Bright Side: Always Look On The of Life
Bright Side: Always Look On The of Life
Bright Side: Always Look On The of Life
by David Spratt
At a forum in Melbourne this February on “Saving lives... reframing climate change around
health and livelihoods”, Daniel Voronoff summed up our dilemma:
People of vision, working together patiently and persistently, have inspired their community
and changed the course of history. These leaders, recognising the threat to civilisation posed
by climate change, have successfully alerted many of the public to the danger it faces.
After many years and great resistance from powerful and ruthless people, an empowered
community has achieved an epic win. The country has taken its first steps towards a ‘clean
energy future’. But time is running out and much more needs to be done to prevent the
catastrophe. Also, their enemies are using lies and fear to win the hearts and minds of the
people, and destroy their hard won gains. Everything may be lost – unless the leaders reach
out to a resistant public in new ways and tell them the truth about the threat to health, lives
and livelihoods that we face.
Voronoff’s analysis, published last year on this site as “The real climate message is in the
shadows. It’s time to shine the light”, highlighted an aspect of climate advocacy in Australia
and elsewhere that had long concerned me: can you successfully bring about change
without communicating the problem you are trying to solve? Is selling “good news” and
avoiding “bad news” the way to engage communities in understanding how climate change
will affect them and what they can do about it? My concern grew as the gap between the
science (where researchers tell us the climate is heading) and the politics (the inadequate
scale of the solutions being proposed) got wider and wider.
In the commercial world the answer is yes, you can sell a “solution” without a real problem,
because half the game is about fabricating demand (status, for example) for things people
don’t need (a new car). In politics too, you can succeed by fabricating or playing on a
sentiment (insecurity) to sell an answer (border protection). The answer solves a problem
constructed for the purpose. The means of selling does not matter, so long as you
succeed.
But with climate change, the problem is not a commercial or political construct, and not
fully solving the problem will be catastrophic beyond most peoples’ imaginations and
current understandings. The price of failure is not a product left on the shelves or an
election lost. Failure is a planet on which most people and species will not survive.
Taking the “climate” out of climate-change policy public messaging became the rage.
Lash’s criticism could be made equally of Australia’s Labor government, whose “Clean
energy future” campaign was classic bright-siding. All clean energy and barely a mention
of climate change or impacts. Check this, or this, 45-second government TV ad for any
mention of the word “climate”. It’s all win–win clean energy. The 100% Renewables “Big
solar” campaign in 2012, largely focussed around the Clean Energy Finance Corporation
legislation, is similar in emphasis.
And so was the “Say Yes” campaign run by a number of Australian environment/climate
non-government organisations (eNGOs), together with the ACTU and GetUp, in 2011. The
word “climate” only just got a mention in the Say Yes Reasons poster, the Morning tea
kit and this Fact sheet. Of 13 posters, just two mention climate. You would have thought
that how climate change might affect family’s lives might be relevant in talking to your
neighbours, but it wasn’t.
The bright-side mantra ran deep. Good news! It’s all about “Yes!” Just “Say Yes!”. The
campaign asked people to “Say yes… “ to … almost anything. If there was one message,
there was a dozen messages, a bad public relations strategy.
Bright-siding is attractive for differing reasons. For some eNGOs close to Labor, there
is a desire not to talk too much about coal and gas; because that would make it hard
to explain the virtues of government policies that won’t reduce domestic emissions in
the next decade. Clean energy is safe territory. Who could disagree? In the community
climate movement, there is concern that talking about climate science and impacts is
“too depressing” or “we already know all that science stuff” (which is not self-evidently the
case), in favour of “getting on with doing something positive”. The case for bright-siding
includes the following:
• “Sell the sizzle”, a manual on climate messaging produced by Futerra Communications
agency, which emphasises that one’s narrative should start by selling the “sizzle” (a
positive vision of the future) rather than the “sausage” (identified as climate change
impacts) because “climate change is no longer a scientist’s problem – it’s now a
salesman’s problem” (my emphasis). “Sell the Sizzle” says:
[T]here is one message that almost every audience responds to. A narrative that changes
hearts, minds and even behaviours. An approach needed now more than ever before. And
it’s the opposite of climate hell. We must build a visual and compelling vision of low carbon
heaven. This guide outlines how to communicate that new positive vision.
