New blogging home

Hi lovelies,

I'm going to be pretty much leaving this blog right now.

It's been an exciting couple of years since I started blogging. It has catapulted me to do many great and fantastic things, such as give a talk at Science Online 2010.

Since I started this blog I have also been blogging at other sites, a bit like the neighbourhood cat that gets fed by everyone. You can read my various blog posts on the Guardian's Comment is Free, the Guardian's Environment site blog, Wired UK, The Frontline Club, New Scientist's Culturelab, and Scientific American's guest blog. Phew!

The big announcement is that: I'm engaged. No, not that one. It really is: I'm now blogging as part of the brand-spanking new Scientific American Blog Network.

I'll be writing regular posts (it's in my contract!) for the Creatology blog. It is "an experimental blog coupling science and creativity" and also a sandbox to try out different media. It's a group blog and my co-writers are Gozde Zorlu and Joseph Milton. You can also follow Creatology on Facebook and Twitter @creatologyblog.

Reflections on Slutwalk London

Rant about activism, the 'greenest government ever' and some possible solutions

I have been reading a book called Do it Anyway, by the talented Courtney Martin, the founder of the world's most popular feminist site Feministing.com. The book is a portrait of eight community activists in the US, and the project was started to answer the question of how super-sensitive young things could face the overwhelming responsibilities they face to "save the world"; "We know that soup ladling isn't enough", she comments.

Julia Butterfly Hill spent 728 days in this 1,500 year-old redwood tree in California.  Will we see see scenes like this in the UK if our forests are under threat from unsustainable logging?

Martin thinks that our generation is commonly mislabeled apathetic, when in fact we suffer from a paralysis in the face of the quantity and urgency of issues. How on earth do you chose what to focus on? I totally feel the pain of this dilemma. I've often chewed off my boyfriend's ear down the phone, lamenting the financial crisis, homelessness, human trafficking, the need for political reform in this country, unjust wars, environmental destruction, climate change and development, gender inequality in the UK, and FGM, mass rape and the lack of human rights elsewhere.

However, the narratives in Martin's book reveal that a narrow focus is vitally important to achieving even the smallest things, and a devotion to your goal over time can yield real (although probably never perfect) results.

In her book, Martin tackles our moral imperative to deal with the issues and injustices on our doorsteps. And she also observes that from her journey to write the profiles for the book, it is the personal and deeply-rooted in the community that are a driver for actually doing the activism rather than just moping. She writes:

"It's time that our generation embraced our respective limitations, not as a sign of weakness but as valuable information as we pursue lives of meaning. We must resist exoticizing the suffering outside of our own circles."

I am far from an expert myself, but I am not sure if this zoom on the local is the key as I am grappling with where to focus my own energies. It seems unfortunate that of the activists sketched in the book, the only one working on international issues is Rachel Corrie, who died in the attempt to prevent a Palestinian home from being bulldozed (Although Martin emphasises that the book is not meant to be comprehensive, just a collection of inspirational stories).

There are surely other examples of people from the West who have done real, measurable good in addressing the issues of people living in dire need elsewhere in the world. One example is Harper McConnell, who has worked in the HEAL Africa hospital in the Congo, and created two programs - one teaching children waiting to be treated, and one to skill-up women waiting for operations. McConnell is described in Half the Sky by Nicolas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn. In their book, they encourage readers to take up the gauntlet to help people in developing countries "who desperately need the assistance". (Sorry for using the term 'developing', Hans Rosling - it is one world but this is shorthand for now.)

Another slight quibble with Martin's book is that perhaps it does not follow that people should necessarily work on issues in their own communities as a way to finding their true path. It is clearly important to be passionate about your work as activism is challenging, and this is more likely if you are directly affected or involved with the issues. But I feel that we live in a global society now, more than ever before. Specifically, the actions of industrialised countries are setting up the whole world, but particularly poorer countries, to suffer from climate change on a catastrophic level. I would argue there is too much blindness of the historic harm we have done to other nations.

Also, this kind of argument that actions should be local above all disenfranchises the privileged middle classes to some extent. If we have been blessed and don't feel we have been affected by injustice ourselves, does this mean we have nothing to contribute? Should I be a feminist activist because I was called a slut in secondary school? Although I would definitely describe myself as a feminist and I think feminism is important, I struggle to see that feminism as the only area I could make a difference in my life.

