04/10/2017

Can Hollywood Movies About Climate Change Make A Difference?

New York Times - Melena Ryzik

Jennifer Lawrence in “Mother!” Paramount Pictures
How do you tell a story about the destruction of the world?
Movie- and TV-makers know how to do it with aliens, of course, or suggest it with invented political intrigue and rogue leaders. But capturing the real global threat of climate change is far harder than filming any spaceship landing. Just ask Darren Aronofsky, whose recent thriller, “Mother!,” buried his climate-change message in allegory.
“It’s really tough,” said Fisher Stevens, the filmmaker and actor. “It’s not a very sexy subject, and people just don’t want to deal with it and think about it.”
Mr. Stevens, who won an Oscar in 2010 as a producer of “The Cove,” a documentary about dolphin-hunting, used the star power of Leonardo DiCaprio for his latest environmental film, “Before the Flood,” which examined global warming in a way Mr. Stevens hoped would inspire viewers to change their habits. A 2016 National Geographic documentary, it found a sizable streaming and digital audience.
But getting Hollywood movies about climate change made is not easy. And when they do refer to it — as did the Roland Emmerich 2004 disaster flick “The Day After Tomorrow” — they rarely do much to galvanize the public to action. Even well-intentioned filmmakers with carefully drafted cautionary tales often miss the mark, climate scientists say.
Part of the problem is simply plot, said Per Espen Stoknes, the author of “What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming.”
“As opposed to terrorism or drugs, there is no clear enemy with climate change,” he said. “We’re all participating in the climate crisis — if there is an enemy, it’s us. And it’s hard to go to war against ourselves.”
And when climate change is depicted on screen, it’s often in an onslaught of fire and brimstone, an apocalyptic vision that hardly leaves room for a hopeful human response.
That, climate researchers and social scientists say, is exactly the wrong message to give.
“Typically, if you really want to mobilize people to act, you don’t scare the hell out of them and convince them that the situation is hopeless,” said Andrew Hoffman, a professor at the University of Michigan who is the author of “How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate.”
But that is just the kind of high-stakes film that Hollywood loves to produce — like “The Day After Tomorrow,” which depicted New York City as a frozen dystopian landscape. Or “Geostorm,” due Oct. 20, in which the climate goes apocalyptically haywire, thanks to satellites that malfunction.
Copious research shows that this kind of dystopian framing backfires, driving people further into denial and helplessness; instead of acting, they freeze.
“You have to frame these things so people feel like they have an entry point,” said Max Boykoff, a professor and director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
A tsunami floods New York City and the Statue of Liberty in a scene from “The Day After Tomorrow.” 20th Century Fox
Mr. Stevens, the filmmaker, agreed with this approach. “It’s going to turn people off if it’s doom and gloom,” he said. “Although it’s not easy to do, when you’re talking about climate change, as you can see with what’s happening now,” with the recent hurricanes. “It’s becoming apocalyptic.”
The question becomes how best to motivate people. “It’s a difficult balance,” said Mr. Hoffman. “You have to communicate the sense of urgency, otherwise you won’t have a sense of commitment.”
Some high-profile examples, like the Oscar-winning 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” may go too far.
“The movie was 100 percent about fear,” said Ed Maibach, a professor and director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. “And during the credits, literally the credits, they made some recommendations about what we could do. That should’ve been a prominent part of the narrative, in telling people the highest value actions they could take.”
More recent documentaries and programs like “Years of Living Dangerously,” a National Geographic series in which different celebrity hosts investigate environmental issues around the world, hope to find the sweet spot between jolting audiences and inspiring them. David Gelber, a co-creator of the series, whose producers include the director James Cameron, said its makers were familiar with climate messaging research.
“The goal is to ensure that our audience doesn’t feel like they’re being fed their vegetables,” said Tim Pastore, president of original programming and production for the National Geographic channel. “We try not to create programming that is a cause for despair, but rather an opportunity.” Because, he added: “The greatest goal of climate change programs is to first find a new audience and stop preaching to the converted. At the end of the day, we’re trying to find new converts.”
But as the well-reviewed and little-seen little-seen “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” demonstrates, the right messaging doesn’t help if nobody catches it. “The term ‘climate change’ isn’t as sexy and ‘script friendly’ as most plotlines,” said Debbie Levin, president of the Environmental Media Association. The solution, some researchers said, was to employ a bit of misdirection. “Agriculture, water issues, environmental justice,” Ms. Levin said. “Those all are big issues that work really well dramatically without saying the words ‘climate change.’”
One bright spot in showing environmental alarm onscreen is children’s programs, Ms. Levin said, which “work beautifully for everyday practices and overall awareness. Parents often watch with them, and they learn together.” And climate change is a frequent topic of visual artists and writers, where the genre known as cli-fi is growing.
One thing too few people do, according to Mr. Boykoff, the University of Colorado researcher, is laugh about climate change. Alexander Payne’s forthcoming “Downsizing,” in which people are shrunk to tiny versions of themselves — thereby using less resources — takes a swing at that approach. Mr. Boykoff has had his students perform a comedy show about environmental destruction; a research paper on the outcome is being readied for publication. “If just scientists talking about their research and findings were successful” in motivating the public, “we’d be sorted by now,” Mr. Boykoff said. “But that’s not true. A lot of people don’t engage with these things through scientific ways of knowing. So the arts, the cultural sphere, is a really important part of this that’s underexplored so far.”
Mr. Maibach, the George Mason professor and an expert in polling on climate understanding, said the greatest problem facing climate communicators is that Americans are not talking about climate change enough — in any shape. “We call it the climate silence,” he said, “and it’s pretty profound.”
So, said Mr. Hoffman, the University of Michigan professor, we need “more movies, more TV, more music.”
“We have to touch people’s hearts on this,” he said. “It’s critical.”