And if that is as far as you read, you could be quickly be bright-siding with just the good
news about clean/renewable energy. But that is not all that Futerra says:
The second step in our narrative is ‘choice’, because now we’ve got heaven we’ve got
to show hell. Today we have a choice between that positive picture and the alternative of
unmitigated climate change. It’s extremely important to hammer home that this moment is
the moment of choice between the two paths. You don’t pull your punches here – lay out
the climate chaos we’re trying to avoid. People can actually listen to this now because they
are sitting in the life raft of a positive vision watching the Titanic of climate chaos. (emphasis
added)
• Often quoted in defence of the “positive only” approach is: “Apocalypse Soon? Dire
messages reduce belief in global warming by contradicting Just-World beliefs”. But
this study is actually consistent with the literature on communication that the strongest
possible science-based messaging is effective. It is deceptive to claim the study
supports “only positive” messages, because it samples messages with zero efficacy
(messages that don’t suggest a path of action that would solve the issue), which is why
they induce the “scepticism” they do.
• A view that most campaigning is simply negative and apocalyptic, and doesn’t work.
“Sell the Sizzle” says that: “The most common message on climate change is that we’re
all going to hell”. But Joe Romm, prolific author of the Climate Progress blog, and a
former acting US assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable
energy, says that the two greatest myths about global warming communications are
that constant repetition of doomsday messages has been a major, ongoing strategy,
what Paul Keating recently told Philip Adams on “Late Night Live”: if you’re not creating
enemies, you’re probably not achieving anything in politics.
The strategic question between renewables-only messaging and other choices has
become more urgent with the growing evidence that the Gillard government has trashed
itself beyond all help, and that a victory by the delay-and-deny Abbott-led opposition
looks very likely. In a recent exchange, one NGO climate campaigner asked: “Does it
really make sense for most of the movement to be working on the Clean Energy Finance
Corp when its chances of surviving may be slim?”, and another responded that their “only
concern with a singular focus on renewables is the Coalition can say we are supporting
renewables through retaining the Renewable Energy Target and then get rid of everything
else (including supporting the 5-25% range)… it is a danger for us”.
But there is a bigger choice, well told in a must-read recent article in “Mother Jones” about
“How a Grassroots Rebellion Won the Nation's Biggest Climate Victory”, and plans to
move beyond blocking new coal-fired plants to seeking to close a third of the roughly 580
existing ones in the US by 2020. Mark Hertsgaard writes of how a network of activists
“confronted a harsh truth”, in the words of Fresh Energy Executive Director, Michael Noble:
They had been working the wrong problem, focusing on renewable energy instead of the
broader climate picture. “What does it mean that we celebrate the construction of a $100
million wind farm in Minnesota when at the same time a 900-megawatt coal plant was being
built?” asks Noble. “That's called losing. If you looked at the problem through the lens
of carbon, all the work we had done was undone by a single plant—a plant that wasn't
challenged by a single environmentalist.”
There is no argument that Australia must move to renewable energy at a pace quicker
than is generally understood, but it also true that the emissions created by the expansion
of Australian coal exports will dwarf all the emissions saved by closing down the domestic
If you avoid including an honest assessment of climate science and impacts in your
narrative, its pretty difficult to give people a grasp about where the climate system is
heading and what needs to be done to create the conditions for living in climate safety,
rather than increasing and eventually catastrophic harm. But that’s how the big climate
advocacy organisations have generally chosen to operate, and it represents a strategic
failure to communicate.
