Greta Thunberg at the U.N. Climate Change Summit, Part Two

Denali melting

Persuasion comes down to audiences: how do audiences react to a message? So far, Greta Thunberg’s dramatic speech at the United Nations Climate Action Summit has gotten two opposite reactions from two kinds of audiences. The Climate Action Summit itself made minimal decisions. But Greta Thunberg has shoved climate change to the front row. Liberals think Thunberg was inspiring; conservatives found her disgusting. No middle ground. Look at some samples:

Conservative reactions were negative and very, very nasty

Conservative Michael Knowles called Thunberg “a mentally ill Swedish child who is being exploited by her parents and by the international left.” That was a nice little dog-whistle to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories; that’s what bigots mean when they say “international left.” Fox News later apologized for letting Knowles say such a thing on their network. National Review Editor Rich Lowry, who, sadly, is one of the more responsible conservative commentators, tweeted that “This is the voice of fanaticism, not a science.” The Daily Wire’s Ryan Saavedra’s tweeted that “This speech by far-left activist Greta Thunberg is absolute madness.” Writing in the conservative Spectator USA, Matilda Olofsson composed an imaginary letter to Thunberg’s fans: “Dear idiots. You have been moved to tears by Greta’s stupid words because none of you are intelligent enough to realize that she is merely a puppet.”

Social media take us even farther down. A YouTube viewer named Givadanger commented that “Getting a lecture from a 16 year old girl is a lot like dealing with a childs [sic] tantrum. They want the whole cake, but they'll settle for a cheap cookie.” Another YouTube viewer tied Thunberg’s speech to a  popular conspiracy theory: “This is so vulgar to even watch... they could turn this sad little girl into a Hitler type Eco-Nazi... that's how much hate is here... this is the direction the LEFT wants to take, not just the United States, the New Global Order...” 

Lots of personal attacks. Plenty of vague conspiracy theories. No attempt to cope with the evidence.

Liberal reactions were enthusiastic

Writing in the liberal online magazine Slate, climate scientist Christina Cauterucci said that Thunberg gave “an unsparing address.” Jen Psaki, a former Obama official, wrote that Thunberg “made the starkest argument yet for why addressing climate change is not just an issue millennials vote on, presidential candidates should debate on or elected officials need to have a box checking plan on.” The French network France24 headlined that Thunberg’s speech ”earns worldwide praise.” Then there was Kenzie Bryant in Vanity Fair: “Anyway, listen: Greta Thunberg can run me over with her rage and compost my body. It would be an honor.” A bit over the top, but, well, fine, whatever. 

Editorials are already appearing. The Everett, Washington Herald commented that “In expressing her fear and horror that the world is not acting with enough urgency to confront the coming ecological disaster of climate change, Greta Thunberg is earnest and emotional.” They deplored that “During her campaign, Thunberg has been met with derision and condescension, even dismissal that she could be ignored because she lives with Asperger’s syndrome.” The Herald is right that her critics put their intellectual bankruptcy on display when they have little else to say about her speech. Commenting about the Summit, The Guardian said that Thunberg’s speech can have left “no doubt” about the “challenge to governments around the world” face about climate change. 

Partisan reactions, all. 

Where do we go from here?

Liberals will say that the science is crystal clear – but what does the science say? Most people don't know. Some conservatives say that the science is unclear. Why it is unclear? They have no idea. Other conservatives think climate change is a conspiracy, but why would they think that? In any case, the media commentators don’t always tell us much about the science.

Several communication problems face us. First, many Americans revere science and technology despite knowing little about science. Science education in the US is not a strong point. The Sputnik scare gave us a major flurry of science education in the 1950s and 1960s, but that seems to have fizzled out, and most Americans just don’t know enough about science to read and evaluate the evidence. Second, if you seek out good sources about climate change, you can easily find them. But you need to make an effort. NASA has a very good website with lots of information, and I encourage people to read it before the Trump administration finishes scrubbing it. More serious readers might take a look at The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change: A Guide to the Debate by Andrew E. Dessler and Edward A. Parson. The complete book is for sale from Amazon and other booksellers, and many large libraries will have it on their shelves. But how many people seek information out? Not many, I’m afraid.

