To get conservative climate contrarians to really listen, try speaking their language

It’s a well-studied fact that facts don’t speak for themselves. This is especially apparent with climate change. Some brilliant studies in the past ten years have shown that people respond to narratives about climate change, not raw facts.

People will listen more when they like what they’re hearing. 

We also know that politics, not scientific knowledge, shapes people’s view of climate change. Hence deniers are generally politically conservative, regardless of scientific literacy. That means a climate change narrative that appeals to conservative values is a high priority.

The effects of climate change are potentially catastrophic. Currently, a minority of conservative contrarians, including politicians in several countries, have an outsized influence on our lack of action. It makes sense that a big chunk of our campaigning efforts should be targeted at them.

Read the story from The Conversation by a PhD student in literature from the The University of Queensland, Jamie Freestone - “To get conservative climate contrarians to really listen, try speaking their language.”

Sunburnt Country review: Joelle Gergis on a fraught future with climate change

Sunburnt Country by Joëlle Gergis.

More than half a century ago, the French historian Ferdinand Braudel issued a challenge to historians, arguing the time had come to look past the business of nations and empires and their narratives of progress, and instead engage with what he termed the longue duree.

Likening the social time of traditional history to "a surface disturbance" or "waves stirred up by the powerful movement of tides", he argued the time had come to try to explore what he called geographical time, in the hope of divining the deeper currents that flow through human affairs, shaping them across generations, centuries, even millennia.

As the historian Tom Griffiths has observed, Braudel's formulation has taken on new urgency in recent years. As our impact on the planet has grown the division between geological time and human time has collapsed, demanding we recognise the radical interconnectedness of processes, phenomena, even ideas we would once have regarded as separate. As temperatures rise and icecaps melt, it is no longer possible to pretend the business of our everyday lives and their dependence upon cheap energy does not have planetary implications, or that the planet's changing climate will not affect us personally and collectively.

Read the review by James Bradley from today’s Age - “Sunburnt Country review: Joelle Gergis on a fraught future with climate change.”