Let’s not wage a ‘war’ on climate change
Photo Credit: Pixabay
Last week the International Panel on Climate Change released a major chunk of its Sixth Assessment Report on climate impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation. With over 300 authors the report’s main value is as a consensus document pegging specific statements regarding causes and effects of climate change to confidence levels. While the themes remain consistent from past reports, climate scientists and modelers have increasing confidence in linking individual weather events to climate change. This maturing ability to attribute the role of climate change to the severity and occurrence of any given extreme weather event is a relatively new analytical superpower. It counters what has always been a challenge by climate skeptics and deniers, “Well, how do you know climate change accounted for this particular weather event?”
If you missed the release of this report in the news, you’re forgiven. It was a footnote in a week that was headlined by Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Yet the report was disturbing in its own right – citing “irreversible losses” and “natural and human systems (that) are pushed beyond their ability to adapt” in the absence of dramatic emission reductions. The fact that climate change again took a backseat to a more topical issue was a tragic addendum to a devastating week.
Our many metaphorical wars
If there is a verb that is most associated with climate change it is ‘fight’. Innumerable media outlets tell us to “fight” climate change. This persistent tendency to characterize humans as engaged in a “war” on the climate took on a grim causticness in the last week as a literal war engulfed Ukraine.
From the last two weeks alone, we get headlines like these:
“Americans Want to Fight Climate Change with Nature” – The Hill (2/25/2022)
“10 Steps You Can Take to Fight Climate Change” – The Washington Post (2/23/2022)
“Supreme Court Hears Oral Argument on EPA’s Ability to Fight Climate Change” – Forbes (2/28/2022)
“Five Things You Can Do to Fight Climate Change Right Now” – The Boston Globe (3/1/2022)
Meanwhile literal wars and metaphorical ones blend together in headlines such as “How Russia-Ukraine War Could Hamper the Combat on Climate Change” from 2/25/2022
or
War dominates agenda but we must not forget climate change is our common enemy from 2/28/2022.
Our collective “fight” against climate change dovetails from the more general framing as being engaged in a war on climate change. This can be seen in examples such as the major climate coalition World War Zero where you can ‘enlist’ as a supporter or the title of the bestseller, “The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back our Planet” in which a ‘battle plan’ is offered for action. To be clear, framing climate change as a war can be intentional and lead to important breakthrough but it is so ubiquitous across the political spectrum we may forget we have an option to frame it another way.
It’s just rhetoric, right?
For those of us who are sick of literal wars, we can ask whether framing climate change as a ‘war’ we are fighting is helpful. As a matter of definition, a war requires an enemy and it’s not clear who the enemy is in our war on climate change. Climate change itself is a geophysical process whereby human emitted greenhouse gasses change the energy balance of the planet as greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere selectively absorb outgoing infrared radiation. Declaring war on this process seems as bizarre as declaring war on gravity. If this ‘enemy’ is unreasonable, are we really declaring war on greenhouse gas emitters or those groups and state actors who have a vested interest in promoting fossil fuels? The target of our war is typically unstated.
Many people would say that equating climate change with a war to be fought is just rhetoric meant to galvanize action. Yet researchers have demonstrated over the last decade that our metaphoric frames influence our problem-solving approaches. The War on Cancer for instance, resulted in more funding for aggressive chemotherapy and less of a focus on addressing the upstream factors that may lead to cancer. Millions have benefited from such treatment approaches but as a matter of public policy it’s important to think about cancer more systematically than as an enemy to be defeated. For an individual patient, the war framing may be a personally helpful illness narrative or it may not. Similarly, the war rhetoric in addressing climate change may be helpful in some instances but we should be cautious in using it so widely.
Metaphoric Frames
Psychology research studies have examined the effect of metaphoric frames by giving participants similar scenarios that only vary in the metaphors attached to the hypothetical situations. For instance, in a mock exercise in determining how a community should deal with crime, increasing incarceration and policing as major policy responses were supported more when criminals were equated with beasts through metaphors (i.e. criminals prey on the weak). Simply by implying that criminals are beasts the researchers were able to elicit different problem-solving approaches by participants.
