“Metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.” - Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami.
When it comes to the relationship of weather and global warming I sometimes feel as if we have become actors in a 21st century version of The Emperor’s New Clothes.
That story, if you don’t recall, is about an emperor who is rather vain regarding his appearance. A couple of swindlers convince him that they can make him the best suit of clothes from a fabric which is invisible to anyone who is either unfit for his position or is hopelessly stupid. The emperor parades around naked in his pretend suit and nobody – including him – wants to say that they can’t see any clothes because that would mean they were either incompetent or stupid. Finally, an innocent young child looks at the emperor and utters the words nobody dares to say: “The Emperor is naked.” And when he does, everyone echoes his cry except the emperor who marches on as if nothing was wrong.
When it comes to global warming, the weather this past winter in Eastern North America looked stark naked.
And when it came to snow in the Eastern parts of this country, well....
I should add that this past February was the coldest in Toronto since records first started being kept in 1842.
The general public was faced with the dissonance that this was occurring over the same period of time that people were being constantly told that climate science was showing that human activities are releasing gases which will trap the sun’s heat and cause a rise in global temperatures.
But when you ask climatologists about the anomalies, you are dismissively told “what you are seeing is weather and not climate.”
That is the message scientists seem to be using for us ordinary non-scientists: “Science has nearly conclusively found human initiated global warming is occurring and that means you must ignore attaching any significance to the weather bitterness and blizzards you see around you.” Like I said, this all feels like the Emperor’s New Clothes redux but with one big difference. The emperor’s foolish nakedness didn’t have much consequence except to illustrate both his vanity and his gullibility.
If you want to convince people that they are going to have to significantly change their behaviours to mitigate climate change, it is rather counter-productive to, in the same breath, announce that people should ignore what weather they see and feel in their daily lives. This is so ineffective that you might believe this to be a cunning communications strategy specifically designed to create climate change deniers and doubters.
Case in point: climate-denying Senator Jim Inhofe dramatically throwing a snowball on the floor of the Senate Chamber this past February to demonstrate his belief that Washington D.C.’s unseasonably cold weather and snowfall had visually confirmed climate change to be a hoax.
It’s time to devise a new explanation for why these record colds and snows shouldn’t negate any rational belief that climate change/global warming is actually happening.
As a journalist I really want there to be a metaphor/simile/analogy which allows me to convey to people how both human induced global-warming-cum-climate change and historically ultra cold, snowy, long winters can sensibly co-exist and not contradict each other. And I want that sort of expression to have both intellectual and emotional resonance because the climatologists agree that this year’s seeming contradiction between weather and climate isn’t going away. The various non-human control factors that drive weather/climate – solar cycles, polar vortices, El Ninos will continue to exist and variations between years are going to continue to arise.
Existing attempts to convey climate change have often focused on the belief that everything is just going to get warmer. The most famous of these is the comparison of a slow warming climate to an innocent frog sitting in the pot of slowly heating water. The frog doesn’t realize he is being cooked until he is cooked. But what this past winter, and indeed the one before it seemed to be saying is that sometimes the water not only doesn’t get warmer at times but actually threatens to freeze the innocent frog to death.
The idea that we are looking at a “greenhouse” effect has had a similar failed quality as eastern North America’s greenhouse has been turned into an icehouse.
Other images have been used to argue that the ability to challenge the link between human activities and global warming is the biggest psychological barrier to change. For example, images about how risky it is to do nothing. In that vein we are told that not lowering greenhouse-gas emissions levels is like shuffling chairs on the Titanic. But, as I have been arguing, what we see as “weather” often goes against these statistical norms.
With this in mind the Canadian Science Writers’ Association (CSWA), with its 300-plus membership of science journalists and communicators, wants to fill the explanation gap. We want to co-sponsor a contest where people worldwide submit weather-says-one-thing-climate-another-and-both-are not-in-contradiction metaphors or analogies or short explanations. We want something which demonstrates simultaneously that while the emperor is naked, he is also wearing real but sometimes invisible clothes.
We propose this contest because without an effective way of describing the contradiction between weather and climate, we science writers can’t communicate what is truly going on. We end up imitating the dismissive climatologists and effectively ignoring the cognitive dissonance between weather and climate which we know exists in our readers/viewers minds.
With all this in mind the CSWA would like some organization or organizations to join with us to fund a sizeable cash prize for the winning entry.
I know this is the sort of thing people try to get crowdfunding money to support, but there is a reason I don’t want CSWA to go that route. And that’s because I want the contest to also brand its sponsors. The CSWA’s half of the contest brand declares that a small Canadian science writers’ association has come up with this cool idea to mitigate the cognitive dissonance over global warming and will help judge it. The other half attaches itself to some company/organization’s brand and in so doing also announces to the world that they not only believe resolving the cognitive dissonance over weather and climate is a general good, but believe it in such a strong way that we will give out a big prize which truly “values” the effort.
I want people/companies/organizations to do what this magazine says they should do – “provide information empowering markets to foster a better world.”
I have detailed specifics in mind about the contest, but before I get into them I look for a response from Corporate Knights readers. Can you see that this sort of contest making a difference in helping resolve the cognitive dissonance? But most importantly, would you join in with us?
To offer feedback to Stephen, or if you represent a company or organization that would like to sponsor such a contest, e-mail him at stephenstrauss [@] hotmail.com.