Climate policy in Australia is trapped in a culture of failure and low expectation. The
reason given for advocating solutions that would still result in dangerous climate change
is that what really needs to be done is “too big” to message effectively. The Australian
Conservation Foundation, for example, adopted a 350 (parts per million atmospheric
carbon dioxide) policy several years ago, but never made in part of their advocacy
because (unofficially) “the comms people couldn’t find a way to message it”.
Ken Ward, a former deputy-director of Greenpeace (USA), identifies “a consensual
public policy hallucination that abrupt climate change can be addressed without great
conflict”. Everybody from the UN Secretary-General to business commentator Alan Kohler
now calls climate an emergency, but it is still a non-no for most climate campaigning
organisations.
I would hazard at a guess that most eNGOs and professional advocacy groups,
with notable exceptions including Beyond Zero Emissions and a few others, don’t as
organisations have a clear front-of-the-mind grasp of our current predicament, or the
rate of emissions reduction required. My guess is that most would not be able to articulate
the fact that the last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are
today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 3 to 6 degrees
Always look on the bright side of life / 10
“Scientific case for
avoiding dangerous
climate change to
protect young people
and nature” shows
that temperatures
today are only 1C
cooler than during the
Pliocene 3–5 million
years ago, a period
during which sea level
reached heights as
much as 15-25 meters
greater than today.
Celsius (C) higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 25 to 40 metres
higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on
Antarctica and Greenland. Or that oceans are now more acidic than they have been for at
least 20 million years, and they are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years
ago, when a mass extinction of marine species occurred. It is predicted 10 per cent of the
Arctic Ocean will be corrosively acidic by 2018, and 50 per cent by 2050.
Even taking into account the emissions reduction target in the Australian federal carbon
package and other nations’ commitments, the world is on track for 4 degrees or more
of warming this century. At 4 degrees, the world would be warmer than during any part
of the period in which modern humans evolved, and the rate of climate change would
be faster than any previously experienced by humans. The world’s sixth mass extinction
would be in full swing. In the oceans, acidification would have rendered many calcium-
shelled organisms such as coral, and many at the base of the ocean food chain, artefacts
of history. Ocean ecosystems and food chains would collapse. Half of the world would be
uninhabitable. Likely population capacity: under one billion people. Whilst the loss will be
exponential and bunch towards the end of the century, on average that is a million human
global-warming deaths every week, every year, for the next 90 years.
Is this communicated inside the Canberra beltway, or is it just for academic conferences?
Is it important that people should know this? Is it important in setting goals? And what is
the action required to keep our climate in the safe zone?
As a reference point, let’s use the most recent assessment of these challenges, “Scientific
case for avoiding dangerous climate change to protect young people and nature”, currently
in publication with 17 authors who are leaders in their fields, including James Hansen, Ove
Hoegh-Guldberg, Stefan Rahmstorf, Johan Rockstrom, Eelco Rohling, Jeffrey Sachs,
and Konrad Steffen. They find that:
• When slow feedbacks – important because of their impact on threshold or “tipping
point” events – are taken into account, the “scenarios that reach 2 C or even 1.5C
global warming via only fast feedbacks appear to be exceedingly dangerous (my
emphasis). These scenarios run a high risk of the slow feedbacks coming into play in
major ways.” Hansen has explained why, at current temperatures, there is no “cushion”
left to avoid dangerous climate change and “…even small global warming above the
level of the Holocene begins to generate a disproportionate warming on the Antarctic
and Greenland ice sheets”;
Always look on the bright side of life / 11
• to avoid 1.5C global warming, a reduction in atmosphere carbon dioxide to less than
350 ppm must be achieved before the end of this century, which would require a 6 per
cent per year decrease of fossil fuel emissions beginning in 2013, plus 100 GtC
reforestation (carbon drawdown). By way of comparison, Australia’s emissions under
the 2011 carbon legislation will be higher in 2020 than they are today.
