As I’ve followed the climate change conversation on Twitter and in the media, I’ve slowly been building up a mental picture of the average “citizen denier” (as opposed to the “professional deniers” in Congress, who are remunerated for their position on the issue).
Recently I’ve begun trying to work out the components of citizen denial, not just because understanding may help me communicate better about climate change, but also because it’s fascinating to ponder what makes the people who tweet me such charming things tick.
Here’s a sampler of recent tweets for citizen deniers: grammar, spelling and punctuation verbatim.
Unless you had climate science at the college level, STFU. I did. You know NOTHING. I've been to the icecaps; seen it.
And
Wildfires have nothing to do with fictitious left wing "climate change"
And
daily kos and madcow Now there are 2 sources almost as reliable as National enquirer!
And
there has always been wild weather
And
While Obama brings out the pen to cut our emissions instantly. All costs past on too us. The Tax Payer.
And
The entire fake Idea is based on computer models with faulty data no less! And every single prediction has been wrong so far!
And
If a cloud appears overhead and I feel a chill because of it does that mean pending doom via a new ice age? - A Democrat
And one more
For the last Decade or so India & China account for about 83% of carbon increase.
It’s a multifarious blend – a thick, odiferous stew of ignorance, anti-government paranoia, mindless pro-capitalist boosterism, lack of education, grammatically challenged parroting of RWNJ talking points, fear, defiance, condescension, incredulity and Tea Party argle bargle. There’s sometimes a dash of racism, particularly in tweets that include reference to the president. A soupcon of hyper-masculinity permeates the messages challenging me to explain – NOW! in a tweet! – why climate change is worse than ISIL!!!
Most of those “RWNJ” traits are under constant discussion on left wing and progressive social media. But there’s something we don’t talk about as much, and that’s that the folks who deny, or “don’t believe in,” climate change seem to suffer from a rather stunning lack of imagination.
This failing of the imagination manifests itself as a lack of ability to make connections and rise above one’s small, constrained local world to see the bigger picture. It’s small, constrained, crabbed, pinched thinking. It’s the attitude that the gutter is all there is, while doggedly refusing to look up and see the stars.
With climate change denial, I suspect that a lack of basic science education is at the root of this mind set. There are, of course, citizen deniers who appear to have had lots of science education – but the effects have been swamped by right wing propaganda and paranoiac talking points. Those folks are not the average citizen denier, however. The average denier knows all the links to their websites (etc.) and parrots the debunked pseudo-science, but doesn’t have the vocabulary or basic book learning to realize they’re being lied to and manipulated with hoodoo and cherry picked data points.
They also don’t seem ever to have stepped back and looked at the big picture.
As the planet warms, it’s not going to require much to get one’s head around the concept of the interconnectedness of planetary systems, and how warming the world this fast is a bad thing. Soon enough, we’ll have the effects of climate change slap bang right up in our faces, everywhere, all the time.
But it’s early days yet for the visible, obvious manifestations that can’t be explained any other way, and people still aren’t connecting the dots. Despite a barrage of evidence and an increasing number of reports of violent weather, wildfires, record-shattering droughts, pavement-melting heat waves and the like, we’re still in a liminal phase.
To someone like me it’s obvious that climate change is real and happening already – but it’s still possible to say things like “while we can’t attribute any one weather event to climate change…” and not be incorrect. It’s still (just barely) possible for a lot of people to look across the globe and say, “Yeah, there’s been some crazy stuff lately, but it’s still within the realm of normalcy. I mean, it snowed a LOT in Boston last year, amirite?”
I am just young enough to not have a clear memory of life before we knew what our planet looks like from space. I’ve always held the Earth in my mind as a blue and white globe, hanging in the midst of an immense midnight field of blackness, with an almost peach fuzz thin layer of atmosphere the only thing between us frail humans and perdition.
When I was 7 or 8 I learned that we are spinning around Earth’s axis at 1,000 miles an hour (at the Equator), and I spent hours the summer I learned that lying face down on the grass, clinging to the turf with my fingers and bare toes, imagining that if I let go I’d be flung off into space! It was breathtaking to think how infinitesimally small I was, and how enormous the earth, and how fast we were going. (It took me a few more years to understand why we don’t feel the rotation – but in the meantime, my imagination filled in the blanks.)
Imagination is a powerful thing. If it’s powered by some basic science, it can help you imagine the future.
A little imagination, paired with some judicious reading, can help you visualize all manner of climate change effects, from the seemingly trivial to the catastrophic. It can help you imagine what might happen to YOU as the world warms.
- Imagine your basement flooding, and the $5,865.79 bill for clean-up that you can’t pay – and that your homeowners insurance doesn’t cover...
- Imagine your small Jersey shore town blown to bits by the next Hurricane Sandy, including the souvenir shop your grandfather built from the ground up – all wiped away...
- Imagine losing your darling little retirement home in Miami to sea level rise – and ending up living with your kids in Minnesota because that also wiped you out financially...
- Imagine hundreds of climate change refugees..
- Imagine out of control wildfires, with walls of flame leaping over housetops and making an unspeakable bellowing roar…
- Imagine summer heatwaves making much of the desert southwest uninhabitable…
- Imagine...
The citizen deniers on Twitter and elsewhere aren’t stupid, or bad. They’re just not well-informed, and they’re not thinking big. They’re not thinking globally. It rains, and hey presto! No drought problem. It snows, and hey, you libtards – no global warming, duh!
No adult likes to think they don’t have the facts. We all want to think we’re right, that our information came from reliable sources, and that we haven’t been duped. So when challenged, most citizen deniers react very naturally – they dig in their heels, and things can take a turn for the nasty.