But back to Thunberg and her audiences. On the one hand, polarization can be useful. If Thunberg activates more voters who are concerned about climate change, she can help truth-tellers win elections and maybe help prevent catastrophe. At the same time, as she angers her opponents, she might motivate them as well. Which group will be motivated in larger numbers? Only time will tell.

On the other hand, however, we still need to hear more about the evidence. Conservatives, who tend to be suspicious of everyone and everything, and who often place the greatest trust in people who are spectacularly unworthy of trust, are simply not going to believe that “the science is settled” unless someone proves it to them. Even if someone proves it, they might not believe it. After all, many conservatives still think that President Obama forged his birth certificate, despite conclusive proof otherwise. Don’t overestimate logic! We have reached the troubling point that common truths and proven science are considered to be liberal conspiracies.

Still, logic and proof are what we have left. Thunberg has done everything that can be done with emotional argument. What is the next step? Can logic and proof convince people? That’s a surprisingly tough question. Research about persuasion will give us some ideas, but no conclusive answers. I’ll be writing about that, off and on, for the next several weeks.

Image: National Park Service

Greta Thunberg at the U.N. Climate Change Summit, Part One

Shrinkage of Lake Powell, United States

Teenage climate change activist Greta Thunberg spoke to the United Nations Climate Action Summit yesterday. Her short, emotional speech got a rousing ovation. The news outlets are buzzing. Her theme: “How dare you!” It wasn’t a question – it was an accusation. Moral outrage made her speech powerful. But, in a paradox, moral outrage was her speech’s greatest weakness. It depends on who was listening.

In this post, I’m doing what I’m sure Thunberg doesn’t want anyone to do: I’m explaining the speech techniques that made her speech powerful. Her techniques were repetition, outrage, and a powerful delivery. My next post will talk about the complicated audience reaction to her speech.

First, her language gave her theme: “How dare you!” She linked her ideas by putting them into a theme:

"This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!"

Or:

"We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!" Let’s remember that when conservatives complain about fossil fuel reduction, they talk about economics. They talk about “killing jobs.” Thunberg's point is that asks the wrong questions. Instead, Thunberg’s powerful language forced the audience toward a choice: money or survival.

Or:

"How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight." A nice little twist in that statement is that she began the sentence with “how dare you” instead of ending it.

And:

"How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just 'business as usual' and some technical solutions?"

Repetition has a powerful persuasive effect. People believe things just because they’ve heard them repeated. Persuasion researchers have known that for years. But Thunberg did not repeat facts; she repeated her moral outrage.

Now, indeed, Thunberg did give some facts and research to support her opinion, but not with much punch. For example, she said “With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years.” She supported that information with neither source citation nor details. Details were not her point. Similarly, she said "The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees, and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control." Again, no source or details.

Thunberg spoke firmly, paused frequently, emphasized keywords, and seemed on the verge of tears. Too often, people who research, study, and teach public speaking ignore speech delivery. Thunberg’s delivery propelled her speech. In the media age, you need to be heard easily or you won’t be heard at all.

But this was a speech for true believers. Thunberg assumed that the scientific consensus was clear (which it is; look at this chapter by Harvard scientist Naomi Oreskes), that the audience already agreed with her on the facts (which, it seems, they did – this was a climate change summit, after all), and that what they needed to was a good, swift kick. She may have been right. People are talking about climate change today, while they were mostly ignoring it yesterday. So, her speech had a dramatic effect. 

But could she persuade everyone? Unfortunately, a Northwestern University research project discovered that audiences respond to statements about scientific evidence about climate change through a partisan lens, and that Republicans simply don’t believe in it. Indeed, the researchers found that Republicans’ disbelief in climate change becomes stronger when they realize that it implies policies. Climate change rhetoric often merely hardens people's preconceived and often ill-informed opinions. Can that be overcome? We're asking a lot from a sixteen-year-old girl, aren't we?