If the root of activism is suffering or empathy, perhaps empathy directs us to places of pain - regardless of their location. It seems definitely worth thinking about acting locally, or volunteering, but I wonder if it would be worth thinking strategically about where we can make the most impact. Is it making a difference in our own, fairly well-off communities that we socialise with, or to communities that are scarcely subsisting, or that are that are under attack?

In other words, the personal is the political, but does the political have to be rooted in the personal? Or should we just direct our compassion and empathy and resources where we know they are most needed?

It seems there has never been a period of time where politics have been so at odds with the data , and on a global scale. As physicist Brian Cox said in a recent G2 article:

“I do not believe that we currently run our world according to evidence-based principles. If we did, we would be investing in an energy Manhattan project to quickly develop and deploy clean energy technologies.”

It's an age-old utilitarian moral philosophy dilemma that we discussed in my university classrooms: if children out there are starving, or lacking an education, how could we justify our flashy watches or sneakers? How much should we give? How much should we expect others to give? What are our priorities? But funnily enough, asceticism is one thing that has not really caught on. I was recently shocked by William Dalrymple's description of a Jain nun plucking out her own hair in his most recent book Nine Lives. And in a similar way, pure environmentalism is has become almost unthinkable and shocking - most campaigns tend to focus on keeping creature comforts such as flying and driving but also 'doing your bit' for mitigation. How many of us are willing to follow the example of Julia Hill, for example, who spent two years up a tree to get protected status of an ancient redwood forest?

I don't have the answers yet about how far we should go or have my personal priorities in immaculate order. But I am inspired by role models such as Harvey Milk and movements such as the gay civil rights movement of the 1970s America, captured in the wonderful eponymous film Milk.

Even though the coalition government is so far not succeeding to live up to their touchstone pledge of being the 'greenest government ever' according to the excellent Johann Hari, I hope that this might galvanise activists and breathe some much needed life into the green movement in this country. Will people come out onto the streets to start protesting the wholesale offloading of their forests? Or the new offshore oil drilling operation near Shetland? (Or will they be so confused and overwhelmed by the complexity of the climate change and ecological issues that they do nothing?)

Hari writes:

"The Prime Minister has said the forest sell-off "empowers local communities" to take over the forests for themselves as part of a "Big Society". Yet sources within the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs say that, unsurprisingly, only about 1 per cent of the sales are anticipated to go to local co-operatives or green groups. The "Big Society" is a fluffy fig leaf for dismantling and demolition."

Perhaps it is time to re-cast the Big Society as a force for political activism and representation to fight the co-alition's broken promises? Or even take the name to fight back against the government on the political platform?

One way to fight the government's cuts right now is to join the False Economy campaign. They’ve got a clever video that makes the point rather well, see below.


Why cuts are the wrong cure from False Economy on Vimeo.

What has this got to do with climate change? At the end of the video, the actor Sam West describes a vision of sustainable economic growth: “...putting the emphasis on green growth and investment. This not only deals with the deficit, but the unemployment and the poverty, and it also deals with the many environmental challenges that the cuts will make worse.”

A spokesperson for False Econony tells me that they are crowdsourcing the consequences of the cuts and they want environmentalist to get stuck in:

“The coalition government has adopted a very deliberate strategy of 'devolving' its cuts down to local government - passing them down for councils to implement, away from the glare of the national media. It's only by collating information on what is being cut, locality by locality, that all of us can see the true impact of the cuts agenda.”

With more data on the site, environmentalists can consider whether the government has chosen the environment as the target of an ‘easy cut’ - without a significant media or public backlash. False Economy say: “Trying to grab a slice of an ever-shrinking pie is not a road the environmental movement should go down; instead, we need to ask why it is shrinking and whether it needs to shrink. These are the questions the government doesn't want people to ask.”

Can women (and men and intersex peeps) save the world?

Caroline Lucas told me recently that she thought it was a "very important" thing to write about environmental feminism when I said I wanted to write a feature about it.

Climate Rush calls for "deeds not words" on climate change

However, getting published on the trend of female-led environmental campaigning is not as easy as I thought. Too niche, perhaps. Or maybe those two words 'environmentalism' and 'feminism' congeal to form an unattractive patina of earnest do-gooders' intentions. Ism-anathema to editors. The public at large is not deeply interested in either, either.

Hopefully, if you are still reading, you are keen on one or both of gender equality and preventing the worst of climate change. Excellent. Let's begin.

I met Lucas at a suffragette-inspired eco-activist Climate Rush vigil commemorating the centenary of Black Friday, a riot involving suffragettes and the police. Guess who came off worse a hundred years ago? The unarmed suffragettes were assaulted, abused and two even died.

