PRACTICE 1
Get the Truth
The first practice of leading for the planet is to tell people the truth. This is more complicated than it may seem.
To lead authentically and convincingly, leaders must come to terms with the truth about the climate as they see it. They must then tell other people the truth in ways they will understand and accept. Climate leaders often teach others how to discover the truth for themselves, and, when the truth gets complicated, they learn how to find trustworthy experts who can help.
Thus, the creation of truth is both a personal and a social process. Leaders and decision-makers cannot afford to ignore either aspect.
1. TRUTH IS BOTH PERSONAL AND SOCIAL
A truth is a belief that a person accepts as reflecting reality, one that he or she believes to be in accordance with the facts of existence. Much of what individuals accept as truth is based on their observations of the external world, while some of their truth is based on personal observations made by people they trust. Along with observational truth, people also think in terms of experiential truth (what they experience when they act), emotional truth (what they feel), and spiritual truth (what they believe about matters they cannot observe). Our cumulative sense of the truth, our personal truth, is what drives us and inspires us. It gives us integrity. It leads to conviction and action.
In 2002, psychologist Daniel Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for demonstrating in numerous experiments that human beings make decisions both emotionally and rationally. In his best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow, he observes that two decision-making processes – what he terms System 1 and System 2 – function simultaneously in our brains. Each contributes to one’s personal sense of truth, and each contributes something important to a person’s ability to analyze complex issues like climate change and energy evolution.
System 1 thinks fast. It establishes perceived truth by reacting to facts emotionally. It is what you experience when you first learn that much of the Great Barrier Reef is dying. It is instinctual. It “operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control,” and it cannot be turned off.1
System 2 thinks slowly. It uses analysis to determine truth – what we often refer to as “thinking scientifically.” It’s how we understand that pumping CO2 into the atmosphere increases ocean warming, which in turn causes coral bleaching, which in turn causes the death of the reef. It is intellectual. It “allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations,” and is associated with choosing, concentrating, and accomplishing.2 It feels hard.
When we imagine our selves, we most often identify with our conscious self and its beliefs, reasoning, and choices – our System 2. We tend to admire people with strong abilities in this system, and we strive for those abilities ourselves. People with high cognitive control – people whose System 2 exercises strong executive control over cognitive tasks – are more likely to do well on intelligence tests and can switch quickly from one task to another. They are more intellectually engaged, and they are more skeptical of superficial answers.3 We are likely to see such people as leaders.
Yet, however much we identify with System 2, we also love our System 1. It feels real. With its moods and emotions, it colors our day. System 1 includes many capabilities that we share with other animals. As Kahneman puts it, “We are born prepared to perceive the world around us, recognize objects, orient attention, avoid losses, and fear spiders.”4
Through interpersonal sensitivity and intuition, System 1 helps people develop the emotional bonds that characterize family, community, and society. Today we even have a special word for it: “Truthiness” is something that a person knows intuitively without examining it rationally using evidence and logic. After falling into disuse under its old meaning of “truthfulness,” the term was reintroduced by comedian Stephen Colbert to mean truth that derives from emotion and instinct. “In the gut is where truth comes from,” Colbert joked on his mock news show. “Anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news at you.”5
Sometimes we prefer System 1 to System 2. After all, it is easy. It is also reinforced by purveyors of distracting entertainment and social media. When we respond to the smiling faces on Facebook without investigating the tensions lurking behind them, we are responding to each other’s truthiness – and we, being human, are tempted to substitute reaction to this truthiness for analysis of established facts.
System 1 and System 2 are partners. System 1 makes constant suggestions to System 2, feeding it impressions, feelings, and intentions. It helps us observe subtle things like hostility in someone’s voice, and it brings into play our innate sensitivity to others. One reason leaders fail to convince people to act on climate change is that they overemphasize System 2 analysis to the detriment of System 1 sensitivity and intuition. They forget that System 1 helps create the interpersonal bonds that motivate people to act. Among these bonds, perhaps the most important is trust.
Trust is a mental shortcut, an essential heuristic that allows our brains to work in the moment and in a hurry. Trusting others allows us to act quickly, without taking the time to check out the credentials of every single person we interact with. It also helps build reciprocal social ties: I trust you, and you trust me, and, therefore, we automatically support each other in thought and action.
A fundamental question thus becomes: Beyond what we can personally observe, who can we trust to tell us the truth? When it comes to climate and energy issues, how we answer this question is fundamental to promoting action based on the truth.
For example, do we trust scientists? Many of us rely on scientists to give us facts, to help us make sense of conflicting facts, and to help us develop fact-based goals. We even trust scientists to help us shape our future. One study found that more than 75 per cent of Americans trust scientists (and the military) to act in the public interest, far more than trust the news media, business leaders, or elected officials.6
It is commonly believed that the more educated we are, the more likely we are to trust science. However, research in the United States suggests that reality is more complicated.7 Less educated individuals actually do trust scientific methods; however, they do not trust scientific institutions. The main reason for this gap is that less educated individuals are less likely to be economically successful and are therefore more likely to be alienated by modern life. They are more likely than more successful people to agree with statements like, “These days a person does not really know whom he or she can count on,” and “Nowadays, a person has to live pretty much for today and let tomorrow take care of itself.”8 In contrast, more educated individuals find more stability in modern life and so are more likely to trust existing institutions.
Individuals also develop trust in science in the contexts of their family and community. Thus, it is not surprising that people who have learned to value extreme individualism are unlikely to accept truth that is socially constructed. In an America that is “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” strong individualists may see cooperation as downright unpatriotic. Research suggests that individualists who support a strongly hierarchical society are not particularly likely to believe that global warming is happening or caused by humans. In contrast, people who have faith in collective action and who are more egalitarian in their outlook are more likely to accept those beliefs.9
Belief in scientific truth also depends on one’s power to access that truth. Those who accept science are individuals who can afford access to science and are able either to interpret that science themselves or to identify experts who can help.
