Climate change conversation reflections: part two

Reasons to hope (6 minute read)

I had intended to bring you an article looking at more of the science behind climate change solutions this week. However, I’ve had a busy week, so I decided to share my thoughts from a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago. The conversation was based around the questions at Living Room Conversations.

If you’d be interested in participating in a future conversation about climate change, or you know others who would, let me know. I don’t have any more of these conversations scheduled but I’ll run one if enough people are interested.

It makes a nice change for me to sit in the same room as other people. The work that I do involves sitting at a desk in my spare bedroom, and the few meetings I have are almost all held online. After years of working in busy offices, it’s a nice change, but sometimes I do miss the company. So, I was really looking forward to my first in-person climate change conversation.

As with my previous Living Room Conversation, everyone in the room, and the one person who was not in the room but joined us on a laptop screen, was worried about climate change. That wasn’t unexpected, because those who want to talk about climate change with me are usually motivated by their concerns. But there was a difference between this group and my previous conversation. All of us had studied science and worked in science, and our understanding and anxiety about climate change had largely come about through our understanding of science. We all had good reason to trust the advice from scientists that climate change is real, that humans are causing it, and that it is an urgent problem we needed to solve.

As a rule, those I speak with don’t encounter many people who doubt climate change is real. Nor do they encounter many who doubt that humans are causing it. Perhaps that’s partly because we are in a bubble of people with similar attitudes. But it’s probably also a reflection of what most New Zealanders are thinking. Surveys consistently find that more than 80% of New Zealanders accept that climate change is real. It’s harder to find figures on how much of climate change New Zealanders ascribe to human actions, but the evidence says that most of us see climate change as partly or mainly caused by human activities.

But, from here things get more difficult. As we talked through our understanding of climate change as a group, we came to the area of real uncertainty in climate change today – the solutions. Science can help us, but it can’t tell us what is right or wrong. Decisions about government policy, where businesses should invest and what individuals should be doing cannot be based on science alone. Yes, science tells us that a diet high in dairy products, beef and lamb results in more methane emissions than a largely plant-based diet does. Yes, science tells us that aircraft have a huge impact on the climate. But what a country like New Zealand, dependent on tourism and cattle farming, should do about it is less clear.

These are the conversations that I find hardest. I know I’m not alone in this – it was clear that others in the group struggled as well. Some of us, me included, sometimes struggle with guilt over our actions and inactions. I’m in two minds about guilt. It can be motivating. It can drive me to taking action on climate change. On the other hand, the guilt itself can be unhelpful – if I feel guilty about a car journey or a flight, that doesn’t mean I emit less. Nor can guilt change the past. I know that for me, focusing too much on feeling guilty can take me down the line of fatalistic thinking, leading me to conclusions that whatever we are doing won’t be enough. I do that sometimes, take a look over the precipice, before I decide it’s just too frightening and crawl back from the edge.

In climate change, we face a problem which is overwhelming. As one of the group pointed out, our modern civilisation has developed within very narrow climate limits. Our actions are now pushing the climate beyond those limits. Fear is justified.

And yet, as we talked more about some very frightening concepts in climate change, optimism crept into the conversation. We were talking about tipping points. These are thresholds where, if we cross them, change becomes irreversible. In terms of climate change, there are a number of them which we may cross, or may have crossed already (there’s a good article from the Guardian on the subject here).

You might think that there’s not much hope to be found in a discussion of climate tipping points. And that is true. But there are other tipping points too – tipping points for social change. The idea is that once an idea or value has taken hold in a certain proportion of the population, society’s norms will change. They can change for the worse, of course, but they can also change for the better. Recent research has suggested that the threshold for change may be around 25% of the population.

For some reason, this image speaks to me of hope (image credit: Melanie Newfield)

As we talked, we began sharing examples of things which gave us hope. Of course, there is the example of the ozone hole, where countries agreed to phase out the chemicals which were the main cause of the problem. But there are other examples where we have made positive progress on environmental problems. Once, we hunted whales almost to the point of extinction. Today, populations of some species, such as the humpback whale, have recovered well. Some of the most damaging pesticides, such as DDT, are now mostly banned. These changes all required international cooperation, but they required something else too: widespread social support for the changes.

There are other examples too, like road safety. For years, New Zealand’s road toll was steadily increasing, as our population increased and there were more cars on the road. Since the early 1990s, however, the road toll has been falling, despite ever-increasing numbers of cars. Safer cars, safer roads and improvements in driver behaviour, such as less drunk driving, have all contributed. We haven’t fixed the problem by any means, but with a combination of individual action and systemic change, we have made remarkable progress.

Another example which gives me hope is childhood mortality. I’ve written about this topic before, when I first started writing about vaccines. I won’t repeat what I wrote previously, but the summary is that infant mortality (that is, babies dying before their first birthday) was once around one in four in many different societies and cultures. Vaccines and antibiotics have made a difference, but the decline in infant mortality began with improvements in sanitation. Today, even in countries suffering under the weight of poverty and war, such as Yemen, infant mortality isn’t close to what it was at the start of the twentieth century.

Talking about the things which had improved was a powerful conversation. As a group, we reflected on the point that positive change can appear to move so slowly it’s barely happening, but eventually reaches a tipping point. Then, once it has improved, we sometimes forget how bad it was.

Is this what will happen with climate change? Right now, I find it hard to imagine. I still tend to dwell more on things which have become worse rather than better. But, buoyed by the discussion of things which have improved, I’ve found new reasons to feel hopeful, and to do my part (no matter how minuscule that may seem) in fighting climate change.

Do you have something which gives you hope? An example of something which has got better? An example where individual action and system changes have combined to make a difference? Let me know in the comments below.