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Rise Of Distorted News Puts Climate Scientists On Their Guard

Eos - 

Wary of misleading coverage, some climate researchers are avoiding publicizing results. Others prepare countermeasures to anticipate and combat skewed media reports.
Ice loss in a warming world and other scientific evidence of human-induced climate change once faced entrenched skepticism mainly in blogs and biased think tank analyses. Now misrepresentations and dismissals of climate science have become mainstays of well-organized, well-heeled websites that resemble mainstream news media but are less likely to follow journalistic practices that prevent skewed and inaccurate reporting. Credit: Illustration: AGU, Photo: technotr /iStock/Getty Images Plus
Last fall, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory ecosystem scientist Trevor Keenan had the kind of high-profile, global-scale research results that scientists dream of: He found that plants had absorbed more carbon dioxide than expected between 2002 and 2014.
Some blogs cited his paper while falsely implying that climate change had slowed or stopped.
Keenan was generally pleased with the media coverage his Nature Communications paper got, most of which conveyed his caveat that increased carbon uptake by plants will not stave off long-term climate change. But he also noticed that some blogs and media outlets cited his paper while falsely implying that climate change had slowed or stopped. The popular U.S. right-wing website Breitbart embellished upon the unexpected nature of the results by describing Keenan and his colleagues as “amazed” [Williams, 2016].“It’s everybody’s fear that their results will be used as something that they’re not,” Keenan said. However, he said he felt there was little he could have done to prevent the misleading reports and hoped they would have limited impact.
Such an attitude didn’t sit well with Keenan’s friend and colleague Thomas Crowther who has since moved from the Netherlands Institute of Ecology in Wageningen to ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Crowther thought Keenan should have more explicitly framed his finding as a temporary fluctuation in a long-term trend to prevent misinterpretations of his paper, Crowther said in an interview.
Climate skeptics are “increasingly in power and making decisions about the world. And I would like to give them as little ammunition as possible,” Crowther explained. Keenan noted, however, that those skeptics’ “arguments are not based on logic but on passion.” “You’re not going to change their minds,” he said.
For years, climate change doubters have sought to discredit climate science with niche websites like Climate Depot and blogs like Watts Up With That? that are devoted to the topic of global warming (see https://history.aip.org/climate/20ctrend.htm#S6). They have also issued misleading think tank reports, some dating back to the 1980s [Oreskes, 2011].
Climate science skepticism “has become weaponized on a mass scale,” said climate modeler Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Today, however, the rise of well-funded “alt-right” websites like Breitbart and an elaborate fake news ecosystem supercharged by social media has climate skepticism reaching a general audience. As a result, many climate scientists find the broader media landscape becoming a minefield. Climate science skepticism “has become weaponized on a mass scale, when before it was more of a boutique industry,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler and director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.As a result, some researchers have begun to shy away from the public eye. These scientists worry that biased reporters could twist their findings to add to misinformation about their field and make them targets of unwanted attention or even attacks. Others, however, say that developing a thick skin can make the hostile environment tolerable. Some are using the same modern communication tools deployed by fake news purveyors to counter the influence of those deceptive voices. A few even are taking the battle to the hard-core skeptics, challenging them on their own turf.