Use of conservative media reduces people’s trust in scientists and reduces the belief that global warming is happening, while use of non-conservative media increases trust in scientists and increases the belief that global warming is happening.10 In recent years, trust in scientists has been in decline among political conservatives in the United States,11 while among Democrats and liberals it has been higher and more stable.12
Individual personality is also a factor in trust, and while personality is 50 per cent inherited, it is also 50 per cent nurtured. An individual being open to new experiences, conscientious, or introverted each predicts a higher level of interest in science. Also, a person’s “need to structure relevant situations in meaningful, integrated ways, to understand and make reasonable the experiential world” predicts interest in and a positive attitude toward science. Not surprisingly, having this “need for cognition” predicts that a person also prefers System 2 thinking.13
The takeaway for leaders is that both System 1 and System 2 matter in human decision-making and communication, and that assessing oneself and one’s followers on both aspects is important. In the next section, we consider how these principles work in practice.
2. LEADING WITH THE TRUTH
The strengths of System 1 are also its weaknesses. Although System 1 thinking is fast and intuitive, it can also be too fast and based on too few data points. Because it is relatively easy and routine, it is likely to continue without much conscious management. This lack of awareness can lead to decisions that lack detail, structure, and, ultimately, effectiveness.
Furthermore, emotion unexamined and untempered by System 2 can run amok. With its social and emotional processes, System 1 connects one person to another. Yet, those connections are counterproductive if they are dominated by emotion – if, for example, citizens develop an emotional bond and uncritically follow a charismatic but damaging leader.
Another concern is that people can get stuck in System 1. For example, individuals who attempt to control their feelings of distress, rather than actively trying to reduce their risks, experience what is called “defensive processing.”14 The person thinks, “Yes, I understand that climate change is a threat, and I find it frightening. But since I can’t figure out what to do about the danger, I will just manage the fear itself. In fact, why don’t I just find a way to ignore it?” Research suggests that if people experience the threat of climate change without learning about solutions, they are likely to practice what is called “message avoidance.” When learning more about climate change and discussing its dangers only increase their anxiety, they avoid both that learning and those conversations.
One of the great debates among climate communicators concerns which emotions are most likely to motivate climate actions. Some believe that people are motivated primarily by hope. These leaders prefer to downplay the difficult truths about climate change and focus instead on optimistic signs for change. Others deride this approach as “hopium.” Although there is research supporting both sides of this debate, mainstream psychological research strongly suggests that fear is an excellent motivator. The drawback is that fear in the absence of coping mechanisms becomes a demotivator that leads to withdrawal. However, fear coupled with possibilities for action is extremely motivating.15
It follows that climate leaders who want their followers to both listen and act should assiduously avoid frightening people without giving them an out. A leader who wants to promote control of climate risks and motivate political action to mitigate climate change should provide information about the threats (engaging System 1) and also about how individuals can respond to these threats (engaging System 2).16
The strength of System 2 is the ability to make sound analytic decisions using reliable data. This skill is the basis of the scientific thought on which modern technological society is founded. It is a strength that will only become more obvious and important as society demands and produces more data on which to base decisions.
Today we live in the Age of Organizations, in part because organizations are uniquely capable of System 2 decision-making. Because they are designed to reason more slowly than individuals and to impose order on decision-making processes, organizations are better than individuals at avoiding errors made by System 1 thinking.17 While individual human beings tend to be overconfident and optimistic, organizations are good at taming that overconfidence.18
In fact, well-run organizations are the best decision-makers in history. They can create and enforce the use of standardized procedures and scientifically grounded data analytics and forecasting. They not only utilize System 2 thinking, they improve upon it. As Kahneman writes, “An organization is a factory that manufactures judgments and decisions. Every factory must have ways to ensure the quality of its products in the initial design, in fabrication, and in final inspections. The corresponding stages in the production of decisions are the framing of the problem that is to be solved, the collection of relevant information leading to a decision, and reflection and review. An organization that seeks to improve its decision product should routinely look for efficiency improvements at each of these stages. The operative concept is routine.”19 Also, by conducting postmortems on decisions, smart organizations help their members learn from their mistakes.
Organizations also foster humankind’s love of a cognitive challenge and ingenuity in every sphere, and this characteristic has been highly valued by society. Of course, operationalizing ingenuity, for example by creating cool products, draws down on the natural environment just like creating more prosaic products does. Nevertheless, those cool products keep coming in part because we love creating them. What is good for the individual and the organization is not necessarily good for the planet.
In addition, it is well known that organizations are not good at weighing moral issues. Even though ethics specialists exhort business managers to routinely include the moral dimension in their decision-making, they seldom do.
The strengths and weaknesses of System 2 have many implications for climate leadership. One is that, given the recognized decision-making efficacy of organizations, climate leaders should be thinking not merely in terms of making an individual contribution but in terms of fostering organizational contributions (see, for instance, Practice 4: Define the Business of Business). Effective leaders will pay attention to how organizations optimize System 2 thinking, and how to grow organizations that apply those principles specifically to climate and energy issues. To this end, it may be useful to consider whether existing organizations, created originally for other purposes, can do a good job of addressing the climate crisis, or whether the best decisions for the planet might be made by organizations designed explicitly to manage climate and energy issues.
Further, effective climate leaders weigh the consequences of innovation on all systems, including natural systems. Innovators should be encouraged to work within the limits of the natural world. Part of this effort is to encourage innovation that takes psychology into consideration. What can we substitute for technological innovation that would still satisfy human curiosity? Perhaps the clever among us can be convinced to engineer simplicity itself (already a trend), or to have fun improving other aspects of human decision-making.
From the individual’s perspective, solving problems rationally using System 2 is often satisfying, but it is also hard work that eats up time and requires an investment of one’s limited cognitive energy. System 2 often requires special skills and knowledge that are hard to acquire and use. System 2 also requires attention, which can be disrupted if one is distracted. Leaders can make sure System 2 decision-makers get enough time for analysis and that they work in physical spaces that foster concentration.