[The paper also notes that “delaying fossil fuel emission cuts until 2020… causes CO2
to remain in the dangerous zone (above 350 ppm) until 2300. If reductions are delayed
until 2030, CO2 remains above 400 ppm until almost 2500. These results emphasize
the urgency of initiating emissions reduction. If emissions reduction had begun in 2005,
reduction at 3.5 per cent per year would have achieved 350 ppm at 2100. Now the
requirement is at least 6 per cent per year. If we assume only 50 GtC reforestation,
the requirement becomes at least 9 per cent per year. Further delay of emissions
reductions until 2020 requires a reduction rate of 15 per cent per year (emphasis
added) to achieve 350 ppm in 2100”.]
None of the big eNGOs want to say in public that global emissions need to drop six per
cent annually to restrict warming to less than 1.5C, nor that achieving this will require
fossil fuel infrastructure to be abandoned and drastic changes in the ways we use energy,
live and work. It’s not exactly out of the bright-siding handbook. It may well be beyond the
scope of what is politically acceptable, but it is the new inconvenient truth. The failure to
acknowledge, let alone construct, a strategy to achieve a six per cent annual reduction,
makes that task impossible, so that in another eight years, six per cent a year will have
become 15 per cent a year. Which is even more “impossible”.
“We’ve reached a point where we have a crisis, an emergency, but people don’t know
that”, Hansen said in November 2008. “There’s a big gap between what’s understood
about global warming by the scientific community and what is known by the public and
policymakers.” When climate action advocates refuse to articulate or campaign on what
the scientific community is telling us, the gap can only get larger.
The problem is now so big, and the scale and urgency of the solutions required so great,
that it is impossible to talk about them within the current public policy frame. The business
and political spheres have horizons too narrow and too limited in time to be able to deal
with the challenges and complexities of global warming.
We have achieved a collective cognitive dissonance where the real challenge we
face is excluded from discourse.
Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci’s diagnosis of Depression-era Europe applies to the
space we now inhabit: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the
new cannot be born…”
There is no solution within the politics-as-usual frame; and there is no developed frame
outside of it.
Many would say there is logic to the “two-step strategy”: to first get the policy wheels
going in Canberra and engage people around trivial outcomes (when compared to the
scale of the problem), and ramp up the outcomes later. The problem, as Hansen et al
have illustrated with clarity, is that time has run out for such an approach. It’s got to be the
brutal truth now, or never, and a method of connecting that reality to solutions, with an
efficacious path that will build a community-wide mobilisation for action that can actually
solve the problem.
Last year Roy Neel, a Vanderbilt University political scientist and formerly chief-of-staff to
In “The real climate message is in the shadows. It’s time to shine the light”, Daniel Voronoff
drew on lessons from health promotion to argue persuasively what effective climate
messaging requires. He identified the problem as bright-siding:
The risk we face with the present suite of messages is that without stating the problem
– namely the severity of the threat and our susceptibility to it – there is no argument
for change. Without stating the threat, the public mind is lead to question, why a tax for
innovation and jobs when the mining industry makes jobs anyway? Imagine the anti-smoking
advertisement that fails to mention mouth and lung cancer, telling the smoker they should
give up a pleasurable habit of ten years because, well, they’re certain to feel better. The
evidence shows this appeal just doesn’t work.
He went on to articulate what the “Sell the Sizzle” approach (see page 6) actually does by
making campaigning messages the choice between “hell” and “heaven”. “Sell the Sizzle” is
broadly consistent with a meta-analysis of research on health promotion campaigns and
their outcomes, which found that the most successful approach is to combine a striking
honesty about the problem with a message of personal efficacy: it is about you, and you
are part of the solution. The study found no negative effects of messages honest about the
severity and likelihood of the health impact, provided there was a clear articulation about
what can be done to stop the problem. In fact, the more detail about the severity of the
impact, the more effective was the message. People’s well-founded fear has a key role in
political messaging, when connected to efficacious solutions. The WorkChoices campaign
by Australian unions in 2006–2007 showed that. And modern environmentalism was born
from the dire warnings in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.
