A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the Arctic Frontiers conference, what I saw, and how I interpreted it. It oozed a slick kind of velour with all of the enforced seriousness you get with heads of state in attendance. As a consequence those smaller voices were marginalized, or presented in a way that was to make the big players give themselves a pat on the back for bringing them in. But I'll save the bitter recriminations that are perhaps obvious to those who go to these things a lot. The short story is that though interesting, I felt there was a lack of the local there, a lack of the small voice, and a lack of frank discussion.
The Jokkmokk Winter Conference couldn't have been any more different, with the attendance being half made up of students and the rest being various professionals in the field. Overall it was set up to encourage a lot of frank discussion, and discussion was had. Geared as it was towards the young or up and coming researchers in the Arctic/Climate Change, the conference really focused on communicating results and the gap between knowledge and action and possible ways to overcome it. I saw it as something of a training workshop for all of us young people that are frustrated with lack of action on Climate Change, something to encourage us to get out there and make ourselves heard. There was also a heavy local flavor at this conference, and it came across as very grass-roots, very much the opposite of Arctic Frontiers.
I'll make a few comments on how I view what was said.
Communicating Complexity
One of the first presenters and, I think, the one that really set the tone for this conference was Ilan Kellman from University College London. He had a very practical and sobering message regarding how to talk about Climate Change and some puzzling questions for the reasons that governments have done so little. He reminded us that CO2 has been suspected as a potential climate altering gas since the 1820s, and that Climate Change as an issue has existed since the 60s, with the IPCC, in his words, drowning in its own bureaucracy since 1990. It's only become more clear that it presents a threat, but the message has remained very unclear. He outlined the slipperiness and origin of terms like adaptation and mitigation, what they really mean, and how they have changed over time. It seemed to me from his presentation that we have just been moving words around this whole time, with a still unclear goal. Are we trying to stop Climate Change? Are we just trying to muddle through it?
Ilan also spoke on the issues of power in play, with both the vested interests and the not, and how challenging it is communicating the full complexity of Climate Change. People have short attention spans and generally don't want to look at issues in a complex way. Climate Change is such an easy thing to ridicule in a 140 character tweet, and so difficult to defend in the same format. Climate scientists make mistakes, and any mistakes make them easy pickings. On the issue of power, it's not just the sort of black and white world of the activists, with the Koch brothers trying to drag us into an abyss to preserve their own fortunes. The same power struggles exist among climate scientists, and Ilan related personal stories of being told specifically never to criticize the IPCC no matter their mistakes. I try to imagine the complexity of the response to climate change, and see only countless drab offices each filled with this or that petty tribal chief defending their own turf from any perceived attack. We have on our hands an issue where everyone is to blame and nobody wants to take any, it's no wonder we haven't been able to respond effectively to this challenge. We're simply too confused to properly respond.
He left us with a few messages to hopefully cut through this kind of behavior, which is to be honest, critiquing, and self-reflexive. I think this is the right sentiment but wonder if several billion of us can adopt the sort of soul-searching introspective qualities and honesty that are probably required to head off Climate Change. I thought that one of his really interesting points was when he asked why it is that Climate Change in particular has to define everything when it might be better to plan for the future in general. This is interesting because it had a host of follow on considerations, like, if there was no defining issue for the future, would there be any incentive to invest in long-term planning like renewable resources or curbing emissions? I think strategically thinking there has to be at least an element of fear to push changes, certainly not the only element, but it has to exist in some part.
Application to Strategy
Strategically speaking, this sort of word play and fear making in the Climate Change narrative is necessary. The goal is to move a body of people in a general direction that they don't want to move in. Discomfort must exist for people to change. Yes, I hold some aspect of disgust at the fact that we have to resort to such word play to get things moving. Because if you look at things in a cold, rational kind of way, yeah, the Climate Change narrative can come across as extremely annoying. People are out there seriously telling people to do things that are "good for the planet." A stupider phrase might exist, but I haven't heard it, and it really trivializes the complexity of the relationship between humans and the ecosystems in which we live.
There is something incongruous about having to package the multifaceted, chimeric nature of Climate Change into such simple bits, but it's necessary, and the unfortunate side effect is that because the narrative doesn't encapsulate the full truth of the issue, it's easy to criticize and to troll. This makes it a bit self-defeating, but I'm not sure it can be avoided, because if it doesn't contain some element of fear or urgency in it, people aren't going to bother taking the long view when they have immediate issues affecting them. The Climate Change narrative either gets bogged down by nit-picking criticism or it runs the risk of never getting over the top of the immediate crises of the day.
It's perhaps easy to get frustrated by these very human fallacies, but Climate Change is a human issue and there's no getting around the fact that one of the biggest parts of finding a solution is communicating the problem in a way that galvanizes action. The greatest difficulty in curbing climate change won't be in finding technical means to make renewables viable, or in defeating resourced and vested interests, but in getting people to change very ingrained behavior and look to the long term. To link strategy to their daily lives.
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