Climate & Society

Last week, returning from a visit with foundation officers and state-supreme court justices in Washington, John, Ramona, and I made it home just as Bozeman was being thumped with two feet of snow and much below normal temperatures. (We did not consider the prospect of an extra night in Great Falls pleasant.)

While exercising caution when discussing climate and weather, I happen to be reading a fascinating book, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850, by Brian M. Fagan.

Fagan’s book begins at the end of the Medieval Warm Period (900-1300) that allowed Vikings to discover and settle Iceland and Greenland, eventually reaching northeastern North America. The Period also saw vineyards thrive across much of the British Isles and high up European Alpine slopes.

All this changed, Fagan describes, as the regional climate dramatically shifted to a cold period lasting from approximately 1300 to 1850. The Little Ice Age changed European agriculture and (according to Fagan) had far reaching social consequences, including tipping the balance of political power from the Mediterranean states to the north, and contributing to the social unrest that culminated in the French Revolution.

Climate change produces an unequal distribution of costs and benefits. This means that different countries will behave and bargain strategically to advance their perceived interests. For example, the Russians might prefer some moderate warming to increase agriculture in Siberia and provide ice-free ports.

Apocalypse Fatigue: Losing 
the Public on Climate Change

In 2008, our conference on social entrepreneurship featured Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, authors of Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.

They (and a dozen others) joined us, seeking engagement with their arguments on how best to reduce CO2 emissions. Nordhaus and Shellenberger deserve great credit for offering both a challenge and an alternative to the environmental status quo. Crossing tribal boundaries requires courage — a trait both the authors possess.

This week, in Yale University’s blog, environment360, Ted and Michael argue that “apocalypse fatigue” — along with “system justification” and “low-threat salience” — are responsible for declining public belief in global warming. They write:

“These same efforts to increase salience through offering increasingly dire prognosis about the fate of the planet (and humanity) have also probably undermined public confidence in climate science. Rather than galvanizing public demand for difficult and far-reaching action, apocalyptic visions of global warming disaster have led many Americans to question the science. Having been told that climate science demands that we fundamentally change our way of life, many Americans have, not surprisingly, concluded that the problem is not with their lifestyles but with what they’ve been told about the science. And in this they are not entirely wrong, insofar as some prominent climate advocates, in their zeal to promote action, have made representations about the state of climate science that go well beyond any established scientific consensus on the subject, hyping the most dire scenarios and most extreme recent studies, which are often at odds with the consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“... Perhaps we should give the American public a little more credit. They may not know climate science very well, but they are not going to be muscled into accepting apocalyptic visions about our planetary future — or embracing calls to radically transform ‘our way of life’ — just because environmentalists or climate scientists tell them they must. They typically give less credit to expert opinion than do educated elites, and those of us who tend to pay more attention to these questions would do well to remember that expert opinion and indeed, expert consensus, has tended to have a less sterling track record than most of us might like to admit.”