 You all here and also having hopefully a few colleagues joining us on the web this spring I had a possibility to attend a very interesting conference called Royal Colloquium, which is a Three-day conference initiated actually 25 years ago I think by the Swedish King to gather a number of scientists and other people. I'm in that category to a three-day discussion on Major topics things going on in the world, you know interesting perspectives of development and environment and so on This meeting in May was potentially his last one. We'll see what happens there a Nice group of people by 25 people gathering just outside of Stockholm to discuss Really a lot of different perspectives. I would say about global development environment issues looking ahead I had then the opportunity to listen to a lot of interesting speeches and Pat Espen storkness that is joining us today He gave a short presentation At least partly related to the book that you see on the left-hand side, which I found found really really mind boggling and interesting About climate psychology and this very interesting and topic, you know, what how do we avoid think about things? That we find difficult. This is quite common problem among all of us Unfortunately, but you have made quite a lot of analysis behind this and what you know What are the drivers in our brain and the way we we are looking at the challenges in the world to really and which can also be Very critical to understand policymaking. How do you actually? Effectively try to Influence policy processes and so on what you need to what are the barriers that you really need to look at? so I asked Paris spent that if he would be in Stockholm at some point if he could join us here and present his work And gladly already now today in August. We had the opportunity to welcome you here to Stockholm So Paris been the floor is yours, please Thank you on your warm words So being both an economist and a psychologist I tend to come to climate and climate policies from a different angle than the most and the question that's been driving me is this one Over the last my driving my research over the last decades Is that our humans? beings Inevitably short-term. Is it the case that we are so to speak hardwired in our psychology and brain? To bring down the ecosphere biosphere with us Or could you flip the question over as I've done in my research and ask? If we're not inevitably short-term What then are the conditions under which humans will act for the long term particularly when it comes to climate? Because you know climate Change has been framed as a wicked problem very difficult thing, but as economists know it's quite simple really You solve the climate problem by doing two things you slap a proper price on carbon and then you use some of the proceeds to educate women particularly in developing countries and You can even distribute the back the rest back as a reduction in income tax or just really distributed back to people So of course the question becomes why don't we do it? so in order to get to that I've Done quite a bit of research. Why is it that humans do not take the brilliant rational advice that economists? Have made for us Why don't we just implement it and part of the reason is in the way climate is being communicated to people in public? Being here at SEI. I don't have to explain this graph This is my PCC are five. It shows two Main developments that have been discussed and repeated over the last 25 years. One is a business as usual trajectory to 2100 which Is deeply troublesome with the four degrees global average? Increase and it really to get the dramatic impact of that across IPCC managed to give this scenario with the name of RCP 8.5 Now does that evoke inspiration? And there's a good scenario as well which which goes back keeps it below two degrees and To get the hopefulness across they gave it the incredibly communicative name of RCP 2.6 as if that would get people on board or But the real effect may it might be more like a big yawn So I've been studying the effect on the public over the last 25 years of this kind of climate science communication And the effect you can see here on the Norwegian public We have good timeline series going back to 1989 the question is how concerned are you for greenhouse effects and climate change? It's being Asked to about four or five thousand Norwegians every year every every second year all the way from 89 to 2015 And you can look here as the amount of climate science goes up the amount of worry very worried or some worry goes down So it seems the more science Backing you have the less people care What about the US not exactly the same question, but almost the same How much do you personally worried about the greenhouse effect the global warming start about the same area? 67 out of 10 and it's been mostly sinking over the time It just recently turned up a little bit now in the US in this March Which with a result that surprised me and I hope this will continue. Maybe we're seeing some turning effect What about Sweden? Haven't found a good data because unfortunately Climate psychology research hasn't been standardized, but there is something called the WSP group that has done this in 2008 and they asked are you climate conscious and Swedish Klima medveten and We have the same wrestled here 2008 More than 90% now it's going down to below 80 over the last seven years so Internationally we see the another interesting Comparison between the psychology of the cultures between globally where 46% is very concerned Which means on the one hand climate communicators is a big success 46% of the global Population say that climate change is the most It's very concerned about that threat while in the US you have the opposite Islamic extremism is more Worrisome and then international instability and then climate change the same thing is with the EU except that Climate change beat international financial instability with a little bit, but in the Asia and Latin America Climate is the most important problem. Do we take questions along as we go or should we do it at the end? Yeah, please Exactly so there are good reason good. Thank you for a good suggestion to improve the quality of this and the time perspective has not been specified. So They're on the same timeline here And also if you ask are humans responsible This is international responses to the question the climate change We're currently seeing is largely the result of human activity Do you agree or do you disagree and in China Argentina Italy Spain southern countries mainly All of our agree, but at the bottom here you find countries such as Australia Great Britain and the US where a lot of people Disagree so from this research there seems to be some kind of weird correlation between speaking English and doubting climate science So if you do the OECD countries and you ask What the public think do climate