A particular problem is that sometimes individuals get stuck in System 2 analytic mode and become isolated from human contact that includes moral and social support. By taking into consideration the important contributions of System 1, leaders can create opportunities for relaxation and human connection, intuitive creativity, and moral reflection. Professor Nate Hagens of the University of Minnesota is a resilience expert. He points out that humans enjoy novelty and that humanity needs to develop new ways to meet that need. For instance, he personally makes a point of appreciating the geology in his own region rather than create carbon emissions by travelling to faraway places seeking the same pleasure.20 Innovative thinking like this combines moral conviction with psychological principles to address the limitations of a stressed natural world.
In sum, effective climate leaders create a blend of System 1 and System 2 approaches to communicate about climate and energy with a variety of audiences. Leaders not only alert people to problems and convince them of the truth, they also motivate them to act on what they have learned.
Understanding the contribution of System 1 helps climate leaders translate science for non-expert audiences and for all audiences that rely heavily on System 1. For example, for some audiences, a leader might describe the oceans as the heart of a circulatory system that moves heat and moisture through all parts of the climate system. “Heart” is a concept that anyone can understand, and this metaphor also embodies the System 1 sensibilities of acting responsibly and protecting people and places.21
System 1 also helps individual decision-makers evaluate the cultural context of the problem, including its social and moral aspects. It helps them sense which information comes from a suspicious source and decide which individuals and sectors to trust. It enables the talented among us to approach the issues from a variety of perspectives – not only as logical analysts, but as creative writers, visual artists, and musicians. It promotes ethical thinking and practice.
System 2 contributes logic and analysis. Normally operating in a comfortable low-effort mode, when stimulated by System 1 – for example when System 1 is surprised – System 2 surges into analytic action. System 2 figures out what causes climate change and analyzes what to do about it. It helps leaders understand scientific methodologies like how to measure ocean expansion.
Yet, relying on scientific reports alone is unlikely to motivate a broad public, nor is it likely to motivate their political representatives. Research by The Frameworks Institute, a nonprofit that studies communication strategies for social issues, suggests that “without a value, people struggle to see the point of engaging with an issue and frequently fall back on individualistic solutions to social issues.”22 Leaders of diverse populations develop trust with their followers by building upon their common values.
At the same time, as discussed earlier, leaders who want to educate alienated citizens about the facts of global warming must work with the issue of their rejection from mainstream society. If they do not, it is unlikely that those constituents will identify with and support the institutions that would address the problem.
3. WHAT IS SCIENTIFIC TRUTH, REALLY?
Even those leaders who are familiar with System 1 and System 2 thinking may not have thought very much about their own grasp of scientific truth. What is it, really?
Scientific truth consists of theories that correctly predict patterns in new observations. When Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth,”23 he couldn’t imagine the kinds of broad-ranging truths that humans have at their disposal today. Yet, because his observations of the natural world around Walden Pond were systematic, they enlighten science even now, providing a rare baseline for measuring the natural systems of the twenty-first century against those of 1854.
Recall the Chinese proverb that if you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day, but if you teach him to fish, he will eat for a lifetime. Informing people about the state of the planet is giving them the fish. Teaching them to fish is showing them how to get good information whenever they need it, and how to apply that information to drive decisions and action.
Learning to fish the scientific waters using System 2 thinking is an important adaptation for the times of exceptionally rapid change we face in the twenty-first century. Climate leadership today requires applying logical methods to systematically gather information and then analyzing that information to set directions and develop plans for action. For such purposes, it is useful to think about the scientific method as operating on different levels of complexity – as investigating what we will call simple truths, complex truths, and highly complex truths. The simpler the truth, the easier it is for people to understand and accept. The more complex the truth, the less people understand it and the more skeptical they are about it.
A simple scientific truth is one that is based on obvious numbers, easy-to-understand measurements, and straightforward math. You, yourself, could go out with a ruler and, over time, measure how much the sea level is rising. Or, using a thermometer (and a lot of funding), you could observe the Earth’s temperatures at different places across its surface and show that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as other regions. Using a carbon dioxide meter, you could enjoy an annual visit to Hawaiʻi to measure the amount of CO2 on Mauna Loa.
In practical terms, it is not all that easy to implement even such simple measurements. For many years, to measure the temperature of the oceans, scientists incorporated readings made by untrained ship personnel, a cheap method that was less than optimally systemic or accurate. Yet, to deploy highly accurate and non-breakable thermometers across the globe is expensive in terms of technology and personnel. Scientists are always trying to improve upon even such seemingly simple methodologies.
Furthermore, even a straightforward measurement procedure can be impeded by extraneous factors. For example, to predict the future of fossil fuel energy, many people would like to know how many barrels of oil are still in the ground worldwide. On the face of it, since oil is found in predictable places, this should be a simple observation problem. However, locating oil in the ground is a technical specialty that involves great expertise and great expense, and is undertaken primarily by oil geologists working for powerful, secretive companies. Furthermore, oil explorers do not have full access to all locales where oil might be discovered. The largest depository of light sweet crude, the cleanest and cheapest sort of oil, is in Saudi Arabia, yet for nearly a century just how much oil exists in Saudi Arabia has been one of the world’s most tantalizing secrets.
Stepping up to more complex scientific problems, leaders take on such challenges as understanding cause and effect in common natural processes. For example, scientists accept that human injection of CO2 into the atmosphere is causing global warming, and they consider the demonstration of this process to be absolutely reliable and straightforward. Laypersons, not being experts in chemistry and physics, may be skeptical of this belief. They simply don’t know, experientially, whether to believe it. Enter System 1: People have to trust the experts.
A wise clergyman from another era once penned this interesting thought: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”24 Today he might say that a lie can tweet around the globe while the truth is still a gleam in a scientist’s eye. The point is that it takes time to imagine, develop, declare, and defend the truth. The more complex the truth, the harder it is to develop, the harder it is to explain, and the harder it is for people to accept. The truth about rapid climate change certainly qualifies on all counts.