An Industry of Confusion
Blogs that distort climate science have thrived for more than a decade. In an extreme trend a few years ago, the United Kingdom even saw a rash of fake meteorological forecasts. Those appear to be on the wane, however, as audiences have wised up to the tactic, according to Adam Scaife, head of monthly to decadal prediction at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Devon.
The blogs often follow a standard playbook, said Jeff Harvey, an ecologist at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology who has studied how climate skeptic bloggers operate. Typical tactics, he explained, include trying to discredit all of climate science by focusing on a niche issue such as polar bear habitat and citing one or a small number of supposed “experts” (who are often not actually experts in the relevant field) to provide a veneer of authority.
What’s new is that these writers are moving beyond blogging into increasing use of the conventions of mainstream journalism. The daily news mix at well-funded, ideology-driven sites such as Breitbart and Infowars in the United States and conservative tabloids in the United Kingdom often includes stories on high-profile climate science papers, reports, and other developments. However, the media outlets that publish these stories may not follow journalistic practices that guard against biased or inaccurate reporting.
Despite its misleading reporting on one of his recent climate research papers, Gavin Foster (right) welcomed coverage in a media outlet often highly skeptical of climate science. That’s because of the audience it reaches, he said. In this November 2014 photograph, Foster, a geochemist at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, discusses a sediment core with then U.K. minister for universities, science and cities Greg Clark. Credit: University of Southampton
A recent example was a Breitbart story that featured a paper in Nature Communications by University of Southampton, United Kingdom, geochemist Gavin Foster. Breitbart gave its story the headline “Scientists Warn of Climate Apocalypse: CO2 Emissions Will Send Earth Back to ‘Triassic Period’” [Williams, 2017]—sensational, perhaps, but not inaccurate.
After describing the study, however, the writer segued into an extended discussion about the supposed unreliability of climate proxies such as those that Foster had used, which included carbon deposits in ancient ice, sediments, and fossils. Next, the writer referred back to Breitbart’s prior coverage of Trevor Keenan’s alleged amazement at his finding of a larger than expected uptake of carbon dioxide by plants.
The article ended with a quote from William Happer, a physicist who disagrees with the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. (Happer has been floated as a possible science adviser to Donald Trump.)
Although appearing in Breitbart surprised Foster, who was not interviewed for the article, he said he actually welcomes the coverage, even if he disagrees with the way the outlet framed his results. “I think it’s great that these sorts of outlets picked up the story,” he said. “It means the people you need to convince are actually reading it.”
Climate skeptics have also mastered social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, which makes sharing misleading stories as easy as clicking a mouse. Through these channels, they can even incite more-respected institutions to amplify a message. For instance, many were appalled late last year when the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology tweeted a Breitbart article, which itself cited an article in the U.K.-based Mail on Sunday that falsely claimed that global temperatures had “plummeted.”

Predict and Prepare
Increasingly aware of outlets ready and waiting to distort climate science findings, many researchers are devising tactics to counter the threat. One is to predict and prepare for misleading stories.
For example, many expect the fake news industry to pounce if, as seems likely, the average global temperature dips this year compared to last because the powerful El Niño that gave 2016 temperatures an extra boost has waned. (According to a recent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) climate outlook, 2017 looks on track to be the second-warmest year on record.)
To get out in front of potentially misleading stories, the United Kingdom’s Met Office publicly released a prediction at the end of 2016 that 2017 would probably be a bit colder; Schmidt made a similar forecast in an article for the website FiveThirtyEight. Scientists plan to point back to these predictions to show that a cooler 2017 is consistent with the consensus view. “Making these forecasts well ahead of time gives us a sound foundation to go back to, when people talk about these small fluctuations from one year to the next,” Scaife said.
Expanding the media’s focus from global temperature to metrics such as sea level and land and sea ice, some of which fluctuate less on an annual basis, could also help bolster the case that global warming is a one-way trend, added Deke Arndt of NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information in Asheville, N.C. These indicators are “all singing the same song, even if they hit different notes from year to year.”
Directly confronting misleading coverage is another tactic that at least one climate change research organization in the United Kingdom has tried, with some recent success. On 5 February 2017, the UK’s Mail on Sunday published an article entitled “Exposed: How World Leaders Were Duped over Global Warming.” Once again, Breitbart covered the Mail story and the House Science Committee tweeted Breitbart’s coverage. Bob Ward, the policy and communications director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment in London, then lodged a formal complaint of inaccurate reporting. In July the UK’s Independent Press Standards Organization (IPSO) ruled in Ward’s favor, and the Mail on Sunday article now carries a long preamble summarizing IPSO’s findings of inaccuracies.