Lucas appears constant in her support of Climate Rush; she joined the 'On the Run' road-show last year, and speaks regularly at Climate Rush events. On her own website, a blog post states that:

Dr Lucas is a keen supporter of Climate Rush, a campaign which uses creative direct action to protest against the government’s commitment to environmentally destructive projects such as airport expansion and new coal fired power stations. Together with Climate Rush, she is calling for a revolution in renewable energy and a transition to a fair and sustainable green economy.

At the vigil for Black Friday, Lucas spoke of her own personal inspiration drawn from the suffragettes:

"The suffragettes showed their real commitment, year after year, and there is much we can learn from that. One of the most inspiring bits of that building [Parliament] for me, it's not the wonderful members lobby, or the wonderful public lobby, or the wonderful chamber, it's actually a little broom cupboard. It's a broom cupboard in the basement, about 3ft squared - the most important place to me in the House of Commons because it is where Emily Davison, the suffragette, locked herself in overnight so that when she was found on the day of the census, she could say that her address was the House of Commons."

Climate Rush is calling for the government to fulfil its promise in May to be the greenest government ever. The picture so far is looking patchy: for instance, DEFRA fared badly in the cuts, but the Green Bank will be a 'proper bank' that is needed to stimulate the green economy. Lucas is far from convinced, however, saying:

We had a debate in the House of Commons today [17 Nov] [on environment] and I can report that all of 12 MPs were present. That is shameful. This is why the Climate Rush movement is so important. We can never let is happen again that only 12 MPs think climate change is a sufficient priority to get themselves along to a meeting to discuss it.

There were about 200 climate "rushettes", as Climate Rush call their followers who took part in the vigil. There were women, children, teens, and men - some decked out in Edwardian dress and veils and "Deeds not words sashes. I met a 15-year-old girl on the protest with her mother. She said that Tamsin Omond, one of the founders of Climate Rush, is her hero, and she's starting a school newspaper that will feature the vigil in the first issue.

At a time in our cultural story where the lack of decent female rolemodels is bemoaned, I happen to think that it's a very great thing to have inspirational leaders such as Omond who take action on the world's biggest challenge

This has been a good year for female environmentalists. In one of the happiest moments of the year for anyone who cares about the environment, Lucas became the first green MP. Bryony Worthington, climate change policy expert and campaigner and one of the founders of Sandbag.org.uk, was recently made a Labour peer.

And it's not just in the sphere of politics that powerful women are campaigning on climate change. Ellen MacArthur recently launched a sustainability foundation, and declared that this would be her occupation from now on. Lawyer and author Polly Higgins is campaigning to make Ecocide an international law. At the book launch of Higgins' Eradicating Ecocide, she called for people to "be unreasonable" [watch below] and kick up a storming fuss for the greater good. This resonates with the Climate Rush tagline: 'Well behaved women rarely make history.'.



Higgins wants people to become activists, because political pressure is needed to make a difference on environment issues, as well as behaviour change. And there is also a grassroots movement for women to act on the environment.

It is well-publicised that the Women's Institute is enjoying a trendy resurgence and becoming increasingly influential. But perhaps it is little known that this year they have published an action pack on climate change campaigning encouraging their members to become guerilla gardeners and activists. In it, they state:

"In the UK, women remain influential consumers of domestic products and utilities, providing them with the opportunity to choose greener and less polluting energy suppliers and appliances, or consider the impacts of their food choices, for example. Women are also still the primary educators of the next generation and therefore have huge power to change the way in which today's children think about their coexistence with the planet."

According to a study* published earlier this year in the journal Population and Environment, American women care more about the environment than American men (!). The study was based on a gender analysis of eight years' of Gallup poll data. Leo Hickman blogged this in more detail, and pointed out a the suggestion that feminism rather than gender is linked to concern for the environment (women are more likely to be feminists, one presumes):

Somma and Tolleson-Rinehart (1997)** find that individuals – both women and men – who support feminist goals express greater environmental concern.

The correlation is there, but how it comes about is not clear. Perhaps people who are concerned about social issues and inequalities are just people who are concerned about social issues and inequalities - whether it is gender inequality in this country or ecological inequality between the world's North and South.