So, there are two problems: first, there are people who know the facts, but to pretend they don’t because they are paid to deny climate change, and, second, there are people who don’t know the facts because they have saturated themselves in conservative media like talk radio, Fox News, and even more disreputable sources. That leads us to the next question: how are conservative and non-conservative audiences reacting to Thunberg’s speech? Stay tuned!

P.S. Here's my post about an earlier Greta Thunberg speech. I blogged previously about Tucker Carlson’s denial of climate change evidence. Carlson is nowhere near as eloquent as Thunberg (he strikes me as boorish), but, like Thunberg, he relied on emotion and personal criticisms more than evidence. Links are here and here. Thunberg spoke truth, and Carlson spoke falsehood, but how will we bridge the gap? 

Image from NASA.  Be sure to read NASA's climate change information, as the United States government is rapidly scrubbing it from the Internet.

Greta Thunberg's Credibility to Speak about Climate Change: Her Youth Is a Big Plus. Maybe We'll Listen.

Credibility, Theodore Clevenger and my former persuasion professor Kenneth Andersen explained, has three main factors: expertise, trustworthiness, and dynamism. No sixteen-year old can be an expert in climate science. So what makes Greta Thunberg so persuasive?

Climate Change and Storms

Sixteen year-old Greta Thunberg, a Swedish climate activist, has been touring European parliaments to talk about climate change. She is making quite a splash. Her articulate speeches review the accepted scientific evidence about climate change, point out the tremendous power of big money in spreading anti-science propaganda, and plead for dramatic action. Her central point is to focus on nations' responsibility to protect their children's future. Her April 2019 speech to the British Parliament ended like this:

"We children are not sacrificing our education and our childhood for you to tell us what you consider is politically possible in the society that you have created. We have not taken to the streets for you to take selfies with us, and tell us that you really admire what we do.

"We children are doing this to wake the adults up. We children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back."

I'll spare you the vicious personal counter-attacks that some conservatives have used to rail against her. Not everyone finds Thunberg credible because not everyone wants to believe her message. And, yes, some people tell her to go away because they think she's too young.

She is, however, credible to people who are willing to listen because:

1. Climate science isn't being debated in scientific circles. On the contrary, media pundits, energy companies, and conservative politicians have created a dispute out of thin air. The debate about global warming is not a scientific debate; as long as we find science itself credible, we can find Thunberg credible. That's why she doesn't need to be an expert. The experts came before her.

2. Her speech delivery was varied, personable, and interesting, but she wasn't loud or frantic. She sounded calm but emotional. Her occasional hesitancy just reinforced her youth. 

3. Thunberg's point was that the future belongs to the young. A teenager pleading for her generation's future has special poignancy. She is pleading for herself.

I find it ironic that conservative politicians care so much about the children who are unborn, but seem to care much less about children who have already been born. Why is that? 

Most of the time, a speaker who is too young loses credibility. But Thunberg's youth gained her credibility. People are listening to her. Maybe she will make a difference. 

P.S. Over the years, I had several students who had Asperger Syndrome. They were some of the finest public speaking students I ever taught. Never think that a label defines you. 

Image: National Park Service

You Can't Persuade Climate Change Skeptics by Calling Them Names

Global Climate Change, National Park Service

I promised to offer suggestions for persuading people that global warming is real. Young Swedish firebrand Greta Thunberg has been traveling the world telling world meetings that they need to listen to the scientists and act. But many Americans don’t believe that global warming is occurring, or they deny that human activity is causing it. Five percent of Americans in a recent survey said that the climate is not changing, while another thirteen percent said that human beings are not causing climate change. Unfortunately, if these eighteen percent dominate the Republican primary voting bloc, they wield influence far beyond their numbers.

Thunberg has us thinking about climate change. Good for her. Most responses to Thunberg’ speeches have relied almost entirely on ad hominem attacks as people criticize her parents, her mental health, the way she dresses, and her physical appearance. Those weak attacks reflect her opponents’ intellectual and moral poverty. So, people might wonder, how might we persuade the doubters?