As an aside, there is a question as to whether renewable energy is the sizzle, or climate
safety (a ‘positive vision of the future’, as Futerra says) is the real “sizzle”. First, “As any
good marketer knows, when you’re selling something, you’re selling the personal benefits,
not the product itself. In the same sense with climate change, we need to sell the benefits
Always look on the bright side of life / 13
of stopping man-made climate change.” So Coke and Toyota don’t sell a brown liquid
or a car motor, they sell fun and a feeling. Climate change action aims, in one narrow
technological sense, to achieve product replacement by closing down the fossil fuels
energy system and building a renewable energy system. That’s the product. But perhaps
the benefit, the “sizzle”, is building a safe and secure future for people and planet, as
opposed to a world of increasing climate extremes, harm and insecurity. This is the
personal climate narrative for people and their immediate concerns – self, family, where
and how they live and work; home, food and water in/security – which is a choice between
climate harm and climate safety.
It is worth noting that the May 2011 CSIRO report on “Communication and climate
change: What the Australian public thinks” found that in response to a question about the
“Most important environmental issues facing Australia today”, 772 rated “Climate change
and related topics” in their top three concerns, as opposed to 101 for “Renewable energy”
(total respondents 1602). Tristan Edis has made some interesting comments about
the politics of renewable energy across electoral demographics, arguing that “support
amongst the community for government policy to support clean energy is soft”, particularly
in the mortgage belt.
So how can the story of climate change be related to peoples’ lives? One obvious
opportunity is to “connect the dots” between the extreme weather people are experiencing
right now, and future climate change. It is stunning that the (then) Labor state
governments and the federal Labor government, and most of the large eNGOs, have
been conspicuously absent in saying clearly and often in public that the remarkable run
of extreme weather (record floods, temperatures, fires, storm, cyclones) people have
experienced in recent years is linked to climate change. In fact, both Anna Bligh and Julia
Gillard went out of their way NOT to make the connection, and a federal Labor MP who did
was told to desist.
As Voronoff wrote recently on this blog:
Although this message is clearly true, it’s painful to watch as opportunities to communicate
the problem we face are lost, mainly because each moment is a rare and valuable opening
to let people know, honestly, and in a way that connects with something that is precious and
tangible and that everyone has, whether poor, fair or excellent – that is, their health.
It’s a free kick to connect future climate impacts to the present, and the words aren’t
difficult. Here’s climate scientist David Karoly:
Australia has been known for more than 100 years as a land of droughts and flooding rains,
but what climate change means is Australia becomes a land of more droughts and worse
flooding rains.
The real benefit in joining the dots is that people are more concerned about climate
change when they experience extreme weather and natural disasters:
It is clear that the evidence and projected consequences which respondents refer to in
the context of their belief and concern about climate change are often related to extreme
weather events and natural disasters.
37 per cent of Australian respondents reported having had direct personal experience with
differing natural disaster events. Overall, public risk perceptions and understandings of
the threat of climate change in Australia appear to be strongly influenced and informed by
knowledge of direct or indirect experience with both acute and chronic natural disasters in
the Australian environment.
In other words, people who want climate action should talk about the extreme weather and
climate change, and push in onto the public agenda. But Labor, in government federally
and in opposition in the eastern States, has consciously done the opposite, which suits
Tony Abbott and the Minerals Council perfectly.
Ninety per cent of Australians think climate change is happening, but only 50 per
cent believe it is human caused. The other 40 per cent believe that climate change is
happening, but that it is natural. The voting intention of this 40 per cent is overwhelmingly
conservative. If we are going to save our climate, if we are going to come close to
‘winning’, then we must engage with these people – and we will not engage them by
talking about loss of species, the dying coral of the Great Barrier Reef, or the demise of
Kakadu National Park. All the lines of evidence show that framing climate change as an
environmental threat is obsolete when talking to conservatives. We need a frame that can
reach across the divide of world-views and speak to common values. That frame is climate
change as a threat to health, wellbeing and livelihood. It is a frame that projects our
movement as the preservers and protectors of life: yours, your family’s, your community’s,
your country’s. It is a frame that says – in this ever-changing world, a world of threats that
seem insurmountable – that you, everyone, have a role to play in making it safe again,
bringing security, bequeathing certainty.
