The terms are slippery, like any good insult, but served to circumscribe the scope of “reasonable” perspectives on climate. Which is why scientific reticence is another reason we don’t see the threat so clearly—the experts signaling strongly that it is irresponsible to communicate openly about the more worrisome possibilities for global warming, as though they didn’t trust the world with the information they themselves had, or at least didn’t trust the public to interpret it and respond properly. Whatever that means: it has now been thirty years since Hansen’s first testimony and the establishment of the IPCC, and climate concern has traversed small peaks and small valleys but never meaningfully jumped upward. In terms of public response, the results are even more dismal. Within the United States, climate denial took over one of the two major parties and essentially vetoed major legislative action. Abroad, we have had a series of high-profile conferences, treaties, and accords, but they increasingly look like so many acts of climate kabuki; emissions are still growing, unabated.
But scientific reticence is also perfectly reasonable, in its way, a river of rhetorical caution with many tributaries. The first is temperamentaclass="underline" climate scientists are scientists first, self-selected and then trained for perspicacity. The second is experientiaclass="underline" many of them have now done battle, in the United States particularly and sometimes for decades, with the forces of climate denial, who capitalize on any overstatement or erroneous prediction as proof of illegitimacy or bad faith; this makes climate scientists more cautious, and understandably so. Unfortunately, worrying so much about erring on the side of excessive alarm has meant they have erred, so routinely it became a kind of professional principle, on the side of excessive caution—which is, effectively, the side of complacency.
There was also a kind of personal wisdom in scientific reticence, as politically backward as it may seem to keep the scariest implications of new research from the public. As part-time advocates, scientists have also watched their colleagues and collaborators pass through many dark nights of the soul, and typically despaired themselves as well, about the coming storm of climate change and just how little the world is doing to combat it. As a result, they were especially worried about burnout, and the possibility that honest storytelling about climate could tip so many people into despondency that the effort to avert a crisis would burn itself out. And in generalizing from that experience, they pointed to a selection of social science suggesting that “hope” can be more motivating than “fear”—without acknowledging that alarm is not the same as fatalism, that hope does not demand silence about scarier challenges, and that fear can motivate, too. That was the finding of a 2017 Nature paper surveying the full breadth of the academic literature: that despite a strong consensus among climate scientists about “hope” and “fear” and what qualifies as responsible storytelling, there is no single way to best tell the story of climate change, no single rhetorical approach likely to work on a given audience, and none too dangerous to try. Any story that sticks is a good one.
In 2018, scientists began embracing fear, when the IPCC released a dramatic, alarmist report illustrating just how much worse climate change would be at 2 degrees of warming compared with 1.5: tens of millions more exposed to deadly heat waves, water shortages, and flooding. The research summarized in the report was not new, and temperatures beyond 2 degrees were not even covered. But though it did not address any of the scarier possibilities for warming, the report did offer a new form of permission, of sanction, to the world’s scientists. The thing that was new was the message: It is okay, finally, to freak out. It is almost hard to imagine, in its aftermath, anything but a new torrent of panic, issuing forth from scientists finally emboldened to scream as they wish to.
But that prior caution was understandable. Scientists spent decades presenting the unambiguous data, demonstrating to anyone who would listen just what kind of crisis will come for the planet if nothing is done, and then watched, year after year, as nothing was done. It should not be altogether surprising that they returned again and again to the communications greenroom, scratching their heads about rhetorical strategy and “messaging.” If only they were in charge, they would know exactly what to do, and there would be no need to panic. So why wouldn’t anyone listen to them? It had to be the rhetoric. What other explanation could there be?
Crisis Capitalism
The scroll of cognitive biases identified by behavioral psychologists and fellow travelers over the last half century is, like a social media feed, apparently infinite, and every single one distorts and distends our perception of a changing climate—a threat as imminent and immediate as the approach of a predator, but viewed always through a bell jar.
There is, to start with, anchoring, which explains how we build mental models around as few as one or two initial examples, no matter how unrepresentative—in the case of global warming, the world we know today, which is reassuringly temperate. There is also the ambiguity effect, which suggests that most people are so uncomfortable contemplating uncertainty, they will accept lesser outcomes in a bargain to avoid dealing with it. In theory, with climate, uncertainty should be an argument for action—much of the ambiguity arises from the range of possible human inputs, a quite concrete prompt we choose to process instead as a riddle, which discourages us.
There is anthropocentric thinking, by which we build our view of the universe outward from our own experience, a reflexive tendency that some especially ruthless environmentalists have derided as “human supremacy” and that surely shapes our ability to apprehend genuinely existential threats to the species—a shortcoming many climate scientists have mocked: “The planet will survive,” they say; “it’s the humans that may not.”
There is automation bias, which describes a preference for algorithmic and other kinds of nonhuman decision making, and also applies to our generations-long deference to market forces as something like an infallible, or at least an unbeatable, overseer. In the case of climate, this has meant trusting that economic systems unencumbered by regulation or restriction would solve the problem of global warming as naturally, as surely as they had solved the problems of pollution, inequality, justice, and conflict.
These biases are drawn only from the A volume of the literature—and are just a sampling of that volume. Among the most destructive effects that appear later in the behavioral economics library are these: the bystander effect, or our tendency to wait for others to act rather than acting ourselves; confirmation bias, by which we seek evidence for what we already understand to be true, such as the promise that human life will endure, rather than endure the cognitive pain of reconceptualizing our world; the default effect, or tendency to choose the present option over alternatives, which is related to the status quo bias, or preference for things as they are, however bad that is, and to the endowment effect, or instinct to demand more to give up something we have than we actually value it (or had paid to acquire or establish it). We have an illusion of control, the behavioral economists tell us, and also suffer from overconfidence and an optimism bias. We also have a pessimism bias, not that it compensates—instead it pushes us to see challenges as predetermined defeats and to hear alarm, perhaps especially on climate, as cries of fatalism. The opposite of a cognitive bias, in other words, is not clear thinking but another cognitive bias. We can’t see anything but through cataracts of self-deception.