Before we think about that, however, let’s talk about how not to persuade people about climate change. This is important, because, as any teacher will tell you, it is a lot harder to get wrong ideas out of a person’s head than it is to get good ideas into them. This post shows an ineffective (but all-too-common) way to persuade people about climate change. My next post will talk about how to persuade people with at least some hope that you will succeed.

Let's put this into context. Ignorance reigns. Not knowing things is our natural state. Bad ideas float everywhere, like malicious mind gremlins that attack everything smart. The mind gremlins block out knowledge. Mind gremlins work because many people don’t know much about science. The mind gremlins fill the void. Climate change is a relatively new scientific research field. In one survey a few years ago, about one out of four Americans did not know that the earth travels around the sun. About half deny the theory of evolution by natural selection. It should be no surprise that something as obscure and seemingly subjective as climate change encounters stubborn ignorance rather than reception. 

Some of these attitudes may never be overcome. Still, there are basically three ways to go about persuading climate change deniers: (1) Persuade climate change deniers that the sources to which they listen, typically the conservative media, are unreliable. Or, (2) persuade climate change deniers that people who tell them about science are credible. Or, (3) present the evidence in detail. None of these will work all the time. I pretty much guarantee you that (1) and (2) are hopeless. Conservatives have very strong commitment to conservative media, and attacking those media directly is unlikely to change anyone’s mind. The conservative media have trained their listeners to mistrust experts. People won't start to trust experts just because you say so.

But this frustrates climate change activists and leads them to give useless speeches. Consider the following (imaginary) speech by a climate change activist:

"What is wrong with you clowns? We have thousands of scientific studies showing that climate change is real. Human beings have pumped zillions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air, and of course it has affected our climate. Where do you think you’re going to live after the earth boils? Look at all the conservatives living in Tampa and St. Petersburg and Galveston. Are you eager to be flooded out of your homes? Are you stupid? Why do you listen to people on Fox News, let alone talk radio announcers who have no scientific training? Why do you ignore anyone who has actually taken a science course? Are you a bunch of nuts? Are you completely ignorant? Are you proud to be ignorant and stupid? Grow up and quit being idiots."

Unfortunately, with only a little exaggeration, that could be a typical climate change talk. And, in their frustration, some climate advocates get even worse. Science personality and Dancing with the Stars dancer Bill Nye lit a globe on fire and said: 

“The average temperature could go up another 4 to 8 degrees. What I’m saying is that the planet’s on f---ing fire. There are a lot of things we could do to put it out. Are any of them free? No! Of course not! Nothing’s free, you idiots. Grow the f--- up. You’re not children any more. I didn’t mind explaining photosynthesis to you when you were twelve. But you’re adults now, and this is an actual crisis. Got it?” 

Nye was venting, not persuading. Yes, he was frustrated, but no wild diatribe will persuade skeptics. Nye probably felt better after his rant. It was probably cathartic. But was it his goal to feel superior – or to change people’s minds?

Guess what? Lashing out at people isn’t persuasive. First, people don’t like to be insulted. People who really are stupid, ignorant, bigoted, or uneducated are sick and tired of being told that they are stupid, ignorant, bigoted, or uneducated. People insult them every day. Listening to insults is the background of their lives. They are not impressed when someone insults them.

Second, neither Nye’s speech nor my imaginary climate change advocate gave us much climate change information. Oops.

So, strive for something better. Let climate change activists present the research and try to activate the listeners’ willingness and ability to understand the scientific information. That requires us to know the details of what scientists have said, and it also requires us to present that information in a clear, understandable way. It might not work. But it’s all that you can do. I’ll talk about that in an upcoming post. I'll also explain a persuasion theory that helps us understand how that works. Hint: the only cure for ignorance is information. Stay tuned!


P.S.: If 1 out of 4 Americans don’t know that the earth travels around the sun, there is something seriously wrong with science education. Oops again.