37
Degrees of Separation
How Climate Experts Cope with What They Know
Sitting on a panel at the 20t2 annual assembly of the Tyndall Ccnln for Climate Change Research, I remember vividly the palpable umc.imp that entered the room when the discussion turned to four degrees. Tlirin was a hesitation in broaching the subject. Voices became quieter and lr*i confident. Nonetheless, everyone in the room talked about four degirei Celsius of warming as being entirely probable if not unavoidable.
At the reception later that evening, the scientists chatted amiabl) Ifl pairs and small groups, clutching their glasses of warm white wine .mil balancing plates of canapes. With their slightly rumpled old-fash mum! clothes and their polite, intense demeanor, they looked like any nllii I group of highly educated professionals—to my eyes, rather like the .null ence for a concert of somewhat challenging chamber music.
However, listening to the detail of their conversations reminded 111« that this gathering was far from ordinary. The people in this room umKH tuted a large part—maybe even the majority—of those in Britain iffl truly understood why a global temperature increase of two degrees m., just, be manageable, and why one of four degrees would be an nllei 1 Mtm trophe. This, after all, is what they have spent their lives studying. 1 'I all people, they know all too well that the phrase four degrees is shorlli.mil iHf
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idling them, we are heading straight for it and could well reach it within sixty years.-
According to Professor Lonnie Thompson, a climatologist at Ohio State University, those in his profession are a stolid group, not given to theatrical rantings about falling skies.' However, he says, they now feel ' ompelled to speak out about the dangers because "virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to 1 ivilization." Extraordinary though this statement is, even more extraordinary is that it appeared in an otherwise sober report in the journal of a iespected international science association.
Hvery year their warnings have become ever clearer and more serious. And, it seems, every year they have become less believed. Returning to the quote with which I started this book, these scientists are, I fear, uncomfortably similar to the handful of people in 1942 who knew what was happening to the Jews of Europe, who carried the weight of that dreadful knowledge but struggled to persuade anyone of the existence of imi me of such immensity.
One scientist told me that he was so disturbed by the latest findings thai he wrote to a few close friends—he named some of the world's most senior scientists—and asked them: the future of humanity depends on this, is there any chance—please any chance—that we
.....Id be wrong? They replied immediately, saying that they too
■ 1 mstantly worried about this and (contrary to what the skeptics claim)
.....always open to the possibility of being wrong. However, when-
cvri they went back over the evidence, they could not avoid the inn omfortable conclusion that they had indeed gotten this right. "We >i' active fatalists," he told me.
Activists and campaigners also struggle with this sense of anxiety, tillering sleepless nights and panic attacks. Dorian Williams, an anthro-1 ■ -1 ■ •; * y senior at Brandeis University who leads the campus divestment impaign for 350.org, says that she experiences "very serious, very low 1 lies of being for hours to days to weeks at a time." Its never going to go
1 . she says, but "you just have to work through it so that you can keep tilting."
People who deal every day with climate change as a reality provide an
environmental, social, and economic collapse. And, as their mo.
s some of the implications of a four-degree temperature increase in [he final this book.
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important insight into the ways that humanity as a whole will cope with its psychological and moral challenges. Almost all analysis concerns i In psychology of people who refuse to accept the science—which, undei standably, they resent. But what about the people who are already convinced? They are the advance party and, as climate impacts build, everyone will follow their lead.
Their internal moral dilemmas come to a head as they struggle to square what they know about the impacts of high-carbon lifestyles wilh the pressure to conform to a society where those lifestyles are not jusl encouraged but also often required as a mark of social belonging.
I have an informal social research project—life is one long experimenl after all—in which i gently coax climate change experts to talk to mi about their personal holidays. A senior climate economist at the World Bank admitted that he flew regularly for breaks in South Africa but said that that this was a force for good because the carbon offsets he boughl "help set a price in the carbon market." A national media environmcni correspondent decided to fly with his family to Sri Lanka because, lie said, "I can't see much hope." A climate scientist specializing in polai research takes several long haul flights every year for skiing holidays because the "job is so stressful." The lead climate campaigner for one ol the largest U.S. environmental organizations flew so often for her work that she could take regular long-distance holidays using her air miles with an automatic upgrade to business class.
