Which works better: climate fear, or climate hope? Well, it's complicated

Lucia Graves.

There’s a debate in climate circles about whether you should try to scare the living daylights out of people, or give them hope – think images of starving polar bears on melting ice caps on the one hand, and happy families on their bikes lined with flowers and solar-powered lights on the other.

The debate came to something of a head this year, after David Wallace-Wells lit up the internet with his 7,000-word, worst-case scenario published in New York magazine. It went viral almost instantly, and soon was the best-read story in the magazine’s history. A writer in Slate called it “the Silent Spring of our time”. But it also garnered tremendous criticism and from more than the usual denier set.

Climate hope, or climate fear?

Beyond quibbles with the science, critics including the illustrious climate scientist Michael Mann took issue with the piece’s “doomist framing” because, as he wrote at the time, there’s “a danger in overstating the science in a way that presents the problem as unsolvable, and feeds a sense of doom, inevitability and hopelessness”.

Read the story from The Guardian by Lucia Graves - “Which works better: climate fear, or climate hope? Well it's complicated."