Communication and messaging is only a small part of the task we face as climate
activists. Behaviour change is crucial. As we have already seen, engagement grows by
giving people an active, meaningful choice between good and bad. With extreme weather
affecting local communities in all sorts of immediate ways, there is an expanding space
at the local level to engage communities in action, whether it be about local flooding
and severe rain, the effect of heat waves on the old and the very young in their local
government area, the future of gardens, or of the local coastline. Such action allows an
understanding of the science and impacts of climate change to be understood through
local involvement. As Grist’s David Roberts says:
Belief doesn’t come first; action comes first. Changing people’s behaviour – in small,
incremental, but additive ways – is the best way to open their minds to the science. It all
comes down to change on the ground. Climate hawks need to get smart about driving
behaviour change wherever they can. Those behaviour changes will pull changes in
consciousness in their wake.
We need to give more people the opportunity to learn the behaviour change needed with
acts of civic participation, whether it be petitions, letter-writing, talking and surveying
neighbours and friends, participating and organising local meetings or groups, sitting
down and refusing to move, and so on, and thereby developing community leadership.
The climate action movement’s role is in facilitating, supporting and reinforcing civic
participation, helping to build an enabling infrastructure for a political transformation that
always has the strategic goal in focus of 100 per cent renewable energy, the closure of
fossil-fuel infrastructure and large-scale carbon drawdown. And that contrasts sharply
which just “saying yes” to legislation which was always going to pass on the numbers.
What is lacking, in Roy Neel’s term, is courageous leadership. That includes confronting
several uncomfortable truths:
• We face an organised denial-and-delay lobby prepared to spend tens of millions of
If you think there’s an existential danger facing the country, you say so.
That’s part of what it means to be a leader. – David Roberts, Grist
April 2012
Malcolm Turnbull was commenting on the perils of denialism and its toxic effect on public
discourse, however, the comparison also holds a very literal and crueller truth – global
warming is a threat to human health.
Just as galling as the deadly effect of denialism is the long-standing tendency of the
environment movement to avoid spelling out the brutal impacts of global warming,
especially its adverse health and wellbeing effects, a habit epitomised by the Australian
Government’s “Clean Energy Future” campaign. For a while now we’ve been hearing that
it is somehow poor, dumb and ineffective communication to discuss and elaborate the
problem of global warming, its dangers and how threatening to our lives and livelihoods it
is. We’re told that it’s disempowering, a turn-off, and that such ‘apocalyptic rhetoric’ is, in
part, responsible for the public’s lowered inclination to consider global warming important.
Sometimes we’re even told that to mention ‘carbon dioxide’ and ‘pollution’ in the same
breath is a fatal cause of distraction from the one and true communication goal.
That goal, the message we ought to be on-about, is that renewable energy and energy-
efficiency are new industries with immense investment and profit opportunities, which
create jobs and, by default, makes our nation strong and competitive. When asked why
we should put ourselves through all the trouble of rebuilding our energy system, and for
that matter, the transport system, agricultural system, the built environment, etc, etc… this
is the received answer. And remember: keep smiling and don’t mention the ‘nasty bits’.
Although this message is clearly true, it’s painful to watch as opportunities to communicate
the problem we face are lost, mainly because each moment is a rare and valuable opening
to let people know, honestly, and in a way that connects with something that is precious
and tangible and that everyone has, whether poor, fair or excellent: that is, their health.
A study cited in recent times in support of omitting the nasty bits is Apocalypse Soon?