When it comes to pursuing highly complex truths, such as how the melting Arctic is affecting the meridional overturning circulation (part of which is the Gulf Stream), or how the ocean functions as a heatsink for the warming planet, laypersons are even more dependent on experts. Many of these more complex truths rely on the manipulation of factors in statistical models to predict outcomes. Understanding them requires understanding higher mathematics that will elude most of us both today and tomorrow.
Thus, when nonscientists must grapple with science – and grapple we must when it comes to understanding the realities of climate change – we need to ask ourselves whether we trust the scientific methodology – the observations that are made and the logic that systematizes and explains them. We must also factor in whether we trust the scientists themselves.
So far, we have been reviewing the psychology and social systems that frame humans’ sense of truth about climate change. We have highlighted the importance of trust and suggested that scientific complexity can make trusting science a challenge. We now arrive at the crucial question of how much trust to place in scientific research. Climate leaders need some facility with this conversation when they must convince others to pay attention to scientific results.
The hallmark of modern scientific research is that much of it is produced collectively and publicly within a system of checks and balances, and this is significantly reassuring. Most scientific findings are published within a scientific community that relies on peer evaluation to review methods and results. Scientists submit their work to peer-reviewed journals and conferences. (This process excludes most corporate research, which for competitive reasons is kept company-private.) Work that is not peer-reviewed has virtually no legitimacy in the scientific community.
Ideally, the vetting system works as follows. The authors’ peers in the same field at other research institutions examine a submitted paper for its logical and methodological rigor and provide feedback to the authors and the journal’s editors. Most often peer review is anonymous, or “blind.” Reviewers serve without compensation, although by providing thorough reviews they can build their reputation among the editors in their research community. The more rigorous the review process, the more reviewers are used, the more knowledgeable are the scientists who are asked to review, and the more rounds of reviews and revisions undertaken. Sometimes reviewers require the authors to collect more data, and the review process can stretch out for a year or more.
To decide whether to trust a research finding, decision-makers should consider not only whether a journal is peer-reviewed but also whether it is peer-reviewed at the highest level. Scholars rank certain journals more highly than others, and higher rankings usually indicate a more rigorous review process. Another signal of high quality is a journal’s acceptance rate: The rule of thumb is that the lower the acceptance rate, the higher the quality of the research.
Readers can also estimate the quality of research by finding a journal’s “impact factor,” which suggests how much the scientific community respects it. This number is the average number of citations from other scientists that the articles in the journal have had over some recent time period, usually a year or two. Understanding how the impact factor is important to scientists gives nonscientists an inside look at the currency of academic success. Many people agree that this measurement is imperfect, especially when it is used to evaluate scientists’ career contributions.25 However, measures like a journal’s acceptance rate and its impact factor generally do point the lay reader toward the more solid journals.
A further check on research is that scientists network with peers in their specialty. For instance, they build their professional credibility by working with other scientists, who in turn provide ongoing critiques of their methods. They take sabbaticals to visit other universities and share their research in local presentations. Such peer evaluation goes a long way toward crosschecking what any one scientist asserts as the truth.
Naturally, leaders need to be aware of concerns about how science is produced and distributed. Sometimes reviewers are neglectful, and occasionally researchers do manufacture data. Also, today new journals abound, and many have low standards. Finally, from a psychological perspective, all cohesive cultures are subject to groupthink and the community of academic publishing is no exception. On balance, the proof is in the results: The scientific method of constructing the truth works. It works worldwide and it works over time.
Despite the robust system of scientific peer review, not all facts are created equal. In addition to the findings of a piece of research, the integrity of the funding and publishing system that produced it also matters. Politics and money influence which kinds of studies are pursued and published. The source of research funding for a project or a laboratory may bias its results, and particularly their interpretation. To assess these influences, leaders must apply common sense and a dash of System 1. Do the findings pass the sniff test? Is the research self-serving? Where a funding source seems to have influenced the results, replication of the study by other scientists from other networks becomes that much more important.
Consider the back story of the BEST project, named after the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature group that directed it. This research re-examined the most widely watched measurement of climate change – the temperature of the Earth over land and water. Even though in the second decade of this century planetary warming was accepted by the vast majority of scientists, this measurement was occasionally disputed. The BEST project brought together a diverse set of scientists and funders, some from the political left and some from the political right, to see if they could develop a set of facts that all could accept.
As described in The Economist in 2011, the pedigree of the study was demonstrably eclectic.26 The study was funded in part by the conservative, free-market (“Prices should be free to guide economic action”) Koch Foundation. The Kochs own one of the largest private businesses in the United States, a set of companies invested primarily in oil and gas, and Koch Industries had been highly skeptical of claims of global warming. The study also examined data produced by a diverse set of researchers – the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature group, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the British Hadley Climatic Research Unit (CRU). It was led by a particularly skeptical scientist, and the team included a recent Nobel Prize winner for physics.
For a period of up to 150 years, temperature collection programs worldwide had been running at weather stations and on ships. These sources were not originally designed to measure global warming, and data from them were not collected systematically. Measurements were taken at different times of the day using different thermometers. Sometimes data were collected near local heat sources such as urban environments, which tend to be heat islands. There were gaps in the data, as well. The BEST study did not collect new data but, rather, it re-analyzed existing data using a common statistical methodology that smooths the effects of missing and outlying observations. Using this technique, analysts statistically weight unusual data points to reduce distortions, giving an automatic weighting to every data point according to its consistency with comparable readings. This approach makes it possible to include outliers, such as older data, without the results being heavily distorted by them.