scientists such as you agree or do you disagree on the climate change problem? And most people how about half think that climate scientists agree Well, as you will know in reality, it's a very strong consensus depending of course exactly how you measure that with the difficult issue But the main point is this what I call the psychological climate paradox. How can it be that over the last 25 years? With the more climate science higher degree of certainty more dramatic outcomes Concern of people actually go down. This is very contrary to what a rational scientist would expect That the more certain the science and the more urgent Then you will expect the concern to go up not down And why does it happen only in richer Western democracies? Well, it doesn't happen in countries as a Latin America Asia and parts of Africa This is a question that climate communicators particularly in the Western countries need to take into account So in order to get good answers to this and I'm happy to discuss these what I did was to review about 3-400 articles from psychology sociology social anthropology some behavioral economics and then to see how What are the main barriers the main defenses that people use to keep the climate science outside? their heart so to speak doesn't don't take it in and Then secondly, what are the main solutions? What are the evidence-based solutions that we actually know work from? repeated validated studies and This is have summarized in this book what we think about when we try not to think about global warming And now I'm going to give you an incredibly condensed version of these three four hundred articles Bowling down to about the next 20 minutes So I wrapped it up in this illustration. Let's say you have a climate message such as this one This July 2016 was the 15th consecutive warmest month ever measured in human history Does that climate message go come through and change people heart or? If it doesn't why don't it? so Five barriers that are it's more like it's like consecutive circles around a fort these are the defenses of the self against climate messages and I've synthesized the research into five main barriers and giving them all names and D in order to be easy to remember It's the distance barrier the doom barrier the distance distance barrier the denial barrier and the identity barrier So I'll very rapidly walk you through them and then we can dip in wherever you want first the distance one Climate messengers are happy to speak about two thousand fifty or two thousand one hundred which is very difficult for my ordinary people's Life where their their attention is mostly on the next weeks maybe and Very few of us are able to take decisions today on behalf of the next century unless we are assisted to do so Secondly climate communicators conventionally use images of glaciers of polar bears Penguins and storms and these things are all far away from people So what you are inadvertently communicating is that climate change is far away in addition to time also in space thirdly When we hear about the people who suffer from climate change, there's typically big storms or floodings and they live somewhere else It's always just a minority and I don't know these people I don't know anybody who knows them and when I hear a statistic such as it's been a million people lost losing their homes That's as you know is statistics It's not something personal So the more distance there is between this those who suffer and the one who is receiving the message the less empathy It's a well-known psychological phenomenon of social distance fourth Responsibility climate change has been communicated as a technical issue in terms of global policies and we have an endless series of cops Wishy-washy Warsaw, etc. Finally something better in Paris But the by effect here is that people here. This is something outside my scope of influence I don't know these people I don't let any access to them is the top guys big boys be speaking their problem Not mine so combined time space social and responsibility Make up what we call psychological distancing which lowers the feeling of personal risk and Reduces the sense of urgency resulting in low issue priority So when you measure which are the main concerns for people in Sweden in Norway and USA If you have a list of 10 15 topics climate change tends to come far down on this list So it doesn't reach up on the top political concern of the politicians gallops That was distance. What about doom? Let's say you say that you know climate change is here. It's now it's impacting our lives our health We need to do something about it right now or else What people here is that you're bringing up catastrophe and doomsday and we have that deep in our Christian cultures We have 2000 years of apocalypse thinking and the end times so psychologically what is brought up is to hear that if you don't change you're going to hell and Magazines have been selling this story for quite some time And for some time it sold well be worry be very worried and here we have again the proverbial polar bear But what we do know from psychology if that you if you overuse the doom you get apocalypse fatigue You no longer create engagement But there is this kind of fear or guilt vague thing and then I move on I go from habituation to avoidance So I start to think about something else. I change the channel I let's say to people. Well, you know, I can't just handle out today And then finally you end up in stereotyping the messengers so environmentalists such as SEI sometimes get this projection backs from Stereotypes saying that you guys you environmentalist you say people are bad You know, it's more like save the planet. Go kill yourself Humans are a pest virus on this earth. So, you know doomsday prophets. I've had enough of them That's the defense mechanism you awake by overusing the doomsday Framing and over 80% of news media articles have been employing the catastrophe framing according to research by Oxford Institute of Journalism 80% catastrophe So we've overused People's capacity to engage through the doomsday frame What about dissonance? The next barrier Well, that has to do with if you see yourself as a good guy and environmentalist something But then you drive car you eat meat you have you fly a plane all these kind of things they You know, and then it's just not me. It's also my friends my colleagues. They fly and the politicians So if everybody does the same, you know, it can't be a really that serious we find ways to rethink this and some students I met in from Francisco wanted to make this Film version of the book so they made this just to illustrate That's when it hit me I Had just gone home from dropping Preston a test prep find my neighbors starting an equally model They told to me that my house was polluting 500 tons of carbon a year Disgusting. That's what it I was in my cruiser going to