Dire messages reduce belief in global warming by contradicting Just-World beliefs. Its
main finding, unsurprisingly, is that when you present a frightening message about global
warming to people, without telling them how to address the threat, they tend to become
sceptical about the threat. But it’s worth noting one of the study’s conclusions is that the
“findings extend past research showing that fear-based appeals, especially those not
coupled with a clear solution, can backfire and undermine the intended effects of the
messages [emphasis added].”
A lot of research has gone into understanding the role of fear in motivating human
behaviour, especially in the field of public health promotion (for example quit smoking
campaigns), which can shed some light on this question of whether or not to address or
omit the frightening truth. And, given that the Apocalypse Soon study tells us its findings
are in broad agreement with the literature, I thought it might be useful to look over the
finding of a meta-analysis of studies into the use of, what are known in the field as, ‘fear
appeals’. In these analyses, the authors compile, compare and examine the findings of
many similar studies and report on the results: the benefit being access to large sample
sizes, lending strength to the evidence. But, before we go on, it’s useful to define a few
terms used in the study that are common to the psychology literature.
Firstly is the understanding of ‘perceived threat,’ which is said to be made up of two
facets: perceived susceptibility to the threat (how at risk you feel) and perceived severity
of the threat (how harmful it’s thought to be). Secondly, fear, being an emotion, is distinct
from perceived threat, a cognition, but the two are, naturally, related: the higher the threat,
the greater the fear. Lastly there’s ‘perceived efficacy,’ which has two facets: self-efficacy,
the belief about one’s ability to respond to a threat (yes I can do it); and response efficacy,
one’s belief that the recommended response can avert the threat (it will work).
And the meta-study findings? “In sum, fear appeals appear to be effective when
they depict a significant and relevant threat (to increase perceptions of severity and
susceptibility) and when they outline effective responses that appear easy to accomplish
(to increase perceptions of response efficacy and self-efficacy). Low-threat fear appeals
appear to produce little, if any, persuasive effects… the advice to message designers is
the same: A persuader should promote high levels of threat and high levels of efficacy to
promote attitude, intention, and behaviour changes.”
Some other findings:
• Increasing the focus on severity in fear appeals appears to produce the strongest
effects on perceptions. Changes in the message variables of susceptibility, response
efficacy, and self-efficacy all produce moderate effects.
• Importantly, there was no support for any hypothesized negative effects from fear
appeals.
• Strong efficacy messages are needed to match the severity and susceptibility
messages otherwise ‘fear controls’ and defensive responses kick in.
On this last point the researchers note the risk associated with messages that induce fear
is that they may backfire if the audience don’t believe they’re able to effectively avert a
threat. In applying these findings to climate change communications, to my mind, this risk
should be evaluated in the context of other risks inherent in the current, pivotal, carbon
tax pitch, and beyond. The risk we face with the present suite of messages is that without
stating the problem – namely the severity of the threat and our susceptibility to it – there
is no argument for change. Without stating the threat, the public mind is lead to question,
why a tax for innovation and jobs when the mining industry makes jobs anyway? Imagine
the anti-smoking advertisement that fails to mention mouth and lung cancer, telling the
smoker they should give up a pleasurable habit of ten years because, well, they’re certain
to feel better. The evidence shows this appeal just doesn’t work.
There should be no doubt about the applicability of health promotion to climate change,
just go read the science. There isn’t much about global warming that doesn’t end in a fatal
or morbid human consequence somewhere down the line, sooner or later. Indeed, sooner
and later. And it’s precisely this point –the human health and wellbeing impacts – that
should form the centre of our message. Let’s put aside the loss of the Great Barrier Reef
and Kakadu National Park for a while and talk instead about heat stress, asthma, dengue
This isn’t the last word; it’s just the beginning, an outline of elements that should compose
a broader narrative that puts the health of families, children and the populace, at the
centre of the message. Here I’ve emphasised civic participation activities in the call to
action, rather than a tax or jobs and renewables. This is because without empowered
participation, neither the tax, nor renewables and the jobs, would even be on the agenda –
nor would there be any hope of avoiding dangerous climate change.