As heat waves this summer shatter world records and dry up rivers and lakes, and wildfires pour smoke over thousands of miles, climate change is ever more apparent. Yet millions of people, including various political leaders, refuse to act. Vital questions emerge about why this is and what we can do about it.
Recent extreme weather is endangering countless species, including our own, but also provides a critical teachable moment. We should use these events to more fully develop and disseminate effective messages, drawing on commonly shared moral principles and narratives that have meaning to climate change deniers, and enhance education about addressing such political divisiveness.
Recent research indicates that altering attitudes about climate change is possible, yet such studies have not informed practice very much. We can make better use of this work.
How to Counter Climate Change Denial
Debunking misinformation with facts fails to alter public opinion, but targeted, strategic messages designed for particular audiences and reframing the issues in ways that appeal to these groups can help. Effective messages aimed at conservatives, for example, can appeal to values of national security, moral issues of purity, and religious beliefs about the need to steward the earth. Though climate change deniers frequently claim that they have a right to burn as much fossil fuel as they want, reframing might emphasize, for instance, the benefits of alternative energy sources that lead to energy and thus national security, the importance of family values that include the well-being of one’s descendants, and the purity and sanctity of nature as embodying divine creation.
Effective communication can also involve emotional appeals, instilling both sadness and guilt about the impact of climate change, and hope about possible solutions, and offering positive examples and moral arguments. People accrue short-term benefits from burning as much fossil fuel energy as they want, for instance, and have legal rights to do so, but these arguments are far outweighed by the longer-term harms (to current and future people and other species), the rights of countless present and future generations to lead healthy lives, and justice (since climate change disproportionately hurts poorer individuals and countries).
For evangelical Christians, the largest and most powerful voting block opposing efforts to reduce climate change, messages can highlight other narratives and values with which they are comfortable and familiar. This group is far less likely than others to think that climate change is occurring, or poses danger, or that the earth is warming primarily due to human behavior. Yet while these individuals are more likely than others to believe that God granted humans dominion over the earth (80 percent vs. 67 percent), even more (86 percent) also believe that God gave people duties to protect and care for the planet. The Bible, for example, tells us to serve as stewards over His creation and to recognize and respond to threats to ourselves and other species, which today we might refer to as climate change. In Genesis, for instance, Joseph correctly interpreted the Pharaoh’s dream and instructed him to store grain for an upcoming seven-year drought. When the famine occurred, only Egypt was prepared. Similarly, God commanded Noah to build an ark to save all species because 40 days of rain would arrive, causing a Great Flood—in other words, a climate catastrophe.
Yet these narratives about Joseph, and especially Noah’s Ark, are commonly viewed merely as Sunday School stories. We ignore the full implications. Noah, for example, protected countless species when cataclysmic flooding endangered them.
To alter attitudes and thus policy about climate, educators, religious leaders, policy makers, and the rest of us should use these approaches more. Many of us meet people who resist addressing the causes of our extreme weather, and we, too, can draw on this recent research to try to shift attitudes.
We should also enhance education for K-12, college, and the public about the need to think about moral conflicts using more systematic approaches, to know how to respond to flawed arguments by drawing on shared moral principles, and to invoke more than one of these values when needed.
The field of bioethics has, for example, developed a framework for doing so, invoking commonly endorsed values, including the need to examine all key relevant facts and consider major ethical principles: maximizing the benefits (to individuals and society), minimizing the risks, protecting stakeholders’ rights, and upholding justice (reducing inequities and avoiding undue burdens on vulnerable or disadvantaged groups). This framework can help, reminding us to take into account more than one principle (not just one that supports us most), recognize all facts (not just those that support our own view), and consider all stakeholders (including those who disagree with us and/or are most at risk of harms).
Though studies have started to probe how to shift public attitudes, more research is critically needed, and social scientists and others, including students, should be encouraged to pursue these topics more. Recent climate crises should lead not to suffering alone, but to creative brainstorming to develop novel ways of persuading others of the problem.
Otherwise, our extreme political divisions and weather will both only worsen.
A version of this post also appears on TheHill.com.