Whole Foods to get some snacks for me and my bros I rolled up to my favorite spot right in front and that's what I Cognitive Lives that contradict what we know That's the problem with cognitive dissonance and we know that very well from psychology our brains then get quite creative and We start to come up with excuses such as you know, my emissions are really quite small my neighbor has a bigger SUV than me or Sweets would say maybe you know the Swedish emissions are right. It's the Norwegian emissions They are too big or the Norwegians would say it's not the Norwegian emissions We are so few it's the USA and the USA would say it's not the US my mission. It's the Chinese emissions They are the problem So we find ways to kind of work yourself out of that to reduce or dissonance that arises from having high emissions And leading to claimant cows Then I can also you know There are also a lot of misinformation campaigns out there well oiled well funded saying that climate change is Natural CO2 is good. This climate change is always changed. It's the Sun and if I start to believe that Then my dissonance goes away. So yes, there is a supply of misinformation in Messages, but why do people want to buy it and cognitive dissonance explains that as a demand side of doubt If I doubt the science I feel better immediately because my dissonance goes away If dissonance goes along for too long, then you end up in denial stated and Denial has been an overused word in climate Communication and policy and it's always the other guys who are deniers So you get this polarizing effect. So but in psychology denier is not Just somebody stupid ignorant or immoral it is the capacity we all have to actually live a Life as if we do not know what we know It's called a double life. I can know people are suffering. I can know the neighborhood girl is being molested I know her father's an alcoholist, but I live as if I do not know because if I tell everybody hell breaks looks so in a way it becomes a social contract and The maintenance of this social contract such as done by this man or by Ted Cruz or others is a way to kind of keep Legitimizing that this is an issue in our culture. We're not supposed to take seriously So denial is a both a psychological and a sociological state of mind in which we live We agree to live as if we don't know what we do know so it's a inner barrier we have That I do know but I leave us if I don't and then managing that tension by suppressing it That's the psychological dynamics of denial that Sigmund Freud originally Uncovered and it's been repeated by lots of empirical studies such as by Karim Ali Nurghor's book living in denial Where she studied a community on the west coast of Norway Finally identity, how can identity be a psychological barrier against climate communication? Well first best way to explain identity is by using cars The car industry understood a long time ago that they don't sell cars They sell an identity So which is your car? Is that you with this you? I'm relax. I'm not going to do a hands up But what happens if this kind of person meets this kind of person and you try to talk climate Well, actually I found this incredibly funny illustration of this Uploaded on the internet because there's a new product out in the US to help this identity conflict It's called rolling coal and it's a kit where if you have a proper car, you know like And then comes this stupid ugly pre use things up in your ass and it's pushing you annoying you It's quite annoying isn't it and then luckily I have a pre use repellent installed You know a previous repellent, you know, so if I hit the button I inject diesel into the engine So that a huge cloud of suit rolling coal comes out Now listen We got him That's a good one So this is where climate communication gets ugly because you're no longer discussing a scientific topic You're discussing my identity and people criticizing who I am And this shifts the whole discussion over into an area where science has very little to see it say about the topic But it's about Defending my values So for instance Dan Cahane from Yale did this study where he gave a few thousand people this fixed choice Option is the earth getting warmer a mostly because of human activity such from burning fossil fuels or B because of natural variations in the earth's environment such to Sun and The more science intelligence you have the more PhD postdoc whatever you're up here And if you have no academic education you're down here and then this is a probability of getting it right So the more education I have on average I get it more right or people get it more right But there is a lot of standard deviation in the ends of this So how can this be so he split this according to identity meaning individual individualistic values conservative values or liberal or egalitarian values and the interesting thing is if you have liberal in egalitarian values you very quickly get it more right with the more education you have But if it's the other way around if climate scientists say that we need more tax more regulation bigger government And I don't really like that these things kind of threaten my identity Then I've learned to use my science and knowledge to explain it all away So the more education I have the more wrong I get it on this question. So this is how identity overrides facts It's called the confirmation bias in psychology. It's very found foundational to defending who I am in the world So to sum this up in five barriers We sometimes So that was 300 articles condensed into 22 seconds At least the corner. So how do we break through these barriers or maybe just go around them because I don't really think you can knock barriers down And what sorry guys if you're into producing reports I'm going to disappoint you because people don't have a lack of information The information deficit idea that people if only people knew the facts They would agree with us scientists and us experts that just isn't so Rather we need a new climate communication toolbox that goes along with the human nature goes along with the way our brain is configured and The literature shows that there are main five strategies or solutions all starting on s we can employ The first is rather than making climate distant. We must make it social so Please stop using polar bears Stop using glaciers and use people's faces instead because that makes it feel much nearer Then use of social norms social media make it local and have some fun glow and flow into it so Like one community in Bergen in Oslo Bergen They started a new motto from protest to party Or better in Norwegian for protest to fast So they make each climate action a party so they throw come artists and their music and they've you know do it And also we know that if you put solar panels on one roof The likelihood of these roofs also getting solar panel is much higher than the average