That’s one reason my Twitter feed is so Pollyanna-ish (compared to my Kos posts). If I am ever going to get one person to open their mind and think critically about climate change, it isn’t going to be by hurling insults at them and calling them stupid, or a Right Wing Nut Job.
I’m not proud to admit it, but like most people, if I’m challenged in an insulting way my first reaction isn’t, “Oh wow – you may be right! Please tell me how you see it?” Nope – my first instinct is to dig in my heels and defend my position. Not saying it’s right. Just saying it’s human nature. I work hard to keep an open mind, but that’s something you have to toil at every day, and not everyone does it.
Firing people up to understand climate change and act on it will require some powerful communicating, and it will need to be done by active engagement – by firing up people’s imaginations – not by hurling invective, or by telling people they are “stupid” and “tea bagger morans.” I’ve seen some pretty awful exchanges on social media, and it’s beneath us.
So what do we need to be talking about?
Well, one thing we need to get across is the sense of how systems connect globally, and effects can be far-flung. The current scoffing from the right about how President Obama thinks ISIL is ultimately less of a threat than climate change is a symptom of blinkered thinking that doesn’t connect the dots. So let’s help connect them!
Another thing we’ll need to emphasize is just how stuck we are here. I can’t imagine or explain why, but some folks don’t seem to be able to get their heads around the notion that THIS IS ALL THERE IS. There is nowhere else to go. When we say “No Planet B” we mean – we’re STUCK. And the climate isn’t “just weather” – it is where we live. Inside the climate. That can’t be hard to talk about effectively – so let’s do it!
A third important message is that climate change is neither a left-wing conspiracy NOR an evil plot to take jobs. It is, in fact, a fact of basic physics. It’s something that will or already has personally affected a huge and growing number of Americans – like the folks in south Florida being swamped by sea level rise, or the folks out west in wildfire country, being burned out of their homes, or, well, everyone who will be impacted by weird growing seasons and crop losses and higher food prices. These urgent, personal, often financial impacts should be easy to communicate, if once we can open minds.
And I will suggest that a fourth thing we need to communicate is how screwed we in the 99% are – and who is to blame. #ExxonKnew, after all – and so, too, do all the fossil fuel corporations and their greedy, amoral stock holders. Those are no ignoramuses sitting on the boards of BP, Conoco Phillips, Chevron, Anadarko Petroleum, and all the rest. The science has been available, and yet decisions have been made for short-term gain.
There is a wave of populist-ish anger animating this election cycle. I would love the climate change activism community to be able to harness some of that amazing energy and direct it at the politicians who bow to the whims of the big fossil fuel corporations. Folks like Mitch McConnell, who is so far in the pocket of the coal industry that he’s probably become a piece of pocket lint by now, needs to be ousted. So too Lamar Smith, Darrell Issa, Jim Inhofe and the rest of that disinformation-spewing, climate change denying crowd.
There’s an opening for us climate change communicators here. There’s a point of entry with a message about how the fat cats, bureaucrats, and greedy 1%ers are GETTING AWAY WITH THIS. They have been getting away with trashing OUR planet to line THEIR pockets.
With enough folks on board, we can apply the maximum political pressure that will be needed to make a change. But that will require a lot more non-blue folks to be prioritizing the issue of global warming. This movement cannot consist of just us progressives and activists. We need a real uprising, and to build a big badass tent that welcomes moderates and libertarians and folks who are unabashedly on the right on a whole host of social issues. This coalition won’t agree on a lot of big ticket items, and that’s okay. But I believe it’s a coalition that must be built.
The very existence of the human species – not to mention a whole host of non-human fellow traveler species – may be at stake. It’s time to up the ante, stop the partisan bickering, and #ActOnClimate together.
Will it be a heavy lift? Yes. Will there ever be a unanimous consensus? No. But I believe we still have to try.
Remember the Mayor of Who-ville in “Horton Hears a Who?” The Whos are in peril, unless they can make their voices heard, and be saved. The mayor exhorts every Who to raise their voices!
Through the town rushed the mayor from the east to the west. But everyone seemed to be doing his best. Everyone seemed to be yapping or yipping! Everyone seemed to be beeping or bipping! But it wasn’t enough, all this ruckus and roar! He HAD to find someone to help him make more. He raced through each building! He searched floor-to-floor!
And, just as he felt he was getting nowhere, and almost about to give up in despair, He suddenly burst through a door and that mayor discovered on shirker! Quite hidden away in the Fairfax Apartments (Apartment 12-J) a very small, very small shirker named Jo-Jo was standing, and bouncing a Yo-Yo! Not making a sound! Not a yipp! Not a chirp! And the mayor rushed inside and he grabbed the young twerp!
And he climbed with the lad up the Eiffelberg Tower. “This,” cried the mayor, “is your town’s darkest hour! The time for all Whos who have blood that is red to come to the aid of their country!” he said. “We’ve GOT to make noises in greater amounts! So, open your mouth, lad! For every voice counts!” Thus he spoke as he climbed. When they got to the top, the lad cleared his throat and he shouted out, “Yopp!”
And that one little “Yopp?” That one little “Yopp!” put them over the top. :-)
And so, to wrap this rant up, I believe that if we can get enough folks to care about climate change enough to HOLLER, and enough to scream “YOPP!” at the tops of our voices, someone, somewhere, will eventually be our little Jo Jo – the tipping point voice that is finally heard by the Powers That Be. And I would be ecstatic if our Jo Jo was – gasp! – a Republican.
I’m on Twitter. @KiraOnClimate