The BEST researchers concluded that, in the fifty years covered by the study, the land surface of the Earth warmed by 0.911° Celsius. This was only 2 per cent less than the comparable estimate by the NOAA. The Economist concluded that, “at a time of exaggerated doubts about the instrumental temperature record, this should help promulgate its main conclusion: that the existing mean estimates are in the right ballpark. That means the world is warming fast.”27
The decision-making process that produced these results had both face validity and integrity. We are likely to trust these results in part because politically opposed sides came together to produce them. The BEST study was so carefully crafted, from both the political and the scientific perspectives, that, had it disproved global warming, it would have been a sensation. What it did was to confirm important truths about the state of the planet, and to show how cooperation in science can improve leaders’ understanding of the truth going forward. What it did not do, however, was to prevent the Koch brothers from continuing to fight “tirelessly” against the regulation of greenhouse gases.28
4. READING SCIENCE AS A NONSCIENTIST
Once climate leaders identify sound science, they must be able to use it to motivate others. Being able to read scientific reports, at least at some level, is an important competence. Conversely, not being able to do so is a weakness that must be acknowledged and managed. (If you are a scientist, you may want to skip this section. Or, you might find it mildly amusing.)
For openers, a major challenge for lay readers is the use of technical vocabulary. For example, consider that most proclamations on global warming state that if we are to fend off dramatic climate changes, we must hold global warming worldwide to “between 1.5°C and 2°C.” Do you usually skip such descriptions, or do you stop to figure them out? For example, do you know how much that is, really? (Spoiler alert: The calculation is coming next.)
To understand this global warming fact as an American (a member of a primitive society that still clings to the Fahrenheit era), you must first be able to translate Celsius into Fahrenheit. Let’s see now, what was that formula? The one we all remember (of course) is: F = 9/5 C + 32°. Yes, but that is the formula for translating between two temperature scales, right? What you need now is the formula for translating one degree to the other, and that is only the 9/5 factor. Since 9/5 = 1.8, 2°C is 2 × 1.8 or 3.6° Fahrenheit. So 1.5° Celsius is 2.7° Fahrenheit. (Does the world seem warmer now?)
Right. But then, so what? To make such calculations useful, leaders must be able to put them into historical context, so you should also know that since 1880 the average global temperature has increased by about 0.8° Celsius (1.4° Fahrenheit). Also, two-thirds of that warming has occurred since 1975.29 Also, according to the European Environmental Agency, “the global average annual near-surface temperature in the decade 2006–2015 was 0.83 to 0.89 °C higher than the pre-industrial average (mid- to the end of the 19th century).”30 NASA scientists offer an even longer-term context: “When global warming has happened at various times in the past two million years, it has taken the planet about 5,000 years to warm 5 degrees [Celsius]. The predicted rate of warming for the next century is at least 20 times faster.”31
In addition, when it comes to interpreting such world temperature changes, you don’t want to fall for the fallacy of applying the world average to every problem. For instance, it is useful to know that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the world average,32 and that, therefore, many northern latitude locales, such as the tundra, are also warming quickly.
Glen Peters, a researcher in the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, Norway, describes the implications of these global temperature changes: “To keep below 1.5C with a ‘likely’ chance [implies] a very, very small remaining carbon budget. If you use the IPCC’s [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] cumulative emission budget that they published in their synthesis report, we have about 400bn tonnes of CO2 to emit [before we] go over 1.5C – and that’s starting in 2011. At current emission rates, that budget will go by about 2020 … If you want to emit for longer, then you’ll have to use large amounts of negative emissions.”33 “Negative emissions” refers to the idea of removing carbon from the atmosphere and, generally, burying it deep in the ground. It is important to realize that this is a technical capability that we do not currently have at scale. Nor, at the time of this writing, is the practical application of this technology on the horizon.
So, based on existing science, to control global warming the world must balance carbon emissions and the capture of emitted carbon, achieving a net outcome of zero emissions, by sometime between 2045 and 2060. Between 2030 and 2050 we need to see significant reductions in carbon emissions. “The window for achieving this goal is small and rapidly closing.”34 How exactly does global warming damage the planet? You can find an excellent description of the carbon cycle on the NASA website, as of this writing.35
Imagine you are the vice president for information technology in a large company, and you have been assigned to draft a white paper recommendation on where to site your company’s new computer servers. You are not a scientist, but you do know that servers require a lot of water, and your company is in San Diego, where water is in short supply. To make the recommendation, you need to understand such factors as the amount of water currently available locally and the likely impact of climate change on its future availability. In your organization, you are lucky enough to have some scientists who can help you research these factors, but you also need to understand their recommendations well enough to be able to field management’s questions about practical applications.
As part of your research, you decide to investigate how desalination might enhance your local water supply. You know that, in the face of a major California drought, Santa Barbara, a city up the coast, took a desalination plant out of mothballs. In an emergency, might your community do something similar? What other solutions might be viable?
To find out what research scientists can tell you about changes in drought patterns and water availability, and about adaptations like desalination, you search in your library for the most relevant online databases and articles. You soon realize that you are trying to answer an extremely complicated question.
You want to know about desalination availability and costs, its environmental and social impacts, and any promising technological advances. So you develop a set of keywords and pull up peer-reviewed articles on these topics. You find many articles on the basic science of desalination, like one on desalination chemistry entitled, “Sustainable Desalination Using a Microbial Capacitive Desalination Cell,” and a data-based article on the environmental impacts of desalination entitled, “Towards a Meaningful Assessment of Marine Ecological Impacts in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).” You are lucky to discover a review article entitled “Desalination and Sustainability: An Appraisal and Current Perspective.”36
Having found these articles, can you understand them? When it comes to reading an academic article, professionals have two main advantages over laypeople – their familiarity with scientific terms and disciplinary jargon, and their training in specialized statistics. As in any professional field, jargon is the shorthand that allows scientists to communicate succinctly. Academic articles tend to be narrowly focused and filled with it, so inexperienced laypeople must research every term.
Just for fun, try to interpret the following – actually very important – statement in a technical article on sea level rise: “Meltwater tends to stabilize the ocean column, inducing amplifying feedbacks that increase subsurface ocean warming and ice shelf melting.”37 Before reading on, you might want to jot down what you think this means …
To understand this statement, you must first define “meltwater,” “ocean column,” and “amplifying feedbacks.” Once you have done this, you would know that “water formed by the melting of snow and ice” stabilizes the “conceptual column of water from the surface of the sea to the bottom sediments” and creates a “process in which changing one quantity changes a second quantity, and the change in the second quantity in turn changes the first.” (How did you do?)