of the country they're in So rooftop solar electric bikes electric cars these things have kind of socially contagious Famous study done by Bob Childini and his team which resulted in the foundation of something called oh power you might have heard of They did is that they took four household categories a few thousand households and tested can you put power consumption at home For the sake of sustainability and the earth that was the first group The second group were told please cut power consumption for the sake of future generations Your children your grandchildren Third group were asked please cut because it's profitable if you cut your power bill Sorry, if you cut your power consumption, you cut your power bill. It's good for your wallet Fourth were told how much they use compared to their neighbors Absolutely consistently on a long series of studies So now this been translated into a business model you give people feedback like this. This is you This is efficient neighbors. This is all neighbors and I get two smileys Because I'm better than the efficient neighbors if I'm below average. I don't get any frowns because if I get this What do I say? I say, oh bugger off a stupid thing So people don't just want to conserve energy. They want to be acknowledged for conserving energy. That's the thing And of course you can use new messengers such as sports people neighbors you can have Stockholm versus Gutenberg you can have Texas versus California competing and green sports alliance is doing this because they're green in the sports alliance and they Reach a complete new set of audience. It's not just an egghead speaking, but it is somebody. I admire. I want to be like That's the changing of the messengers that grows out of this Why is it so important to do this because it breaks the barrier of distance the more social It is the less distant people experience it. That is how we avoid triggering the distance barrier second nudging Like the work you already involved them with the eat and the green nudge If you just change the size of the plate at the buffet in a restaurant from this big one to this one This one looks full. This one looks empty. I put more food on this one So changing this plate to this plate reduces 20% of food waste and As all of you know how much energy goes into making food 20% of food waste from the hotel It's a big thing and you just do it by something simple like this also, you could change the the labelling of household appliances from showing the sales price to the life cycle Price the life cycle cost so I could see when I go in there not the price just today But I see the price for seven years. I can also find the price for today. That should be in smaller fonts And the big fun should be the life cycle cost This is called salience in behavioral economics If you make the life cycle cost salient while the purchasing price is less than shift people's behavior And you can cut up to 10 million tons of co2 just by redesigning the price label on household appliances in the EU That's the that's the Outcomes of these studies. I'll skip the video my final warning has to do with the power of defaults How many people do you think actually buy carbon offsets for their plane travel? It's what less than 1% What do you say? 23% Yeah In this room, yeah, okay, but what happened if you shift to the default so you had to actively after going through all these all these pages And Then rather than clicking and then doing an extra step to make a co2 offset purchase It was automatically included and that what I did was to manipulate this a little bit You can't see it, but that's part of the point with small fonts. It says there check here to not pay carbon credits By flipping the default over you have a huge behavioral effect. We know that from a lot of studies so these are three examples of how we can Shift towards more simple actions and this counters the dissonance You don't feel dissonant any longer if you have more climate-friendly behaviors Next major lesson for climate communication is to use more supportive framings As I said more than 80% catastrophe framing and less than 5% Opportunity framing in the studies from the news media. We need to shift that around From a political discussion of how costly it is and it's job-killing to a discussion where we speak about people's health We do know that the more you make climate a health issue the more the general public involves I Can speak a lot about that, but we have sort of times. I'll just go on the second is insurance issue We pay about 3% of our insurance for fire and theft insurance Why do we do that? Do we do we believe our house will burn down? No, but it's good to have and We should reposition the climate policies as climate insurance And this has been done Well started by risky business report where they say it's time to take out a climate insurance policy of our own We follow the same logic as with fire insurance If we say 3% in fire insurance, why can't we increase to 1% in terms of climate policy insurance? Thirdly in addition to health and insurance framing. We do know that the opportunity framing works And it's probably the most psychologically effective to creating engagement So if you want to create climate engagement speak at least 75% about opportunity I like this example solar roadways. You might have heard of it. Maybe not What they do is to replace asphalt with solar cells underneath level of hardened glass So the smart the road we have smartphones. We have smart houses Why can't we have smart roads that make more energy than the car needs to run it? And if you ask an economist, I'm sure they're economists here They would say oh too expensive too costly. Did we say too expensive? Well forget it. It's costly and They said that yet people love the opportunity So they crowd-founded this in indiegogo and they got four times as much money as the osfor people were Throwing money at them because they love the opportunity And that's the psychological effect you need to visualize what kind of future you really want so It's one of the most successful crowdfunding in history and of course Tesla is another company That's giving people the opportunity of freedom energy. It's not about battery. It's about getting out of the monopolistic Suppression of utilities it's having your own car powered by your own son with your own house energy people love that independence freedom story or opportunity around it and of course Google is buying nests to get inside the Internet of Things and all the opportunities of smart housing and the Chinese are skipping road traffic Trying to reduce it a lit by selling five fifty million electric bikes per year now So these are different types of opportunities that show a different type of future and they are Psychologically much more effective to bring engagement than the catastrophe framing together. This comes into