However important feminism turns out to be in explaining the gender differential in the developed world, it is certain that women are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change, according the UN. The Women's Environmental Network (WEN) have also produced a report on gender and climate change describing that women are more likely to live in poverty, globally, so are more likely to bear the brunt of environmental destruction. The report finds:

"[W]omen are more likely than men to

• die in climate change-related disasters, and suffer from increased workload, loss of income, health problems, and violence and harassment in the aftermath of such events;
• be displaced, or encounter problems when other (usually male) family members migrate for economic reasons;
• experience increased burden of water and fuel collection, and resulting health problems, due to increased incidence of drought or other changes in climate;
• feel the effects of rising food prices most acutely, and be the first to suffer during food shortages;
• suffer exacerbated health inequalities;
• suffer from violence, including sexual violence, in resource conflicts;
• be expected to, and need to, adapt to the effects of climate change, increasing their workload;
• suffer as a result of intended solutions to the problem of climate change, such as forestry projects and biofuel production."

The WEN report also highlights research that women are more focused on behavioural rather than technological solutions compared to men. I wonder if this is because of social constructs around gender, such as that women are no good at engineering or that men are less empathetic? The Women's Engineering Society, and I'm sure plenty of men, would have something to say about that.

Workshops on gender and climate change run jointly by WEN with UK Feminista are "oversubscribed", the WEN comms officer tells me - another indicator that feminists are heavily into the environment.

Whether you are a woman, man or an intersex or transgender person, anyone can be a feminist, and anyone can follow join the very lively women-led movement to act on the environment - whether it is joining protests, getting informed or lobbying your MP. Go forth and be unreasonable!

Refs:

*The effects of gender on climate change knowledge and concern in the American public, Aaron M. McCright, POPULATION & ENVIRONMENT, Volume 32, Number 1, 66-87, DOI: 10.1007/s11111-010-0113-1
**Tracking the Elusive Green Women: Sex, Environmentalism, and Feminism in the United States and Europ, Mark Somm,  Sue Tolleson-Rinehart, Political Research Quarterly March 1997 vol. 50 no. 1 153-169, doi: 10.1177/106591299705000108

Long-awaited blog on climate skepticism

Part 3 in a series on climate change journalism

Sometimes you wait a long time for something and then it just lands in your lap when you're not looking. Or maybe it is under an embargo you can't break.

Either way this is a ripe time to write about climate skepticism in the media. First of all, Bob Ward, climate change communication guru at the Grantham Research Institute at LSE wrote a 'Viewpoint' in Weather at the tail end of last month in which he advocated climate researchers taking more responsibility for countering the claims of climate skeptics in the aftermath of Climategate and the IPCC errors.


The nasty shock of the 'recoil effect'


The increased prominence of skeptical views in the media the past year is described by Adam Corner, a researcher into understanding risk at Cardiff Universtiy, as a 'recoil effect' - occuring despite the fact that climate science has since been cleared. Big fat caveat: climate researchers may have a role to play in this but ultimately the buck of misleading climate change coverage stops with journalists and editors. Margot O'Neill described the challenges facing the media in a blogpost for ABC, chiefly the aftershock of Climategate and the ensuing "public confusion about whether there is a reliable scientific consensus".

Ward suggests scientists need to communicate more effectively with the public and the media; on the subject of personal integrity as well as scientific results. He also adds that: "More leaders will be needed who can skillfully take on confrontational media interviews and go head-to-head with slippery opponents."

He explains this is because climate skeptics often: "take advantage of scientists' sensitivity to allegations of bias or subjectivity and take advantage of this by accusing researchers of being advocates if they suggest that greenhouse gas emissions should be reduced. Researchers need to be smarter when dealing with such tactics and the rhetorical tricks that their opponents use in public debate."

And hey presto! In a probably completely unrelated event, the LA Times and Grist published a truly remarkable piece about climate scientist in the US mobilising to counter-act the pervasiveness of skeptics in climate change journalism. According the the LA Times this week:

"On Monday, the American Geophysical Union, the country's largest association of climate scientists, plans to announce that 700 climate scientists have agreed to speak out as experts on questions about global warming and the role of man-made air pollution.

John Abraham of St. Thomas University in Minnesota, who last May wrote a widely disseminated response to climate change skeptics, is also pulling together a "climate rapid response team," which includes scientists prepared to go before what they consider potentially hostile audiences on conservative talk radio and television shows."

John Abraham is a proactive kind of scientist. Earlier this year he 'eviscerated' Lord Monckton's climate skeptic arguments in a painstaking point-by-point presentation, and further responded to the litigious peer's criticisms on the Skeptical Science site. Hopefully Abraham and others like him will be as skillful at manipulating the media as the climate change skeptic lobbies. But will they be skillful enough to drown out the minority of highly vocal dissenters from the scientific consensus?

