February 22, 2010
1 Comment

Keep Calm But Don’t Carry On

by Chris Hatch

Chris Rose argues for a serious post-Copenhagen strategy rethink:

Einstein famously said that to go on doing the same thing and expect a different result, is the definition of insanity. Climate campaigners immersed in rethinking after the 2009 Copenhagen Conference need to keep calm and carry on [1] but not in the same way.

Governments and campaigners both face a common problem: how to generate change and political space for change. The conventional science-UN politics-media process isn’t going to get them there – but other strategies could….

Steps In A New Strategy

Government and non government campaigns and communications strategies
could involve the following.

1. Create political space for necessary practical changes (eg renewables, efficiency, waste, different transport or food) by matching asks and offers to values, and then capturing and utilising the consequent supportive opinions (VBCOP).

2. Create ‘discourses’ and dialogues around those changes – distributive, efficacy and risk issues for example – to make news.

3. Do not try to sell ‘big picture’ Pioneer conceptions to Prospector and Settlers eg ‘a low carbon society’: nobody was ever ‘sold’ a high carbon consumer society, it just happened and we embraced the benefits.

4. Focus much less attention on the international climate talks, and much more to making changes ‘at home’ (eg domestic renewables, electric cars, green fashions), and demonstrating that these are happening

5. Educate the media about science and uncertainty and the basis of the construction of the consensus on climate change – best done as a peer to peer exercise

6. Educate relevant scientists (and politicians and campaigners) about the basics of reflexive communications – framing, heuristics and values for example – so for example, they stop interpreting their progress or lack of through what the media says about opinion polling

7. Government bodies and science institutions should give more scientific-policy attention to responses to impacts which are already happening (eg sea level rise, season change, acidification of the seas, melting glaciers) and explain these in terms which resonate with values, rather than publicising the results of scenarios and models which are trying to push the outer limits of ‘climate prediction’ (where uncertainties are greatest).

8. Within the UN science-politics system, disengage the outer limits of science from the politics and stop politicians from using the elimination of uncertainty as a metric for taking political action.

9. Campaigners and politicians, and in particular their communications planners and social marketers, need to understand the dynamics of change in terms of values groups.

10. When talking about the ‘big picture’ of climate change to mixed audiences is unavoidable, use frames that are universal in terms of values. For example ‘being a parent’ (see Campaign Strategy Newsletter No 50 – ‘It’s The Children Stupid’).

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One Response so far...

  1. Barry Saxifrage says:
    February 23, 2010 at 9:52 am

    There are some good things to do in this list, but I disagree with the overall message that we need to back away from “big picture” and international efforts.

    This is exactly what big fossil wants. They have spent many years and many millions of dollars to create a moment of retreat on climate action. But it can’t last because the climate won’t stablize just because they want it to.

    Because the climate keeps changing rapidly, I don’t see that the Einstein quote applies to climate change efforts. Doing the “same thing” under constantly shifting conditions is not what Einstein was talking about at all.

    Of course the climate movement has been improving and refining its messaging and data, and should continue to do so. But a stable climate with manageable weather extremes requires both big picture coordination and robust international cooperation.

    The current media frenzy is a swing of the pendulum that will come swinging back soon enough. The media is desperate for “controversy”. In a year or two the “controversy” will be that “deniers arguments wither under new data, record heat and increasingly wild weather.”

    The climate sanity movement needs to be ready to push through a big picture, international solution when the pendulum swings back.

    Already the main denier “arguments” are being demolished:

    – watt’s weather station “bias”
    – spencer’s “satellites-show-cooler-temps”
    – lomborg’s “high cost of action”
    – “global cooling since 1998″

    All this is happening as climate patterns are aligning for even faster increases in global heating. It is just going to get nastier and more obvious for people every year.

    The conditions will likely be radically different in a year or two — both in global climate effects and in media cycling. Let’s don’t let this next jump in clarity and opportunity pass without a bold safe climate solution ready to go.


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