the story of Where we want to go you see the main problem today, isn't that people don't think climate change is real because they do 63% of the people think it's real only 18% say no 52% say it's human cost 52% say it's worried but 44% half-and-half say it's nothing much to worry about but what about solvable if you ask people will humanity solve the climate problem in this century more or less And people say We're fucked And this is because we don't have an incredible story of how we turn society around and that's the story we need to create a narrative that people find plausible credible and We want to be part of it We need to create that wish in the human heart to go on and one guy who knew to do that was this guy It was terrible. It was persecuted You know surveillance with suppression poor But he didn't sell talk about the hell he talked about the dream and you know what happened So how doesn't sell sorry guys after 25 years of selling hell? We have to change our story and of course a new story as as the eyes are involved It is that green growth is smart if we can credibly make it real way out of this mess we created and We need to point out that it's very profitable. It's more expensive to continue us today It's you know, I like this way of telling it the Stone Age didn't end because of a lack of stones We found smarter ways of doing stuff and of course Petro means stone So in the same way Petroleum age doesn't end because of a lack of oil But because we do it in a smarter way But if you go out too much against oil as in Norway where we are Petroholics I get all the you know resistance and people criticizing me. So what I have to say is thank you oil It's been good We've been a blessing together, but Times are changing. It's like a dysfunctional marriage. We've been together too long now. So it's time to go our paths It just doesn't work any longer Time to go time to shift and the new story has to be a thousand different credible versions of localized where we take cities and Change them into high quality of life cities with lower ecological footprint and this is what makes it credible We need to tell this story for each city for each country in a way where we show and make people want to be part of it That's the storytelling part. And finally we need to get signals The big disfavor that climate scientists are doing is that they are telling people Whatever you do, it doesn't matter because PPMs in the atmosphere is going up. Did you know 400 PPMs? we're fucked or We have already passed more than one degree warmer world in a century global average surface temperature But people don't understand global average surface temperature per century It's an incredibly bad signal to be discussing what you need to shift It is to signals that people can influence so we show the societal response more than the climate system indicators For instance, this is a project from Norwegian bank. I go into my bank account statement This is my consumption and this is the resulting co2 emission So each I can always turn it off of course But immediately becomes shows how much co2 have I done this some month compared to the previous month if I want That makes it personal And all the same way we should do it for companies and we should do it for cities such as Copenhagen has done This shows we're making more value-added with less emissions at a rate of more than 5% per year in that period If cities go ahead like this, we solve the climate problem before 2050 We need a 5 to 6% carbon productivity change per year from now to 2050 and It's sold so our humans inevitably short-term to conclude well We do know that rational facts are simply insufficient to secure a lasting engagement We also know that humans will act for the long term if there are conducive conditions for doing so and The research shows so far that social norms Supportive frames simple actions stories and signals if one or more of these are in place then people will act for the long term It's not a dream. It's evidence there And if you don't believe me look at the books and the references there Finally individual human actions do not solve the climate problem I'm not saying that we're solving the climate problem by taking individual psychological action What I do say is that this is a new way of doing climate communication that helps us build support from the bottom and up Thank you. You won. That was my 30 minutes So I'm happy to discuss and you can we can dive in wherever you find it to provocating or unbelievable Too simplistic Hi on there. Yeah, Peresman. Thank you very much And I'm just gonna yeah hands are coming up already. So I'm going to start Neil. Please go ahead I'm gonna run to you as well so that Thanks very much for that was so interesting I think there's so much that we can take away from that particularly in terms of the D's that we can use to structure our communication I Wondered how much evidence there is that guilt Motivates sort of financing and support so he talks a lot about how doom can be too much and a positive Message is better and I think that's really great But I wondered if there's a balance there that to some extent some degree of guilt is Important to maintain motivation that there might be saturation from a positive message at some point as well Okay Hi, thank you so much What's that I here have been working on on this topic for four years now And it's great to have someone here who summarizes our research really nicely and adds more to it, obviously and I just wanted to To kind of discuss with you one a very important Factor that we found our research to be most powerful and communicating which is self-efficacy though the messaging of the signaling can be easily summarized in self-efficacy and The the way it is currently used in Communication is it is always usually targeted at the individual level and that is in line up with neoliberal ideas of the Individuals taking is responsible for the collective etc. etc But it for us that it does forget that there are shared responsibilities And so I wanted I want to discuss that was that office of conflict for climate communicators Yeah, thanks also for my side from for really interesting presentation, which we actually as you heard relates very much to the work We have been doing I Had I guess I have a more general question You know you talked about a lot about the need to come kind of yet change the climate change communication And I'm wondering what you think the role of scientists is here since after all we I mean It's not really part of the incentive system For like academics to go beyond they you know writing up papers and reporting us on or going to conferences Usually conferences that are for you know the science communities What do you think is role of of scientists here? Thanks Super questions. So first of all, yeah, yeah, the point about Guilt and at what point it flips