All of them felt uncomfortable discussing their leisure flying, and I have found that there is a norm of silence—a meta-silence even— around this topic. Nonetheless, when prompted, all of them could present complex narratives to justify their own behaviors, often contain ing a moral license or deferring to the social norm among their fellow middle-class professionals. They all argued that they would gladly stop flying but—and here they drew on their insider understanding of tin-scale of the problem—a single personal sacrifice is meaningless unlesi it is supported by wider systemic and social change. Ironically, thru own well-informed arguments provide the clearest evidence possible that scientific information, on its own, is unable to counter socially engrained behaviors.
Professor Kevin Anderson, the former director of the Tyndall Centre, is unusual for his reluctance to fly for any reason. His audience at a recenl conference in China was astonished and impressed when he told them
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he had come (and would return) by train. He is convinced that this added In die legitimacy of fiis science.
Anderson regards it as "incredibly disturbing" that the people who shape climate policy are such profligate fliers. He tells me of a conversation with the director of one of the largest power utilities in Britain, who told him, quite casually, that the following weekend he was flying with his horse to China to go riding. Anderson explodes, "We were both about to give evidence at a government hearing on climate change and he was Hying his bloody horse to China! . . . And when I challenged him, he looked at me like I was some kind of radical lefty!"
Experts seem to believe, Anderson tells me, that the pearls of wisdom that they've rained down from thirty-two thousand feet in a first-class seat are so important that they outweigh their emissions and those of the people like them. They don't see that the reason we have this problem is precisely because of people like them and, he adds, being more concilia-lory, "people like me."
And, I should also add, people like me—because I am an expert flyer too. I fly rarely and I always try to justify each flight. But as that word justify reveals, I am also prone to constructing a narrative that can resolve the inner conflict I feel every time I sit on a plane. It is all immensely frustrating because I must admit that I love travel and, in my pre-climate change days, I flew a lot. So I know very well that flying is addictive.
Mark lillingham, the founder of the Rough Guides travel books, coined the phrase "binge flying," which he compares with nicotine addiction. Interviews with frequent travelers find them using the same language as other forms of addiction. They talk about the buzz or rush, I heir loss of inhibitions, finding new meaning in life, and their depression on their return.
Maybe this is why the self-serving narratives we experts mobilize to liistify our personal flying are so uncannily similar to those that people raise around addictions: I need to do this, I'm not hurting anyone, rveryone else does it, I've worked for it, I can stop anytime, other people are far worse.
Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon says that the public needs to remember that the people who work on climate issues may be smart but are still human beings like any others, "driven by varying mixtures nlambition, curiosity, orneriness, self-confidence, and altruism."
I lowever, climate experts are different from other people in one
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critical aspect: We are the lead communicators of climate change and our own actions will always be monitored as a measure of our trustworthiness. In other areas, inconsistent behavior by decision makers is utterly relevant: the racial prejudice of judges, the tax evasion by politicians, and the sexual behavior of priests are all matters of intense publii attention because we know intuitively that an internal conflict maj undermine their judgment.
Inevitably we run the risk that we will project our own values, incon sistencies, and silences onto the story we tell. Is it any surprise, given these internal conflicts, that there is so little mention of flying among the list of personal actions promoted by environmental groups and the US Environmental Protection Agency? Or, indeed, that international aviation is not included in national emissions calculations or the Kyoto Protocol?
Renee Lertzman, a visiting psychology fellow at Portland State University, argues that it is mistaken to judge these inconsistencies as arrogant or hypocritical or apathetic. They are, she says, best understood as a strategy by which experts defend themselves against their anxiety and the internal dilemmas that cause them pain. "We cannot tolerate 0U1 own complicity, so we externalize and project our concern onto others— the airline industry or the failure of government policy to control it," shr tells me.
She recalls a participant in one of her workshops complaining tli.it people who fly "lie" when they say that they care about climate change, No, she stresses, "it is not lying—these are intentions that they are stru^ gling to negotiate." Nor, she says, is there a gap between what they say and what they do. She prefers to see this as a tangle of conflicting need*, or, she suggests, a tapestry.
Rosemary Randall, a psychotherapist who has worked extensively with climate scientists, says that she frequently encounters their "bewildri ment, depression, and despair at public attacks or indifference." Then solution, she suggests, has been "to move further into the world oj reason—more graphs, tighter arguments, greater precision."