In addition to the jargon, in technical articles you soon run into challenging statistical analyses. Of course, research is often designed to test models, which in turn support or fail to support broader theories. Certain types of statistical analysis have been shown to be the most useful in describing the relationships between independent (“causal” or “predictor”) variables and dependent, effect variables. Even after taking a basic stats course, most laypeople need at least one statistics course on multivariate analysis to begin to understand these techniques. PhD training takes students even further into the statistical niceties of their fields.
Fortunately, the typical data-based article has several standard parts, and, as it turns out, these provide a handy framework for skimming. The abstract describes the purpose of the study and its major findings, and may suggest the implications of the findings for managerial and other applications. The body of the article includes an introduction, which often describes how the study contributes to the field. This is followed by a discussion of the theoretical background of the research, which reviews what has already been discovered by other researchers and asserts how the current study advances knowledge.
The methodology section covers which research method (laboratory study, field research, or questionnaire study) was used for collecting the data, and what sample was used to test the hypothesis. Often a layperson can evaluate whether the sample is relevant to and will reasonably generalize to the population in which they themselves are interested. Finally, the results section presents the conclusions drawn from statistical analysis of the data, and it is followed by a discussion section that describes the study’s weaknesses and the implications for future research. If the lay reader is lucky – and some journals today require authors to include this – the last section has a subheading called something like “Practical Implications.”
Furthermore, peer-reviewed research articles include both original research articles and research reviews. If a field of research is sufficiently developed, you may find a recent review article that summarizes the results of many data-based articles, so you yourself do not have to do all that work. As a bonus, review articles tend to follow common, obvious logic that makes them accessible to many readers.
Is knowing how to read science a good thing? Preliminary research suggests that, whether in their companies or communities, laypeople who grasp published science at a basic level at least have the advantage of being able to pose good questions to experts.38 Leaders who are at least somewhat knowledgeable can lead where others who are less informed can only follow. For instance, in a study of policymaking for wind turbine installation, researchers found that motivated laypersons who invest enough time can acquire enough knowledge to engage in meaningful dialogue with subject matter experts. Because they have done their homework, such leaders can have some influence over the process. Less informed laypeople have less influence, in part because policymakers are likely to turn away from trying to develop consensus with them and turn instead to expert opinion.39
On the other hand, as the saying goes, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. A thorough vetting of the facts is always necessary. How you do that will depend not only on your own scientific abilities but also on your organization’s resources for acquiring professional help.
Reading science can be a complicated task. This raises the question of whether leaders should study the science themselves, or delegate that learning to others. When the scientific problem a leader is trying to solve is so complex that it is beyond their own abilities or the abilities of their team, they must turn to a consultant. PhD-level and other research professionals approach essential research to understand it as thoroughly as possible. As specialists in the area researched, they will read not only an article but also most of its references. Their training in research methodology and statistical analysis allows them to see the holes in the research as well as its contributions.
Whether a leader chooses to make or buy necessary science will depend on such factors as the availability of internal and external resources, and how they will manage costs in the short- and long-term. In the end, the fundamental question is, Who can you trust to give you the truth? – and the practical question is, How much is that worth to you?
Whether your decision is to read the science in-house or to hire consultants to help you, you generally expect that at the least you will be able to obtain it. Americans, in particular, take for granted that they have access to basic science. Every year vast troves of US government science are developed and made available to the public. Every time Americans check the weather they are tapping into the satellites and scientists of the NOAA and the National Weather Service. Either they go directly to https://www.weather.gov, or they listen to media reports that are likely to use that same free information. Likewise, they rely on Food and Drug Administration scientists to monitor the safety of what they consume, and to educate them about everything from using cosmetics safely to keeping pets healthy. They rely on the Environmental Protection Agency to measure and assure clean water and unpolluted air. They count on the US Geological Survey to inform them about natural hazards related to water, energy, and other natural resources. Not incidentally, that organization’s mission includes studying the impacts of climate change and educating the public about them.
Much of this science is available free online. In addition, the results of any independent research funded by the government must be published for free. Americans’ ability to access all this government and government-sponsored research is enhanced by an excellent free library system.
Nevertheless, public access to science can be restricted in significant ways.
First, it can be restricted by politics. In the climate arena, an early attempt to squelch research on climate change was the well-documented case of NASA climatologist James Hansen versus the George W. Bush administration and the fossil fuel industry.40 Hansen is credited as the first scientist to warn the world about human-induced global warming. It was his testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in 1988 that initiated the national discussion of climate change. One commentator has called that testimony “the official beginning of the global warming policy debate.”41
Motivated perhaps by the Bush family’s oil interests, officials of the Bush administration had tried to censor Hansen’s early public pronouncements alerting the public to climate change. In part to reduce NASA’s earth science group budget, they appointed political loyalists in positions formerly held by NASA professionals. They also edited government research documents on climate change to make scientists’ conclusions appear much more tentative than they actually were.42
Today, government scientists realize the need to preserve continuity of climate data in the face of any administration that might want to eliminate such research. As one scientist puts it, “If you can just get rid of the data, you’re in a stronger position to argue we should do nothing about climate change.”43
In 2017, the incoming Trump administration began to remove climate and energy data from government websites, sparking nationwide events by scientists and their supporters to archive valuable data sets. Although it is illegal to destroy government data, it is not illegal to make it hard to access by revising a website so that certain pages are impossible to find. “At the moment, more people than ever are aware of the risk of relying solely on the government to preserve its own information,’’ wrote two government document librarians, James A. Jacobs of the University of California, San Diego, and James R. Jacobs of Stanford University, in February 2017. “This was not true even six months ago.”44
Another restriction on access is cost. Much of published science is not free. If one is interested in, say, “Enhanced Desalination Performance of Carboxyl Functionalized Graphene Oxide Nanofiltration Membranes,” as a layperson you can purchase the original research article directly from its publisher for $37.95.45 Typically, researchers do not get a royalty for these downloads, but their publishers do. In fact, the profit margins of academic publishing companies are among the highest in the world.46 These days, some academics are finding research articles to be so expensive that they share papers free online, and paper-sharing Internet sites are being developed for scientists.