The fight begins.

Ref:
Communicating Climate Change, Robert Edward Thomas Ward, Weather, DOI: 10.1002/wea.683 [sadly no free version for me to link to]

How to be less maladaptive

Or, what are the messages we should be sending out about climate change?

Most of us are somewhere on the ‘maladaptive’ scale according to professor of public ethics and author of Requiem for a Species, Clive Hamilton, meaning that our actions don’t correspond to what we know about climate change. This is a form of denial. 

So how do we get our “actions and principles to dance together”, paraphrasing  climate change communications expert George Marshall, author of Carbon Detox. Apparently it’s a psychological precept that we humans seek a close balance between our beliefs and behaviour.

Let's dance.
Pic: Wikimedia/ http://www.flickr.com/people/jennifrog/

We’ve got far to go. While a recent YouGov survey showed Brit’s interest in climate change has significantly decreased from 80 per cent in 2006 to 62 per cent in 2010, the evidence for an average temperature rise of 4 degrees Celcius mounts.

A poll last year showed that only 41 per cent of Brits believe that climate change is manmade. Compare this to the fact that the UN’s IPPC have called the evidence for manmade climate change “unequivocal”.

Apathy. Denial. It’s clear that the attitudes of people need to be shifted. And possibly, they could be influenced on the basis of what is known about the psychology of getting people to act on climate change. An argument for this is that the media has been part of the reason most people are still not acting in a significant way on climate change, so it must consciously be part of the solution.

It’s a big challenge because there are many barriers to acting on climate change – so says my mate Morgan Phillip’s PhD thesis.  There are many things in our lives competing with it for our headspace, our consideration and our aspirations as well as our time. Things such as: celebrity culture, consumerism, sports, our televisions (four hours a day!) – not to mention our jobs, home lives and our families and social life.

Another big issue is the distance factor. Yes, it might be a crime if there are already climate refugees and conflicts are already fuelled by lack of resources. But, writes George Marshall in Yes Magazine:

“… [P]eople have decided that they can keep climate change outside their “norms of attention” through a selective framing that creates the maximum distance. In opinion poll research the majority of people will define it as far away (“it’s a global problem, not a local problem”) or far in the future (“it’s a huge problem for future generations”),”

Another issue is that predicting climate change is done via the seemingly abstract science of climate modelling, and also the numbers themselves are hard to wrap our heads around.

Act now or forever hold your peace

So, all in all, it doesn’t seem like something we need to act on now. But it is. Luckily, there are some psychologists that have been looking at how to remedy this. I wonder what campaigning but upfront and objective journalists can learn from them. What kinds of messages should we be putting out if we care about informing and truth-telling but also the consequences of what we write?

The take-home message of the big American Psychological Association report on climate change psychology that was published last year was: climate change doom creates inaction. This makes sense: tell people enough bad stuff regularly enough and it’s all too tempting to put fingers in ears.

This could be a reason, taken in its purest form, not to write (or listen to) sensationalist stories that warn of an environmental apocalypse. But the truth can be pretty grim itself. So how can you write about it an not leave people feeling disempowered?

A solution could be balance out news pieces – and let’s be honest, most news tends to be about bad things that happen – with some positive news. This could be about inspiring stuff that people are already doing to take the reins on climate change and might get people energised to do something or solutions-based or adaptation stories. It sounds pretty bland in black and white, but it is uplifting to read about people who are innovating, campaigning and are leading the way. I recommend Positive News, Lucy Siegle’s Innovators column – and I will be writing something on grassroots green heroes shortly.

Sell it or shake it

Sustainability consultancy Futerra argue for communicating climate change in a way that works. They write in their report Sell the Sizzle that “We wish that understanding climate change would automatically lead to lifestyles [sic] changes. But it doesn’t.”

Instead, they propose selling a vision of a sustainable future. The sizzle of a sausage sells. Heaven sells. Hell does not. In an article on TheEcologist.co.uk Solitaire Townsend says:

'For years we've tried to 'sell' climate change, but a lot of people aren't buying… Threats of climate hell haven't seemed to hold us back from running headlong towards it. We must build a visual and compelling vision of low carbon heaven. And this vision must be desirable. If [it] isn't more desirable than what we've got now then why bother reaching for it?'

This line of thinking seems to be a logical conclusion to the APA’s findings (although the APA were more focused on identifying issues to overcome rather than solutions – so far).

