What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming Review

The post-obit excerpt is from the introduction to Per Espen Stoknes' volume What We Recall About When We Effort Not to Retrieve Most Global Warming: Toward a New Psychology of Climate Action (Chelsea Green Publishing, Apr 2015) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.

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I was talking to a group of forty senior industry executives when the air in the hotel conference room began to feel charged. No more than x minutes into my talk on climate psychology, I sensed a brewing discomfort in my tummy. Then one of their leading members cut me off from his first-row seat. "This global warming thing yous're talking about is very uncertain," he alleged. "It'south been hyped. There is even a Nobel Prize winner in physics, Professor Ivar Giaever, that has documented that global warming isn't happening."

Such comments are not uncommon. I wasn't very surprised. This topic was hot, the audience was feeling criticized by the global warming message, and I was being challenged. The glove had been thrown down. What could I say that they would hear? To proceed with my next slide was non an option. The challenge couldn't just exist ignored. Those in the group were mostly white, mostly male, and mostly in suits and ties, similar myself. The questioner's voice was friendly, simply I could experience the hostility mounting just nether the surface.

Something in the climate message is unsettling, maybe even disarranging to our minds. And in that hotel conference room, on a cool November solar day, the psychology of climate was being enacted in real time—ironically during my lecture on the very same subject.

No wonder there is a gut reaction to shoot downwards the bulletin. Or the messenger. Have "them" down. Impale the doom-mongering. Subsequently all, argument is state of war, and the climate contend has been exactly that. But think nearly the word debate. The prefix de refers to "down," as in depression. And bate—every bit in bat, one with which to striking the opponent—comes from the Latin word battere, to fight. So debate is fighting by hitting someone down with a bat.

The climate debate has devolved into but such a deteriorating and drastic spiral. Many of those who doubtfulness global warming are now seeing the tape numbers of people hit the streets demanding climate action. They may be noticing that large bookkeeping firms, insurance associations, and military analysts are increasingly ranking climate as a serious take a chance to the economy and security. And they may even be experiencing immediate heavier floods, longer droughts, or other effects of climate change. But still, the debate rages on or is carefully avoided altogether.

How much longer will and then many people feel a need to gainsay climate and ecological science? Climate change is now a more divisive topic in the United States than abortion, gun command, the death penalty, or genetically modified crops.

If you desire change to happen, hard confrontation is usually not productive. Coaches and psychotherapists know this. You don't debate your client in the hope that you—the coach—win and they lose. The more you attempt to forcefulness change onto someone, the tougher the resistance. Getting into us-versus-them positions invites more ditch digging, not dialogue. The stronger argument rarely wins in practice, unless the opponent really wants to learn and explore. And even if you win today, the losers alive to fight another twenty-four hours. They don't go habitation and change their minds in wise reflection. I, at least, don't change that way.

Change can happen through dialogue, but what is needed first is curiosity, empathy, and focus on finding some common ground.

For those of united states of america who feel the unsettling winds of change in the air—literally—the time for debating with contrarians about whether climate alter is happening is over. It's no apply trying to win the argument confronting those that have made up their minds to the contrary. We don't even desire to win over the climate contrarians so that they lose. What nosotros desire is movement out of the trenches. Attention. Mutual ground. Articulation exploration of solutions. A shift toward new stories. And for that to happen, we first demand to empathize the internal resistance, the deadlock: What's holding back the long-overdue shift? What's stopping the facts of climate change from unsettling our minds enough that the much-needed swerve in public opinion tin happen?

So what did I reply to the group of executives? That I'm happy that up to 2 or three percent of climate researchers insist on thinking differently. Living with diversity may be taxing, but the alternative is usually worse. Diversity of species and diversity of minds are both indispensible to a vibrant world equally we motion deeper into the twenty-first century. The executives could accept this line of reasoning; they know that having sufficiently diverse heed-sets when doing strategic analysis is disquisitional to avoid groupthink in executive teams. Nosotros could proceed to the issues of fear messaging, worldviews, and new opportunities of green growth.

Just being happy virtually the sparse, thin ii to 3 percent piece of contrarian researchers does not give license to ignore the other 97 percent—even if ignoring the unsettling climate facts could be personally more convenient for my lifestyle. Choosing ignorance would let me off the hook of feeling implicated when I fly likewise much—or don't contribute enough.

The nuts of greenhouse gas atmospheric warming are simple. The presence of sure gases traps more of the sunlight's heat close to earth, and so that less is radiated back out into infinite. Since the industrial revolution, our species has been releasing more than of these gases into the air than are taken out by natural processes. This shifts the earth's energy balance abroad from the delicate stability during which homo civilization has flourished, leading to disruptive conditions for humans and today's ecosystems. That's virtually it. Three sentences.

But the devil is in the details. Climate sciences at the planetary scale quickly become extremely complex. Since the ever-moving air is linked to rainfall, to clouds, to ground, to body of water, to chemistry, physics, biology, ecology—everything really—the issue starts spanning many, many disciplines. A person really needs years and years of dedicated preparation in order to empathize simply one of these disciplines at some depth. And this is fifty-fifty earlier nosotros include human being societies and the social sciences. In democracies, the question becomes what people should believe about this complexity. Which experts are to exist trusted?