Alternatively, if you are a professor or a student, or an employee of a business organization that relies heavily on research, you may have access to academic science through your institution. Universities, businesses, and libraries often purchase individual journals and sets of journals and provide access to their readers for free. For example, to find this article on desalination, you might download it from your university library online. Alternatively, you might discover that your own university does not subscribe to the database in which it can be found, but that you can order the article through an interlibrary loan system.
Independent researchers are on their own nickel. For them, the price is still $37.95, which can add up to a huge amount for any sort of serious investigation. Thus, the expense of researching in peer-reviewed articles excludes some interested and no doubt very interesting people and projects. There does exist a cadre of consultants who trade in their access to databases by providing nonaffiliated organizations with the scientific information that they need, but this information also comes at a price.
Users searching outside of the databases, using a free resource like Google Scholar, are probably searching too broadly. They may waste time sifting through some less than excellent research, and, in the end, may find that the resource is neither as comprehensive nor as focused as they need. Even if they find citations that interest them there, they may still be up against a paywall.
Obviously, expensive access to research can stifle its production and application. Also, powerful owners might influence the content of their databases. Suffice it to say that the situation has prompted a movement in which some researchers prefer to publish in open-access journals, and there are now over 10,000 such journals.47 These journals often require authors to pay a fee that defers their costs. In some disciplines, these journals are not the most prestigious, in part because they are newcomers. In other disciplines, government regulations require authors to make their work public in this way.
In response to these threats from politics and the profit motive, the Union of Concerned Scientists advocates for democratic access to all science data. Their view is that “scientific integrity includes the open, reliable conduct, supervision, and communication of science as well as the appropriate use of science and policy creation … Regardless of decision makers’ political affiliation, good decisions require the best available independent information we can gather.”48 In a related effort to protect access to climate science, the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund offers legal assistance to researchers facing lawsuits over their work on climate change. Its general guidelines can be found in the publication Handling Political Harassment and Legal Intimidation: A Pocket Guide for Scientists.49
5. TRUTH INTERPRETERS
Given their busy lives, modest scientific training, and limited access to scientific data, many climate leaders will rely on science interpreters to help them obtain and understand scientific truth. Most nonscientists, most of the time, rely on the Internet, television, radio, newspapers, and magazines for their scientific information. Today more than ever, we need to be rational consumers of such information. Leaders, whose influence is magnified, have a special responsibility to ferret out the truth.
Journalists’ professional norms influence how they present climate and energy issues and, therefore, what the public takes away from their coverage.50 The norm of balanced reporting, for instance, in which the views of experts on both sides of a conflict are presented, is assumed to be a hallmark of good journalism. Yet, when practiced simplistically, this principle may give a voice to fringe minorities that are clearly wrong.51 By giving both sides of an argument equal time, a journalist magnifies minority influence and distorts the truth as heard by the public. For example, although most of thousands of scientists believe in anthropogenic climate change, a few do not. Always presenting both sides of the story leaves the false impression that there is a lack of consensus among mainstream scientists, or that both sides are in some sense right. Less engaged readers and viewers may not read and view broadly enough to know the “whole truth” – that is, the truth.
Responsible news organizations combat this problem by construing the norm of balanced reporting in the context of their entire news organization and its product, not just in terms of one article. For example, this policy of National Public Radio distinguishes between daily reporting and longer-term investigative reporting:
When we say our [daily] reporting is complete, it means we understand the bigger picture of a story – which facts are most important and how they relate to one another. It’s unrealistic to expect that every story should represent every perspective on an issue. But in our reporting, we must do our best to be aware of all perspectives, the facts supporting or opposing each, and the different groups of stakeholders affected by the issue. Only then can we determine what’s best to include in the time and space we have.52
In other words, each story exists within a larger system of stories, and it is that system that embodies legitimacy and truth.
Another common journalistic norm is to rely on authorities. Authorities can be especially helpful to journalists when they address complex issues like climate change and energy evolution. However, journalists are sometimes tempted to reduce the complexities of a story that has many voices and many angles to a simple conflict between two authority figures. For example, in a segment called “The Climate Feud,” Fox News host Bill O’Reilly once pitted Vice-President Al Gore against former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Gore had shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change for their combined efforts to disseminate knowledge about human-made climate change, while Palin, in a contemporary editorial, had been so uninformed that she conflated climate and weather.53 Inviting confrontation between such so-called experts can undermine the authority of actual experts and does little to offer listeners the truth about climate change.
To bring their listeners broader truths rather than just single-minded opinions, National Public Radio’s decision about what to include in a daily report is, again, contextualized within an ongoing investigation:
As journalists, we strive to master broad domains of information. We often seek the expertise of specialists who might have a greater grasp of facts within their specialty. Our challenge is not to be dependent on what any particular source tells us, but to have enough mastery of our subject that we can accurately situate each source’s knowledge and perspective within a broader context. This means we strive to know enough about a subject that we can tell when a source is advocating a disputed position, advancing a vested interest or making a faulty claim.54
Following this logic, their reporters attempt to substantiate a given fact using a variety of sources. Also, while their daily reporting may be less in-depth than their investigative journalism, reporters strive to know enough about the big picture, about the wider system, to be able to ask critical questions of any and every source.
Other journalistic norms include personalizing news stories with anecdotes, emphasizing crisis and conflict, and focusing on the present. These norms make stories more appealing to audiences. Writers particularly favor interpersonal conflict. As an op-ed editor at the New York Times once said, “Let’s face it, newspaper editors prefer bullies.”55 Unfortunately, this approach engages System 1 and avoids more complex, systemic, System 2 theories and solutions. It also downplays issues of power and action that are not breaking news, but only play out over time.
When reading climate journalism, leaders should pay attention to how journalists describe impending threats and the actions that can address them. Given how leaders motivate people to engage with climate issues, it is important that they cover both.