from being something that's motivating to be something that's demotivating and actually whether I also interpreted a little bit there that you're talking about are the particular circumstances or particular actions that actually might You know be better motivated by guilt than others Then we had self-efficacy Yeah, sorry, yes, go ahead. Thanks With all three great questions I'll answer based on evidence from Studies of creativity and positive psychology first Lots of studies Under which people get problems to solve that require creative thinking to solve them And you can measure their level of creativity by measuring how many suggestions of possible solutions They come up with so people are then showed or a movie or a catastrophe movie and then immediately afterwards given a toss to solve The other condition is that they're so in a comedy and then a neutral film just a documentary a boring documentary Now this shows a very clear distinction about how many Suggestions for solutions to people come up with on the same toss solving and it shows that The people who have the comedy or the positive movie come up with significantly more than those have seen the catastrophe movie or sometimes by orders of magnitudes so The this research can be summarized into a rule of thumb Showing that if you have a three to one ratio of let's say positive to catastrophic Consequences of framings then you get the optimum Response on their people creativity and engagement If you have zero catastrophe and zero Seriousness it's all happy funny Polyana blah blah blah it doesn't really work So I'm not saying scientists should kind of shut up and not talk about these Fundamental problems we have so I'm saying we have to shift the balance of 80 percent catastrophe and less than 5% opportunity to 75 percent opportunity and 25 percent Catastrophe so and this is not just what you think but actually what people hear That's the problem. So you have to put yourself in the audience's question. What do people hear I? Can believe I speak a lot about solutions what people heard was was Catastrophe because we're somewhat allergic to it and that's the community really communication so That's the rule of thumb And I hope people can take that away. It's I think it's very useful and I think there are some references in my book about where this comes from Second if not piece of email me and I'll give you that self-efficacy. Thanks for raising that up and as you can see From the figures I showed you the graph showing that are we Do you have belief in our collective efficacy to solve the common problem and at least in the USA? It's very low unfortunately. We don't have very good internationally comparable Survey results. It's part of the problem that every country Researchers have been doing their own climate psychology surveys and not using standards and we don't have good time series So it's really a patchwork of which being a lots and lots of time or even different surveys And they never match completely so what I would love to see is for SEI to do some survey on the Swedish Population that could be correlated with international surveys as to how do you perceive the collective efficacy of our societies to solve the climate problem and then Working from self-efficacy You could heighten that actually I think Climate scientists communicators have been doing a disservice to self-efficacy by over-emphasizing indicators such as PPMs in the atmosphere of CO2 and The sea level rise per in inches per decade because all these kind of signals kill the feeling of self-efficacy So how do we shift the majority of our signaling into a mode where people can see that actually? Oh, we are turning we are doing better this year than we did previous year my company is turning around Suddenly we're written in so I found something incredibly interesting results studying companies So like telenoor in Norway they have been doing their fair share and even more In turning around their economy and I think Sweden in particular is a fantastic case because according to studies I've seen the numbers I've been studying since 2000 Sweden as a country has had a genuine green growth with more than five percent improvements in carbon productivity per year And I think so-called would probably be at the top of that as well even though I haven't seen proper figures So these kind of stories about community aggregation community action and then getting research feedback on the the Impacts we're having locally these would play back and strengthen the feeling of self-efficacy And I think as you pointing out Strengthening the feeling of self-efficacy is crucial to keeping a long-term engagement with climate change and Climate scientists have been inadvertently killing it That's my provocative Statement I'm not saying that they wanted to do it But it's a become a by effect of the way we communicate instructional research then finally the role of scientists Thank you so much. That's really core to my heart and We must Recognize and respect all scientists that do their work and produce the fantastic Academic high-level quality research they do and not wanting to take Societal role So I'm not criticizing scientists for not going beyond their role. However, those who feel Called for it should be helped to find ways to communicate it And I think one of the best examples I've seen is the website is this how you feel You can Google it if you want is this how you feel This is so this is how I feel and I think I have it somewhere here. Oh Well, I think I Skipped the slide for short brevity There we go Is this how you feel We we bleep calm and what is this is it gives an opportunity? Because you know natural scientists are trained not to get into emotion not to get into storytelling not to be too personal and It's part of their PhD training and that's what you get so it's quite logical But if you want to have an impact as a climate communicator, you have to be emotional You have to have a pathos you have to have an ethos somebody that you can relate to and in addition to you all your logos Which you already have so They are invited to writing Letters not machine, but on pen so About how you feel about a research into climate science, and I think it's it's non defensive It's heartwarming. It's despairing. It opens up for so much more of the whole human being and suddenly the audience can relate to This scientist as a personal human being whose you can feel is rare and not just an egghead behind a white lab coat But of course doing that makes you vulnerable And I'm not demanding that of any scientist But I hope more will do so and I written a book about it actually together with Jürgen Randers and a few prominent scientists It's called science-based activism So it's some of the leading climate researchers and climate activists people in the world like We're friend from MIT Behind the climate. Okay, and