Why Everything We Teach About Climate is Wrong

The way we talk about climate change in our society is disastrously wrong. It's unrelatable, and it's the reason we cannot muster the political willpower to do anything about it. 

First, climate information is largely communicated through scientific narratives. It sometimes feels like a college degree is necessary simply to get through a basic news article about the subject: 400 ppm, CO2, carbon sequestration, solar geoengineering, CCS, cap-and-trade, COP26, anthropogenic, IPCC… the list goes on forever. A language barrier exists between scientists and the public even on the most basic terms. Take ‘uncertainty,’ for example, a term which, in the scientific community, applies to everything: there’s not even 100% certainty the sun will rise tomorrow, but we can still be extremely confident it will because the chance it won’t is so infinitesimally small. The same applies for the climatic changes occurring from human fossil fuel burning.

News reporter or climate scientist? Looking at some of the articles out there on the topic, it's a tough call.

All that technical language is interesting to the scientifically-inclined. Most of us, however, just want to know one thing: how might this impact my life? And we're not getting that. 

As a Minnesotan, I hear so many hand-wavy discussions of potential future sea level rise (you can't get much farther from the ocean than Minnesota), so much about heat waves thousands of miles to the south (have you felt the winters here?!), and countless stories of droughts halfway across the world (we are the land of 11,000+ clean, freshwater lakes). 

Lake Superior holds 10% of the world's freshwater. Water scarcity isn't exactly a high-profile issue for most Minnesotans.

No wonder so many people in my hometown simply do not care about climate change, do not know anything about it, or flat-out do not believe it's real. 

And why? Because we don’t talk about the impacts in our own backyard: losing all our forests to grassland, losing our snow and winter recreation (and the tourism dollars that come with it!), losing our wild rice and trout and X. Losing our regional identity and our reputation as a tough, resilient, cold-hardy and stunningly beautiful state. Our children won’t get to experience the excitement of sledding after a heavy snowfall or ice fishing on the lake because we’ll be too warm to support more than a couple inches of snow or ice. They’ll never feel the thrill of a Boundary Waters trip because our Northwoods will be gone. When was the last time you came across a news article about any of these impacts? For me, it’s been quite some time. 

Climate communication is not wrong because the facts are false. It’s wrong because it doesn’t resonate with the public. We need place-based climate education. 

Line 3 Protests in Duluth. Photo credit to Fibonacci Blue on Flickr.

The heart of every movement is passion, and it’s extremely difficult to spark interest in a cause that doesn’t feel personal. There will not be widespread climate action until the issue is made relevant to each of us through discussion on how it impacts our identities and daily activities. Only then can we inspire the collective action required to drive change.