two questionable elections they managed to put their presidents in the White House despite that they lost the popular vote, and when in between a president of the other party ruled, they managed to make him weak enough, in the double parliaments of the US, to block him from any strong climate actions. So even when Obama sat in the White House, they managed to have such strong influence that the US in practice helped kill the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, even though many parts help with that. This delayed all international progress until the Paris climate agreement in December 2015. By then the UN had changed tactics and managed to push through an agreement based on entirely voluntary carbon dioxide emission cuts from all parts in the agreement. By now, the sum of promised emission cuts would result in a global average temperature of between 3 and 3.5 degrees Celsius in 2100, despite that the official Paris agreement goal is 2 degrees, or even 1.5 degrees C. That is if everyone lives up to their voluntary promises.

When again a Republican president moved into the White House, he made a show of withdrawing from the entirely voluntary Paris agreement, for domestic political reasons. I still sends bad signals though. In all these years, the tiny progress towards stopping the climate crisis that was made in the US under Obama, have now been completely frozen or erased by Trump (with the exception of some progress on state or city level). Trump still continues to try to turn the clock backward regarding emissions (be they climate or health motivated) even to the 1970’s. Considering the successful and clever politics by the people behind the Republican (Tea) party, it is understandable that nothing really happened in the US on federal level in these 15-20 years.

I have given up understanding the climate change deniers. In an entirely rational way I have read enough about them, among other things studies made by psychologists, to know what to expect from them. They are a known factor: In the US they have power. In Europe they are marginalized. I spend much more time trying to understand entirely different groups. Most importantly: It is incredibly strange that so many parties and leaders in the rest of the world have taken the US position as an excuse to do nearly nothing, despite that they pay lip service to the climate change science and the Paris climate agreement. Of course the influence of US is important: if the worlds most powerful nation do nothing, why should we? But I don’t think it is the whole explanation. How is it possible to understand how dire our situation is, and then do nothing, despite that you are in a position of power?!?

The other group that worries me, is the large part of the public, which (at least here in Sweden) now admits the problem, but invent excuses for why they cannot do anything to change their own carbon foot print. Excuses that boils down to “it will be too expensive/inconvenient for me to help save the planet/our civilization for my grand-kids”. This actually sounds much more like an individual version of the excuses that one hear from most politicians. These people, not the direct climate change deniers, are now the big problem that prevent actions against the climate change. Good days, I am able to see it as a progress, that we have advanced pass one roadblock to another one.

Add to this political back ground the endless research results and observations that tell the story of how green house gases reach record levels, temperatures rise, snow and ice retreat, extreme weather increase, biota retreat, forest fires increase, and extinction of species reaches new records (the last is only partly climate related, but the other causes are also man made). Among us who work in these fields (be it climate simulations, feed back processes, climate change effects on the biosphere, or on individual human health, or the health of our collective society), who have to read many of these studies, and who understand what they imply for the future, a feeling of despair, anger, loss of motivation, and even depressions, has become common.

Few people understand how historically unique it is that scientists are so worried that they go together and form something as the IPCC to communicate their warning to the public and to people with political and economical power, and sustain doing this for 3 decades. Generally speaking, scientists are weary of media contacts, and avoid everything that distracts from their research. I know myself. The collective effort of the IPCC reports, from peer review papers through endless steps to the simplified pedagogical summaries for decision makers are enormous. Yet it have not helped! I have thought a lot about what mistake we might have done. We are all trained to deliver our research in a neutral and calm way, with no feelings or values attached. A “good scientist” can talk about something disastrous in the same tone as if he/she just had added a few more digits on the decimal of phi. If there is any mistake with which we have contributed to the lack of action to prevent climate change, it is this. People, on a more or less sub-conscious way, have not taken us serious enough, because we have not expressed that we are personally and seriously worried. I decided to break that behavior a few years ago. The process also helped against the worst of my climate-depression.

Time to tie this post up, it is getting long. Let’s go back to where I started. When I’m asked what I think of Greta Thunberg and the other protesting youngsters in Fridays4Future, I am usually answering, that in my view, they are the only ones for 15 years to react in a rational way and in proportion to the threat that we face. My dominant feeling is relief. Finally someone react!

I think that with some variation, a lot of my colleagues feel something similar to what I have described. I think that one thing we will see now, for example through networks like Scientist4Future, is that more climate scientists and environmental scientists will become more directly outspoken, and personal, in their reaction on the lack of action on the climate crisis. It is, of course on top of continuing our scientific research, the best we can do. If you are a scientist, tell people that you are worried! It is OK! It doesn’t imply that you aren’t a serious scientist