and of course Sorry. Yeah. Oh Sorry, my head is somewhere else right now so if scientists could frame and Add a personal narrative. Why do people why do a scientist care about this? Ecosystem in a svalbard fjord. Why do you feel for the way a glacier is moving? Why do you engage in the type of algae pollution that is coming up? What's your personal relationship to the ocean these kind of things would make it more accessible for people in general? And I really hope scientists will be courageous and share This personal story in addition to their to their data I don't know if that's And I've got a couple of questions here online from people who are watching the webcast And the the first one I will read it out, but I also want to slightly add to it So that we actually take a step forward from the answer You've just given to also this question But the question here is how do we encourage scientists? How do we encourage scientists and their? Institutions to communicate messages in ways other than papers and I want to throw that even broader to say What are the structural? Problems that stand in the way of using those five enablers that you described to us So in a in a an academic context That's something to do with you know the fact that papers are seen as the gold standard that that's part of building your Academic career. There's all this stuff around as you said the scientific method prioritizing logos over anything else pathos and Itos as well, but there you could also throw that out into the media What are the structural problems in the media that means that 80% of of the messages are doom messages So that's that's my that's the question. We'll come to the second one in a moment Well, there are two or one questions Many questions probably okay first a Scientist is very rarely acknowledged by his peers if he does Personal or media engagement most quite often You get ridiculed because it's over simplification And then you feel bad about it yourself because a journalist and they maybe you know the journalist but even the desk is kind of giving you a title or Changing it in a way that makes you feel that this is not my research So and then on the on the positive side there are hardly any Benefits or incentives for scientists to really engage So there's this extreme disbalance in academia in terms of You get no benefit from climate communication at all actually One leading climate communicator in Norway Oh Sorry my brain Beautiful blonde lady from Birkenes West Coast She all name will come She has done a lot of climate outreach and she says personal stories For instance, you know when the climate temperature goes up in waves like this each time it's a little flattens than climate scientists Sorry climate Contrarians say that the climate change has stopped and she said climate has been cooling every time since I grew up And she gives personal story about how old was she when the first time you had this and then a second time and third time And you can relate to her whole growth and then always is going down Oh, if you should listen to these people and the way she tells is just beautiful and you laugh and you feel She tends to speaks about her kid and and she makes it a beautiful way But when she got home and there was a change of leadership at the Institute She was confronted with I Don't see your production is keeping up where This all this time on communicating I think you have to revise it because we're not, you know delivering here So her boss actually reprimanded her for doing climate outreach to a large extent Even as it's probably the most effective climate communicator in Norway So Structural issues why don't we have like in like in business you have these dual career ways You don't have to become a manager to manage people if you're a good engineer a good scientist You could have an academic or engineering Career stage and why can't we have a dual system and without an academy as well So you get a kind of credit it for actually your communications work outside of publishing articles That was one reflection. I had what was your other idea is in the media. Yeah, the number of guys journalists are busy, they are whipped around their under Paid and they always have bad time. So I have a short time So if you want to speak with a journalist you have to be very very clear on your framing up front So because they will if you inadvertently happen to use a catastrophe framing They will latch onto it because they're lazy and don't have time So being very aware of your framing from the first statement to give to a journalist is kind of Key so I think there's this wonderful book. You might have heard of it He's better than me and in making scientists Communicate better. It's called Olson. It's called don't be such a scientist If you haven't heard about it check it up the book is called don't be such a scientist and and His I think his advice and his work in terms of video and filming is pretty inspiring. So that was a few Associations top of my head Randy Olson also appears in some of our trainings that wonderful you have him here, right cool We're not personally but his his ideas and his work his methods. So I've got gosh There are more questions coming in here and there are hands going up in the room. Okay, so get ready now so here and I think this is asking perhaps for some, you know some references or some research you could refer to who communicates Climate change most effectively. Is it the scientists the politicians business civil society? What's the evidence? Next how useful The dream that the engagement and opportunities you're talking about Isn't there a danger we're peddling another kind of denial and then Greg has a question and Anna has a question Yes, something in your one of the illustration made me jump up a lot actually which is the last one when you summarise it Identity and politics actually have nothing to do with climate science also, I've done a lot of work on values and If you're looking at the kind of behavior, we're gonna do want to change We can definitely point out to certain types of behavior and certain types of political actions that are not In any type of shape or form conventional with climate action and in radical emission reductions so Again, I would like to know how you reflect on this as a communicator that you have to take into values Then that might not be reconcilable with the type of mission reductions. You would like to see And so my question is how do you see? Media's role in helping us getting this message out to good message Because it's like built in in media's logic is that they Sell bad news. I mean, that's their business idea And we sort of need them to get the message out. So I wonder how you look upon their sort of future role Okay, wow big questions, yeah First who communicates most effectively and that of course depends on the audience who are you who is it you