However, Hamilton disagrees. He tells me “We need to belt people over the head with the facts at this point in the debate.” He thinks that if the public goes through the process of feeling anxious, afraid or sad about the extent of climate change, they will go through transformation – that elusive bridge between values and actions that Futerra dismisses in their report New Rules New Game. 

Is deep reflection the bridge between our values and action?

What is needed for this, Hamilton argues, is deep reflection on the truth of climate change – it’s only when people touch upon it superficially that they fail to be affected. And once you’ve been shaken to the core – the ‘burning embers’ diagram does a pretty good job – there is no way you can fail to act. Even the licensing ‘green halo’ effect can be reduced “if people see those activities as necessary,” says Toronto University researcher Chen-Bo Zong.

But I wonder about whether this approach is *too* terrifying. Where does emotional support for this process come from? “People heal and make change when they feel supported, understood and challenged.” Writes Renée Lertzman in TheEcologist.co.uk.

So I ask Hamilton whether positive communications had a role to play in lifting deep-thinking people out of their climate depression and into action. He responded that positive stories are okay in the context of the reality of how bad it is.

I don't know if I agree - that still sounds a bit depressing. Surely we must get the balance right between informing and offering hope? A dash of requiem and a dollop of sizzle, if you like.

Except possibly neither of these approaches is right. In a Twitter natter on the topic with 10:10-er @Cian he said:

“Maybe one of the issues of the past 20 years is that we've tried various forms of 1 message”.

Sauce not sizzle?

Malcolm Gladwell’s talk on spaghetti sauce (see below) gets at the point that you can reach many more people if you offer them options – chunky, Italian style and so on rather than just one generic sauce.

George Marshall recognises we are not all just one generic public and so he organises his book Carbon Detox around a handful of marketing types. One set of instructions for the goal-orientated ‘Winner’ and one for the make-a-difference ‘Striver.’ I’m pretty sure this kind of approach has a sound basis in a meta-analysis of behaviour change literature (paywall. Or check out p222-223 on constellations of behaviours if you can).

On the surface, this looks good. People can chose what action to take based on their personality and preferences. But even when you add nuance, not all of the problems are resolved. We’re still in a sauce. For instance, if you go about telling winners that it’s okay to have the occasional high-carbon treat (in lieu of a habitually high-carbon lifestyle) and strivers that they have to lead the way forwards for the environmental movement by being activists – isn’t the disparity kind of unfair?

I don’t know what the solutions to this are. Maybe we just have to accept people have to do what works for them – as long as they are engaging in significant behaviour change. Some people might be more ahead of the curve than others, and maybe they won’t resent the winners all their materialistic desires. Humphf.

Back to the journalism

I think I’ve shown that there is some contention over the best ways to communicate climate change to get people be interested again and act. And I’m not sure this really helps us as campaigning journalists apart from that we should keep all bases covered: belt people with the truth; sell them an alternative, utopian vision by writing about solutions; and give lots of variety in green lifestyle stories.

It seems an uncomfortable that this approach is full of contradictions and we don’t yet know the right formula to give people the ‘right’ amount of information about the science and despair, and the ‘right’ amount of inspiration and multi-faceted practical advice to pull them out of it to get them off their bums to do something about their behaviour. There is a lot at stake. 

Perhaps what’s needed is a more individually-tailored news and features site that plugs in to where you are on your psychological process of dealing with climate change. Will there be a point in the future where the internet will interact with our belief systems? Discuss.

Refs:

Assessing dangerous climate change through an update of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “reasons for concern”PNAS March 17, 2009 vol. 106 no. 11 4133-4137, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0812355106

Heimlich, J. & Ardoin, N.M. (2008) Understanding Behaviour to understand behaviour change: a literature review, Environmental Education Research, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 215-237, DOI: 10.1080/13504620802148881

Campaigning climate journalism

As a nascent environment journalist, I’ve had a furrowed brow more then once over the past few months thinking about the responsibilities of the job at hand.

The main questions that preoccupy me are:

1. To what extent should climate change* journalism aim to motivate people to act on climate change? (*Where I write climate change you could sometimes easily substitute conservation, which might be an even more important than climate change.)

2. If you were to consider campaigning as essential to climate change journalism, what are the messages we should be sending out, anyway? And to whom?

3. How do we deal with sceptics?

4. What’s the future of climate change journalism? What are the possible solutions to the flaws in some of the dodgier climate change coverage, or just climate change coverage in general?

I’m going to be tackling these in a series of blogposts starting now.

