Giving more information does not change people’s attitudes. The vast majority of scientific communications is still in the form of data and graphs. In order for there to be any meaningful action, it is not enough to convince the rational part of the brain with data and graphs but the emotional part of the brain must also be convinced. Giving technical answers to technical questions without making use of the myths and philosophies available in a tradition does not move most people. As communications guru Frank Luntz advised Republican candidates on messaging climate change, “A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth.”
People obtain their information through the people they trust. Attitudes on climate change is now a shorthand for figuring out who is in our group and cares about us. This is where religion can play a crucial role. Previous social justice movements like anti-slavery campaigns, civil rights, anti-apartheid, anti-debt, and anti-poverty campaigns, arose through church networks. Climate scientists with strong religious faith say that their religious belief and their scientific research are entirely compatible. They believe that God creates the laws and their role as a scientist is to discover them.
2015 produced two very important publications on climate change: the first was Pope Francis’s encyclical letter Laudato Si, while the second was the Paris Agreement on climate change. One was written by a former teacher of literature and the other by a multitude of diplomats and delegates, Both are founded on an acceptance of the research produced by climate science. In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh compares the two documents.
He writes that as a primarily religious document, it might be thought the pope’s Encyclical would be written in a vague and elaborate style and the Agreement would, by contrast, be crisp and to the point. But actually the opposite is true. The Encyclical is remarkable for the lucidity of its language and the simplicity of its construction; it is the Agreement, rather, that is very artificial in its wording and complex in structure. It has eighteen densely printed pages with one large block of text consisting of only two sentences, one of which runs on for no less than fifteen pages!
This part of the Agreement has thousands of words separated by innumerable colons, semicolons, and commas and only a pair of full stops. The Agreement has thirty-one ringing declarations with phrases like "Recalling decision 1/CP.17 on the establishment . . ." or "Further recalling relevant decisions . . ." It indulges in wishful thinking, repeatedly invoking the impossible: for example, the aspirational goal of limiting the rise in global mean temperatures to 1.5 degrees Centigrade — a target that is widely believed to be already beyond reach.
Laudato Si, on the other hand, addresses complex questions with clarity. It does not suggest that miraculous interventions may provide a solution for climate change. It does not hesitate to take issue with past positions of the Church, as, for example, in the matter of reconciling an ecological consciousness with the Christian doctrine of Man’s dominion over Nature. It is fiercely critical of “the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology.” It insists that it is because of the “technocratic paradigm” that “we fail to see the deepest roots of our present failures, which have to do with the direction, goals, meaning and social implications of technological growth.”
In the text of the Paris Agreement, by contrast, there is not the slightest acknowledgment that something has gone wrong with our dominant paradigms; it contains no clause or article that could be interpreted as a critique of the practices that are known to have created the situation that the Agreement seeks to address. The current paradigm of perpetual growth is enshrined at the core of the text. It merely acknowledges that “climate change is a common concern for humankind." It is as if the negotiations had been convened to deal with a minor annoyance.
In contrast to the Agreement’s careful avoidance of disruptive terminology, Laudato Si challenges contemporary practices. Obscurity and technical jargon fills the official discourse on climate change and its style as well as its vocabulary conveys the impression of language being deployed as an instrument of concealment. Strangely, Laudato S’ seems to anticipate this possibility: in a passage that refers to the way that decisions are made in “international political and economic discussions,” it points to the role of
“professionals, opinion makers, communications media and centres of power [who] being located in affluent urban areas, are far removed from the poor, with little direct contact with their problems. They live and reason from the comfortable position of a high level of development and a quality of life well beyond the reach of the majority of the world’s population.”
In Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, George Marshall says that religious groups have not incorporated the issue of climate change into their world-view unlike previous social movements like those against slavery or apartheid. But there are climate scientists with strong religious faith like Katherine Hayhoe who is the director of the Climate Science Centre at Texas Tech University and is also an evangelical Christian who is married to a pastor. She says:
The facts are not enough. When we look at the planet, when we look at creation, whatever it is telling us is an expression of what God has defined it to be. So instead of studying science, I feel like I'm studying what God was thinking when he set up our planet.
The language won't move people like me but there are a far greater number of people for whom what she says makes perfect sense. George Marshall says that both religion and climate science face the same cognitive difficulties. Both require people to believe something on the authority of the communicator; both manifest in events that are distant in time and place; they challenge our normal experience and assumptions about the world; and they require people to accept certain short-term costs in order to avoid uncertain long-term costs. The difference is that religion has these difficulties to a much greater degree.
Marshall writes that the Reverend Sally Bingham, an Episcopalian preacher and renewables advocate told him, "We believe that Mary was a virgin, that Jesus rose from the dead, that we might go to heaven. So why is it that two thousand years later, we still believe this story? And how can we believe that and not believe what the world's most famous climate scientists are telling us?" He writes that maybe by resolutely keeping religion and science apart, environment scientists "have ignored the most effective, tried, and tested models for overcoming disbelief and denial".