want to reach? So I guess it's possible to do that universally, but I have some some favorite cases People going in new directions and you might have heard about sustain your 100 So if you don't know check them up sustain a 100 each year, they launch a best 100 solutions within 10 sectors of the economy And they only speak of solutions and they do so in a brilliant way and they use top politicians and names such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and others to kind of bring fame and and Disseminating knowledge on the best practices of the world so sustain a 100 I think that is they are presenting part of the future of climate communications. Also, I like the Work that is being done by DNV GL In the veritas and they have a global opportunity report So they take the 10 major risks and then they identify all the opportunities relating to the men 10 major risks and then they collaborate with scientists and Companies and NGOs and politicians on how do we capitalize on all the opportunities in inherent in all the risks? So these are two great examples I also like the way the climate group work in the UK if you don't know them, please check them out Also, I love the work done by green biz comm in the US So also I like the work done by the blue economy initiative Ginter Pauli and their work done at the Wuppertal Institute. So these are kind of mingling of science with commercial initiatives that have a credibility when it comes to communicating climate in opportunity-framed way But I'm not a judge Actually, I was a judge. I was invited by the MIT on one of their last last Competitions, so we had 64 project ideas competing for the price in the best way of communicating climate behavior change And I will give you the winner. Look it up. It's called a hashtag dare tomorrow Hashtag dare tomorrow So that was not just me. It was a team of six judges and we picked that as the best Initiative within the MIT competition hashtag dare tomorrow So The question Dream if you are selling the dream, are we then just peddling increased denialism by making people feel cozy and positive and Getting into some kind of bubble And of course if you sell the dream in a way that becomes fundamentalistic and In opposition to critical discourse Then we're in deep shit. So that's why I'm currently Reading a very critical book on green growth there we go Ideology political economy and the alternatives so they're take they're saying this this thing that se is involved in the new Climate economy report and the green economy. It's all crap It's just it's impossible. It's not going to happen and then I'm going through all the arguments I'm making sure if I'm going to continue to speak about green growth as a way out of this solution What answers do I have to these fantastic? Well-formulated academic sharp questions and if I can't answer them I can't be genuine when I speak about the dream But if I can be then I can still go on speaking about that dream because I find it credible So my work now after writing this book is to write a new book on green growth Where I'm going to explain why these guys are Too narrow in the imagination Why they're not imaginative enough they're seeing all the obstacles But they're not seeing the possible solutions and I'm going to paint a coherent critical picture, and I hope I'm going to annoy the eco fundamentalists who say that green growth is just a Mirage just something that the politicians are peddling to make people feel good and get votes and Then I'm going to challenge them into Countering my arguments for why it's it's possible and why can't up so that's my personal response to that If you really if you let's say There's this thing about storytelling It's kind of profound if you tell a story and you don't really believe it yourself Then the story takes its revenge on you Because stories are bigger than us stories have intelligences that connect with other stories ideas networks of ideas and If you don't have a living Relationship to the story you're telling the audience somehow picks up on that and Then it undermines your own position So when you tell a story be true to the story and be true to yourself. That's that's mine And if you do that and still can talk about the dream I see no problem with it Also, I have a lot my last chapter in my book speaks about different types of hope kind of polyanna illusory hope Heroic hope stoic hope and a grounded hope so I could just speak about that But I think there are different ways of being hopeful and dreamy And then fast lastly and how do we speak to the media? I think we should study the masters What did Steve Jobs do? How did he make an entire world right about the opportunities of Apple without them paying a dollar in Advertising how does Ellen musk? Communicate in a way that makes the media rush and give Tesla billions and billions and billions of dollars in free media attention so How can we because you know if you just take an article and go out to the journalists and tell it they have to find their own Framing on it, but if you were creative and imaginative Why can't we? Using charisma storytelling Framing which we know works come up with ways of hooking the journalist into writing an interesting story and just just repeating the boring good old Apocalypse thing So that's my challenge and I think sustain here for instance are pretty good at it and other minds on the other examples I've mentioned so that's a few Reflections from my side That's it. Yeah, thank you very very much I just in my wrap up and say I was also rather Provoked at a moment with the point that you said, you know climate science got nothing to do with politics And I think I understand what you mean by that But I wanted to just give you a little bit of a reflection when I been speaking to the Swedish government for a long time about How they communicate what their policies are on climate change and indeed their responsibilities to sort of talk about the climate science? they Have finally got the message a little bit what you've been presenting to us and before cop 21 came up with some key messages and what I was very struck by was the fact that it's their key message in It's first two sentences did not contain the words climate change Hmm, and they talked about you know opportunities and jobs and growth And I think that it's quite clear that politics and climate science do go hand-in-hand And the connection is is the sort of work that you've been doing so we're we're very grateful that you've come and talk to us today And we have a small Thank you token of appreciation. So thank you very much everybody Mighty oak. Yes. I love the Swedish oaks I really do. I don't know. I have deep connections with actually growing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks so much Anybody wants to continue to have somewhere have some books also if anybody wants to have a copy