Campaigning climate change

To lay all my cards on the table from the beginning, I think climate change journalists have a moral responsibility to get people to act to mitigate the shitstorm that’s on its way.

This is because journalists have a privileged position in society. Although the so-called ‘fourth pillar’ is among the least trusted profession, they have an unusual power to exert influence.

It is difficult to quantify the causal relationship between the quality and quantity of climate change coverage in the UK’s media and its effect on public opinion because of a lack of research, according to Bob Ward (a climate change policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment) in Climate Change and the Media. But a study done by Butler and Pidgeon in 2007 showed that the type of media consumed made a difference to the readers’ perspectives on climate change.

It’s this power to affect attitudes that gives journalists a unique position to act on what the UN Secretary General, Ban-Ki Moon, has called climate change the “defining issue of our era”. If the media can wield its influence to campaign for both stronger mitigation policy and personal and community sustainability, then it is increasingly possible people will rise to the challenge of ameliorating climate change.

Hold your horses

But wait a minute, what about traditional journalistic values? Aren’t journalists meant to be mediators sifting the facts through a sieve of balance, impartiality and other journalistic values?

I quite like environment journalist and author Eric Roston’s definition of journalism, which he pinged to me over email:

“Journalism is the word we use to describe how researchers who are financially independent from their subjects scrutinize people in power and contextualize these findings for a general audience. It's composed of two things, investigation and storytelling--and the possibilities for both are changing more rapidly than any single person can understand.”

So if journalism is in flux, perhaps it should be admissible for journalists to wield their influence to get people to act on climate change? – After all, it’s in their own best interests.

Roston thinks no – although he says there is a continuum of what constitutes journalism – he tells me:

“I would disagree that climate journalists should campaign for anything other than tools that help them conduct their work -- open data, "sunlight" policies that require certain disclosures from government, declassification of relevant materials, and maybe the most important, "shield" protection that prevents journalists from being legally compelled to reveal confidential sources. Our society is quite litigious, and a big concern I have about new journalism models is how journalists will be protected from investigation subjects protected by high-powered lawyers.”

Powers of persuasion

I agree that these are very important freedoms and rights to maintain, but I also think that you must consider the impact you have on people when you write on the uniquely challenging problem of climate change. But acknowledging this responsibility also makes me feel uneasy. If climate change is so immense a problem that needs a complete culture change, like the austerity measures of the world wars, then doesn’t campaigning journalism, taken to the extreme, smack of a kind of brainwashing propaganda?

This quandary is well articulated by Bob Ward. He writes to me:

“The danger with campaigning is that it distorts reporting of an issue, so audiences do not receive a neutral, objective account of the news - basically it crosses the line from providing information into the realm of motivating action. In this case, audiences may lose trust in the source of information. Then again, the scientific evidence on climate change indicates that it could result in the future in profound and fundamental risks to billions of people across the world, so would it be desirable for the media to report on the risk of climate change as if it journalists have no interest in whether the Earth suffers the worst impacts?”

Signposting

One answer is: it depends on how clearly different types of climate change stories are signposted. David Dobbs, a science journalist who writes for the New York Times and previously wrote about the environment says:

“There's reporting and there's persuading. I think you need to be clear to yourself and to the reader which you're up to. In the job's tightest definition — straight reporting — the responsibility is to inform, honestly and accurately. Yet as we all know, just reporting accurately will often influence readers, whether you set out to or not.

"If you're setting out to persuade, however, you should make that clear, even if not explicitly. Your facts should be just as solid as ever. But it should be clear to both you and the reader that you're marshalling those facts in service of an argument, rather as more-or-less straight information.”

So for Dobbs, if something is an op-ed, it needs to be demarcated from news clearly. So far, so straightforward, as all journalism should do this in accordance with industry regulator guidelines.

I asked the editor of the Guardian’s environment website, James Randerson, whether he thinks that the intention behind their environment editorial is always clear, and he responded that everything that is part of the 10:10 campaign is clearly labelled, as are lifestyle, eg Ask Leo & Lucy and comment piece, eg George Monbiot.

In the case of the Guardian I agree that individual pieces are well signposted. It is a given that their editorial stance is that the environment, alongside civil liberties, is a special area of interest. Randerson says: “Climate change is one of those things we do have a campaigning stance on. That means we do think there is a responsibility, not only to tell people news, but also to motivate them to understand what they can do about the news… to say what actions are effective and what’s just greenwash.” He adds that straight news stories on climate change are reported and written in the same way as any other topic - without a campaigning slant.