The authors summarize their findings:
“Interestingly, we find that the influence of the metaphorical framing effect is covert: people do not recognize metaphors as influential in their decisions; instead, they point to more “substantive” (often numerical) information as the motivation for their problem-solving decision. Metaphors in language appear to instantiate frame-consistent knowledge structures and invite structurally consistent inferences.”
Past metaphorical wars have had a funny way of taking on some of the literal characteristics of wars. For instance, COVID-19 was widely framed as a war and legislation created for wars – such as the Defense Product Act – was used to finance and manufacture the PPE required by clinical workers. In other countries, military brass took top positions in COVID-19 task forces as heads of state announced the new war. Additionally metaphorical wars can be part of the justification for executive branch agencies to bypass due process in enacting emergency responses.
The Disempowerment of a Climate War
Although undoubtably meant to empower individuals, a war on climate change is unhelpful because it is vague. It suggests a true enemy that can be defeated when we already know that many aspects of climate change are already irreversible. In this sense, we have lost the battle when the challenge is characterized in this manner.
Because the rhetoric is nebulous, it does nothing to clarify how we prioritize actions. When the climate itself is the enemy then no actors’ activities are at odds with the war effort. The vagueness of the war metaphor provides cover for any accountability as we can always scapegoat the climate itself as misbehaving. In this sense, the implied ‘enemy’ implicit in the war metaphor invites us to anthropomorphize the climate system.
Instead of the uncertainty of a war we need to be explicit in our language about what can be done. Simply stated, we can address the geophysical causes and consequences of climate change in four ways:
Reducing or eliminating new emissions
Drawing down or removing past emissions
Making human and natural systems more resilient to climate change (i.e. adaptation)
Changing how much solar energy is absorbed by reflecting more incoming solar radiation [1]
A war against climate change does not help us at all in prioritizing and pursuing actions, identifying areas of high-leverage, establishing governance structures needed for global commitments, investigating tradeoffs, and continuing to learn and innovate.
Entropy and War
Ironically one of the key characteristics of true wars is the generation of heat. The chemical reactions involved in bombs exploding and guns firing are fundamentally exothermic. What we clearly don’t need in addressing climate change is further heat. Seen from this perspective we must de-escalate climate change, not declare war on it.
Wars are also stressful and in portraying climate change as a combat or a fight one must ask if we are unwittingly exacerbating our own stress response. Research has shown steep increases in eco and climate anxiety which according to a study in the Lancet is “characterized by severe and debilitating worry about climate and environmental risks and can elicit dramatic reactions, such as loss of appetite, sleeplessness, and panic attacks among those affected.” And in an another study (also from the Lancet) from December 2021 examining attitudes among 10,000 adolescents, over 75% believed “the future is frightening” and more than half agreed with the statement “humanity is doomed”. Although it would be implausible to attribute all those feelings to our war rhetoric, framing climate change as a battle may be worsening our anxiety – particularly as the framing does little to suggest solutions or ways that we can support climate change mitigation efforts.
Ultimately, framed as a single war against climate change the scale of the problem is incapacitating in its immensity. Broken down into 100 micro problems it becomes addressable and tractable. For those of us who don’t want to be conscripted as soldiers to the war effort, a de-escalation framing can nonetheless allow us to reflect on where we can have impact. People can add value where they have the skills and passion to do so. A war is governed hierarchically but much of the work that is needed can be delivered through decentralized efforts.
Margaret Mead once wrote that “Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts…”. Stopping wars is a very hard problem as what is currently unfolding in the Ukraine demonstrates. While we cannot yet prevent all wars, we can at least limit their non-literal expansions and in doing so not further warfare as our primary problem solving approach. The climate is not against us. It has no intent to do us harm. Climate change is a profound social, environmental, and political challenge. But it’s only a war if we make it one.
[1] The fact that some of the early studies on geoengineering approaches were funded by the CIA shows the blurring of metaphorical and literal wars.