What we run into at this point is that effectually half of the population in rich countries chooses to side with the tiny sliver of 2 percent rather than the 98 for some reason or other. That is a fascinating paradox. Pretty scary, actually. And therefore worth thinking deeply about. What parent can today take to heart that inside the lifetime of their newborn infant, the planet will become hotter than information technology's been in millions of years?

This book is nigh such paradoxes, responses, and solutions. Understanding human responses to climate change is clearly becoming simply every bit of import as understanding climatic change itself. The main question is: What do our reactions to the climatic change facts tell us about the manner we call back, what we do, and how we live in the world? And how tin can we use what we know nigh human nature—our own, and others'—to move beyond our psychological barriers to making a not bad climate swerve?

Thinking About the Future

Several years ago, not long after my divorce, I found myself walking back from my now ex's new apartment, having left our kids at her place. Walking abroad lonely. Our life projection of the previous xv years was in ruins. Now what to do with my life? The pain from my broken dreams was as palpable as the freezing-cold dark around me. I noticed the winter stars, and the waning old moon lingering just to a higher place the horizon, to the left of a tall part building next to my new attic in central Oslo.

Then something unexpected happened. I could feel the air around me similar never before. Information technology seemed to descend from the heaven itself, menses down from the moon, and rise up from the ground. It enveloped my hair, chilled each finger every bit I swung my arms and walked in its flow. I was walking with pain in my heart, but something new was opening before me, besides, and I reached a decision I didn't even know I was contemplating. The balance of my life, I decided correct then and there, would revolve effectually climate-related work.

If you're thinking you've just opened a volume past a new-age evangelizer, you can relax. The climate epiphany didn't come out of nowhere. I had grown up in a family unit-owned, smelly fish manufacturing plant on Norway'due south gorgeous western fjord coast and later exercised the entrepreneurial and curious genes spawned there in the worlds of green tech and plasma physics. I had get a certified psychologist with a PhD in economic science, and had been exploring future strategic scenarios, consulting beyond 4 continents, and wondering how my worlds of science and storytelling, therapy and policy, climate reality and human imagination might eventually collide. But I hadn't all the same accustomed climate every bit a defining feature in my life's work.

Information technology has taken some years to digest the answer that seemed to come right out of the open air that evening. Does the deed of accepting personal loss open the heart to the more transpersonal hurting of displaced peoples, forests and body of water, the furred and the finned ones? Information technology certainly seemed that way. And it makes more than sense each time and every twenty-four hour period I reverberate on it. Acknowledging distress on one level led me to connect meliorate to it on another.

In the years since, much of my climate-related work has been in collaboration with my older colleague Jørgen Randers, who dorsum in 1972 co-­authored Limits to Growth—the volume that sold millions effectually the world and launched a vehement debate on whether, and when, global consumption would overshoot our planet's resources. Nosotros've taught futures thinking together at the Norwegian Business concern School for more a decade, and have as well run the Centre for Climate Strategies together. Afterward decades of watching the globe fail to accept meaningful action on key issues, especially climate change, Randers recently wrote upwardly his thinking about the near likely global future in the bestseller 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years. In it, he argues that rich countries will modify their current course likewise slowly to avert severe climate disruptions. Innovation volition lose to inertia. Humanity volition hence fail the claiming to act on climate modify before it reaches runaway proportions, in the chief because people, capitalism, and republic are too short-term to tackle the critical long-term climate consequence.

Business as usual, he predicts, volition run its grade, overshooting ecological limits toward 2052 and beyond, but with better resources efficiency and less frantic economic growth than we've seen in the previous four decades. Randers forecasts that by 2100 we'll end up in a world three degrees Celsius (five degrees Fahrenheit) warmer. In that location'll exist no end to setbacks and troubles, merely we'll avert the apocalypse of delinquent climate tipping points at least in this century. His story details a gray, muddling-through world, with slowing economic growth and mounting costs and consequences from climate impacts. Many, many natural species, habitats, and cultures, he worries, will gradually be lost, with the poorest people suffering the nigh.

The question that drives me is: Is humanity up to the task? Are we humans inescapably locked into short-termism? Both Randers and I hold that we already take the necessary technical solutions for a low-emission society. But he feels sure that our thinking is too short-term and our behavior also self-interested to turn around rapidly plenty to avert runaway climate change in the coming century. Similar Randers, many today argue that humans seem hardwired to self-destruct and accept the planet's biological wealth down with us. Most practise not even want to hear bad climate news.

I'd like to think otherwise, hence this book is a guide for how to break free from such a future forecast. Information technology looks deep into the psychology of the human being response to climate change and shows how to bypass the psychological barriers to action. Can those barriers really be bypassed, and before long enough to matter? Randers and I have been arguing about this for years, often in front of our classes. Where Randers, the elderly wise physicist, sees the socioeconomic juggernaut run its inevitable course of overshoot and decline, Stoknes, the younger optimistic psychologist, maintains that there is more than to humans and cultures than short-termism. I argue—to his entertainment—that the climate paradox is resolvable, and that solutions are within reach. He doesn't believe my scenario. I competition his forecast. And so let'south get going and prove my dear colleague wrong.

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