In need of a makeover

However, in general climate change journalism can suffer from an image problem because of some journalism that recklessly sensationalises or distorts the facts – or even ignores them completely.

Historically, the press doesn’t have a good record on climate change reporting. According to Nick Davies, in Flat Earth News, “Scientists spent two decades warning the planet was heating up while journalists simply balanced what they were saying with denials from experts and oil companies.’” In this case “balancing” reporting with the manufactured doubt presents an inaccurate, misleading overview of the science.

Even now, there can still be problems with balance, particularly in broadcast media, which its British regulators, OFCOM, states must be impartial. According to investigative journalist George Monbiot in his book Heat: “Until mid 2005, the BBC seemed incapable of hosting a discussion on climate change without bringing in one of the Exxon-sponsored deniers to claim it was not taking place.”

In a case in point, Dr S. Fred Singer was called in to debate online ‘What does the future hold for climate change?’ as a climate change expert. However, Davies writes in Flat Earth News that The Union of Concerned Scientists found Singer’s work was promoted through 11 of Exxon's anti-climate change lobbying groups.

If balance is one of the four horsemen of the journalistic apocalyse, the three others are: sensationalism, denialism and straightforward distortion.

Contrast this piece from the Indy on 6 degrees Celcius rise by the end of the century with this, I think less sensationalist piece on the same report by the New Scientist.

A recent example of distortion from the UK press is that the Mail and Daily Telegraph misconstrued the work of a climate scientist called Mojab Latif to state the case that snowy weather in the UK this January contradicts the climate change consensus. Latif responded to clarify the meaning of his research in the Guardian.

Commentators can don a contrarian stance. This probably appeals to the right-leaning audiences of certain papers, ker-ching for the right-wing press. An example of a commentor that denies manmade global warming is happening is James Delingpole, writing for the Daily Telegraph. In this piece for the Telegraph blogs, he uses Climategate as a basis to deny the consensus of climate science. He calls it the: “Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig)”.

To read more about what some see as a concerted effort to undermine climate science, read this extract of Requiem for a Species by Clive Hamilton on the Guardian online.

(As an aside re Climategate, James Randerson told me about Fred Pearce’s massive investigation into the Climategate emails: “He says we’ve dug up all this dirt but it’s nowhere near as bad as many people have been saying, so where does it leave us? It leaves us that climate change is clearly happening, it’s clearly a problem, and there are issues [with the hacked emails] but they don’t change this. If we hadn’t done the big investigation first that would be just him [Pearce] spouting off, but because he’s done the investigation he can say that with credibility.”)

In a recent interview where I speak with Clive Hamilton, he says that the media does have a responsibility to compensate for bad coverage in the past. He thinks the main priority is to tell the truth (so far, so traditional) so people are informed and that’s the first step to what he calls ‘adaptive’ behaviour, meaning you act in line with the evidence. I’ve not read Requiem for a Species yet, but at his talk at the RSA (listen here) a couple of weeks ago, he did also talk about the importance of hope, and offering a positive vision. He told me some “positive stories are okay within a context of the reality of climate change.” (More on how we get might motivate people to act in the next post.

Wash hair, not brains

It is this question of making up for past sins that made me think of how far it’s possible to go without adding your own special bias onto stories to enhance their capacity to influence people to act. Where does one article or a body of work cross the fuzzy line from campaigning to a kind of manipulation? I ask Dobbs what is his take on this? He writes:

“There's a sense in which any attempt to persuade is manipulative: You are, after all, manipulating an argument in order to get someone to change their minds or their behavior [sic]. But, again, this gets scungy when you twist facts to your cause or otherwise play sleight-of-hand. Transparency is the thing: Integrity to the facts, honesty about intentions, and you're playing fair.”

Okay, so I have to admit to mostly being a Guardian reader (I’m not going to look at each paper in depth, don’t you think this post is long enough as it is?) but it does seem to me that they will tackle news such as the retraction of a global warming paper and of course deep coverage of Climategate, which, as Randerson points out: “There’s no way we would publish that stuff if we were following a monomaniacal line that is like climate change is going to kill us all and everything has to fit into that.”

Although it must be uncomfortable covering stories that aren’t in line with their editorial stance, objectivity is the trump card. Not ‘balance’ but representing the truth of the situation as you see it – I mean, there’s no such thing as true objectivity since we are all the subjects of our perceptions. But as long as you do proper journalist-y things with the information you have, and you aim to be as objective as possible within the awareness of your own biases, what more can you do?

REF: doi: 10.1088/1755-1307/6/26/262008