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.