Another psychologist, who works alongside climate scientists in one of the largest British research councils (and so preferred to talk to me off thl record) is perpetually disturbed that her colleagues fly constantly and never talk about their anxiety or the implications of their work. She ll convinced that, as a result, generating ever more knowledge has become! the end in itself. They have, she told me. created "a huge information
machine run by experts, reinforced by other experts, and all they do is sit around in expert committees, and make their expert presentations to each other."
This rationalist expert culture protects scientists from the emotional content of their work. When Lertzman interviewed scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency in 1998, she expected them to share stories about their emotional struggle at the frontline. She tells me she was really surprised to hear them say, "T am a scientist and I don't engage on that level.'"
In the fascinating article "When Swordfish Conservation Biologists Eat Swordfish," the marine biologist Giovanni Bearzi complains that biologists who spend their professional lives researching unsustainable lishing can nonetheless sit down at a restaurant and order swordfish or t una from those declining stocks. It is, he says, "as if monks advocating poverty were to wear jewelry and expensive silk robes."
Yet, if Lertzman and Randall are right, we could see this in a quite different light. When people gratuitously perform the thing they warn igainst, it suggests a ritual of public disavowal. They are managing their own emotional anxiety by policing a strict cognitive divide between work .ind play, information and responsibility, the rational brain and the emotional brain. Activists often quote the motto "be the change you wish in see," which they ascribe to Mahatma Gandhi (although, of course, he never actually said this). In a way, these experts are also acting out the world they wish to see—a world in which they do their job, governments do their job, resources are managed sustainably, and then they can fly to Italy on holiday and have that well-earned swordfish steak—goddamnit!
Professor Chris Rapley, former director of the Science Museum in 1' mdon and one of Britain's most senior climate scientists, has become in unlikely advocate for the psychoanalytic arguments, which he gladly defends against the positivist prejudice within the science community 1I1.1I "psychotherapy is not rigorous and quantitative."
Kapley speaks with remarkable honesty and clarity about the internal 11 ess he endures from what he knows. "It is," he tells me, "so difficult to lie optimistic, however much you argue yourself into an optimistic posi-llon. I know I have tended to deal with my own anxiety by placing what I 1 now into watertight compartments. The fact that we climate scientists in sleep comfortably at night tells you that we have unconsciously ■ 111 ked very hard at this."
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Lertzman and her fellow psychotherapists argue that we are all irrai n < nal, unconscious, confused human beings and we are all struggling tO make sense of this issue. This is why she finds the cognitive explanal h >n for our avoidance of climate change to be "incredibly limited." They pul the blame on the "ignorant, self-centered, shortsighted people, in contra I to the enlightened and evolved people." The focus on political affiliation is also superficial because it does not explore what leads people to becorm so strongly identified with those affiliations. Hatred, she says, is alwayi I clue that something else is going on.
For Lertzman, the argument that climate change is too hard for ill ■ deal with is "ridiculous," and if we turn it on its head, "there is plenty ■ evidence that we have enormous capacity for deep care and concern." Tin-question is then how to reframe the argument away from the gap into the tangle of the tapestry. People need to be in the place where I In ll anxieties are recognized, to be able to say, "Yes, this is scary; this is hard and only then, she says, can we be truly mature, creative, strategic, und innovative.
38
Intimations of Mortality Why the Future Goes Dark
I he Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City is heav-Ing—115,000 fans crammed in for the second day of Comic-Con, the largest comics convention on the East Coast. I am here to ask a simple question: What do you think the future will be like?
My reasoning is this: These people are young, smart, and curious about technology and future worlds. Surely, as they stand around in lines waiting for autographs, they will have spare time to answer a few questions from a stray British social researcher—not in costume, although one woman eyes my scruffy trench coat and asks, "Out of curiosity, have von come as Inspector Gadget?"
So, I ask them, what do you think the future will be like? The surprise is that they have little idea or, it would seem, desire to find nut. One woman says, "I've never thought that far ahead—I like living in the present." A man farther down the line is concerned that it might be 1 <>ne-color-jumpsuit kind of future." "Like Logan's Run," he adds when I look perplexed.
lirian Ferrara is selling nine-hundred-dollar replica weapons from li ience fiction video games. "I'm not a doomsday prophecy kind of guy, I"ii I am a realist," he says. So, being realistic, he doesn't see a bright 111111 re, but he is very vague about the details. Maybe, he speculates, we "ill he immobilized, strapped to a chair with a feeding tube.
One couple are more politically alert, having spent time with the
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