In television news, broadcasters typically discuss either climate change threats or climate change actions. Seldom do they discuss in the same broadcast both the threat of climate change and actions to reduce that threat.56 Of course, this news pattern appeals to System 1 fears but fails to encourage System 2 solutions. It gives people little sense of efficacy about managing their fears, and it encourages an attitude of passivity toward change.
A related problem is that when they do discuss prospects for effective action, news programs tend to split the difference. They might say, “Yes, we might be able to manage climate change, but on the other hand maybe we won’t be able to,” or “Yes, we have an environmental problem, but we also have a political conflict about it.” Deeper, more hopeful analysis is rare.
Most newspapers also separate threats and impacts from actions to resolve them. Research suggests that among leading newspapers, the Wall Street Journal is the least likely to discuss in the same article both the threats posed by climate change and the potential impacts from taking action. It is also the most likely to emphasize how difficult change can be and that change will involve conflict that will negatively affect the economy.57
Energy journalism illustrates many related challenges.58 To begin with, much of energy journalism is a context desert. Energy journalists often fail to provide data that help the average reader to interpret their reporting realistically. One might read, for example, that a certain new oilfield holds 3 billion barrels of oil. If that sounds like a lot to you, consider this: If world usage is 96 million barrels of oil per day (MBD) – call it 100 million barrels for estimation purposes – 1 billion barrels lasts about ten days, and that 3 billion barrels of oil will last the world roughly one month. The International Energy Agency publishes frequent data and forecasts about worldwide average demand.59 Meanwhile, decontextualized energy journalism gives readers the false impression that 1 billion barrels is a huge amount of oil.
Another concern is that many energy journalists ignore the fact that the “oil” of today is not the “oil” of yesterday. Light sweet crude oil is not shale oil, which is not tar sands oil, which is not natural gas. While in common usage the word “oil” at one point in history referred only to light sweet crude oil – the least expensive type of oil to extract and refine and the least polluting to burn – today it refers to a variety of different types of oil. Sometimes, too, reporters revert to the term “oil” when they really mean oil and other liquid fuels like gas. Interestingly, these kinds of semantic changes by the fossil fuel industry itself have kept the supply of “oil” strong and growing in recent decades.
Sometimes, too, energy journalists fail to do their math properly. For example, an energy blogger for the New York Times points to a source that argues that “if [a] power plant [that] supplies the electricity starts with 100 units of energy, it will lose two-thirds of that in making the current and another 10 percent in transmission and distribution. The motor will be only 90 percent efficient; so pumps, motors, drive trains and throttling valves along the way will lose more, leaving the plant with 93 units of energy.”60 Right?
Like other journalists, energy journalists rely on authority, but, in their exceptionally complex field, they are rather more likely to accept an authority’s view without criticism. For example, they often quote Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Prize and an oil industry economics consultant. Yergin is invariably optimistic on the future of the oil supply and the benefits of low prices. In all 721 pages of The Prize there is no numerical estimate of the amount of oil left in the ground. The result, as energy futurist and media critic Chris Nelder points out, is that “in the eyes of most editors, an optimistic take on future [oil] supply is just good energy journalism. And a balanced, nuanced article with indeterminate conclusions doesn’t sell papers. But a pessimistic take (no matter how true, or buttressed by facts) is editorializing, which is bad” (emphasis in original).61
In all human communication, power affects point of view. Therefore, in addition to understanding journalistic norms and foibles, climate leaders will want to know who owns a media outlet.62 As of this writing, the conservative Murdoch family, alternatively represented as climate skeptics and climate deniers, owns Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and National Geographic Magazine. The liberal New York Times, which regularly reports on climate change, is owned by The New York Times Company and has been controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family since 1896. The Economist had been purchased by publishing and education giant Pearson PLC, but in 2015 was bought by Cadbury, Rothschild, Schroder, Agnelli, some related family interests, and some staff and former staff shareholders. The Financial Times had also been owned by Pearson and was sold in 2015 to the Japanese company Nikkei. These two British publications routinely report on climate change, and the Financial Times is especially strong on energy reporting. Likewise, the online magazine Slate has a heritage of liberal owners and reports regularly on climate change, and the independent newspaper The Guardian, owned by a trust that safeguards its journalistic and liberal values, reports frequently on climate and energy.
We don’t have enough space here to tease out the numerous influences that ownership might have on the content of these publications. (Certainly, disclaimers that owners have no influence should be ignored.) A related concern is that the business models of the traditional media are under severe attack, with print editions losing money and online editions failing to make up the difference. Suffice it to offer a warning, and, also, the advice to make clear and deliberate decisions about which media to trust.
We are what we learn, and the further we get away from our formal education the more our information sources determine what we believe. Online posts disconnected from journalistic norms become popular because of their direct appeal to System 1. On the other hand, some bloggers consistently contribute to sound System 2 analysis. Consumers of climate and energy news must be vigilant. They should skim less and investigate more, even if this means limiting the subjects they can cover. They should examine the ownership systems in which a piece of media is embedded to ferret out news bias. To know something about the context of a given fact, they should look around in other media for both conforming and alternative views. We all need to do the math.
Along with all this, news consumption as we know it is being upended by technologies like smartphones and social media, a crucial topic that is beyond the scope of this book. “The traditional media ecosystem is changing and disintegrating,” asserts The Guardian.63 Their research on how smartphones intermingle entertainment and news further illustrates how System 1 gets to go first.
• • •
In sum, to address the climate problem, Team Humanity must first face itself. We human beings use System 1 to motivate ourselves to seek the truth and System 2 to tell ourselves what the truth is. Only when leaders know the truth can they act with conviction and attract followers. Climate leaders can help by guiding their communities to develop trust in sound science. Responsible media consumers need to scrutinize climate and energy journalism, and monitor their own media habits.
On the way to discovering the truth, leaders need to both trust and distrust. They need to work with others in the community – in scientific communities, business organizations, and governments – to develop, test, and retest the facts that people can agree on to drive change.