A Tough Choice
The new media environment can be particularly challenging for young scientists, who need to promote their work but often receive little media training or guidance.
When the journal Global Change Biology accepted Martijn Slot’s recent paper on tropical forests’ ability to acclimate to higher temperatures, he thought about having a press release written. Slot, a plant physiologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City, is a postdoc who hopes to eventually land a permanent research job; he could certainly have used the recognition.
Plant physiologist Martijn Slot of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City, Panama, installs a data logger for a study on leaf temperature while perched on a tower crane above the tropical forest canopy of Panama’s Parque Natural Metropolitano. Slot has not publicized some of his scientific findings to avoid skewed coverage. Credit: Camilo Rey-Sanchez
But having seen findings like his get twisted to make climate change seem less dire, he said he decided to let the paper appear without fanfare. “I don’t want to be misrepresented,” he said. “The nuance of your science [can get] lost, it becomes a one-liner, things get taken out of context; people can run with it.”
Abigail Swann, an assistant professor of atmospheric science and biology at the University of Washington in Seattle, shares Slot’s worries. Several of her team’s recent results could, in the hands of someone looking for fodder to create confusion, be used to make deforestation appear beneficial. For example, a modeling study Swann and her colleagues published in 2016 found that forest loss in the southwestern United States and the Amazon could actually cause trees to grow faster in the southeastern United States and eastern South America. “It’s a difficult line to walk,” she said. “You could try to construe this as that trees are bad in some way.”
Instead of shying away from press exposure, however, Swann has armed herself with talking points on non-climate-related benefits of trees—that forests are essential for protecting local biodiversity and water sources, for example. She said that so far, to her knowledge, only one right-wing newspaper in Australia has written a misleading article about her work.
Having seen findings like his get twisted to make climate change seem less dire, he said he decided to let the paper appear without fanfare.
Some scientists also try to head off misleading coverage by putting their own interpretation forward for the public. Foster, for example, published an essay in the online venue The Conversation on the same day his Nature Communications paper came out. “We thought [the study] might have some press interest, and we wanted to lay out [our case] in easy language for people,” he said. Although the essay didn’t prevent Breitbart’s misleading report, it gave interested readers Foster’s side of the story in a readily understood form.

Developing a Thick Skin
Abigail Swann of the University of Washington in Seattle has researched forest loss in some regions, finding it prompted quicker forest growth in others. Concerned that some media might misuse her findings to extol virtues of deforestation, she prepared talking points for press interviews. Those focused on benefits that trees offer in addition to mitigating climate change by storing carbon, like sustaining water quality and biodiversity. Credit: The Daily/Lucas Boland
Climate scientists who insert themselves into the public dialogue need to be prepared for uncomfortable interactions, say some veterans of the fray.
Nearly every climate researcher interviewed for this article had received angry or unsettling emails. In the spring of 2016, Swann endured a lecture from a customs official dismissive of climate change.
Scaife collects in a binder his letters from those who think that human-induced climate change is a hoax. Michael Mann, a well-known climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, has even received death threats.
But most say that with a thick skin, the online smears are tolerable. “People have to understand it’s not personal,” Schmidt said. “You’re just a name that can be used to make a political point.”
A few, such as Harvey, even dive into debates in the comments sections of blogs.
He described the experience as “a basic street fight or mud wrestling match” and said that he doesn’t expect to convert those who vehemently deny climate change. But he has also found that many blog readers are genuinely confused and appreciate an expert’s perspective.
“I’ve met some very good people on these blogs,” he said.
“People have written me emails afterwards and thanked me personally for teaching them about a process that they didn’t understand. And I thought, I’m doing my job as a scientist.”

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Why Eating Grass-Fed Beef Isn’t Going To Help Fight Climate Change

The Conversation - 

Shutterstock
Beef gets a bad press, environmentally speaking. We’re bombarded with reports highlighting its high carbon footprint accompanied by images of belching cows and devastated rainforests.
But is all beef bad? Some argue that beef from grass-fed cows has higher welfare, nutrition and other credentials than meat from animals that eat intensively farmed, high-protein feeds. Most cattle get a mixture of such feeds and grass. Many also argue that purely grass-fed cows not only produce less emissions than those fed soy or grain, but that they can even help absorb carbon from the atmosphere (grass uses up carbon from the air via photosynthesis). My colleagues and I have produced a new report for the Food Climate Research Network that shows the evidence suggests otherwise.
Most studies conclude that if you look at the amount of land used and greenhouse gas emissions produced per kilogram of meat, pasture-based cattle actually have a greater environmental impact than animals fed grains and soy. This is because commercial feeds tend to be less fibrous than grass, and so cows that eat them produce less methane (through belching and flatulence), which is a potent greenhouse gas. Animals in more intensive, grain-fed systems systems also reach slaughter weight faster than grass-fed animals do, so emissions over the animal’s entire lifetime are lower.
Grain-fed beef has less environmental impact. Shutterstock
However, some academics and many within the alternative farming movement challenge these conclusions. They say that these studies only factor in one side of the greenhouse gas emissions equation: the animals’ emissions. Inspired by ideas such as ecologist and farmer Allan Savory’s principles of “holistic grazing management”, they argue that if you graze cattle in the right way, their nibbling and trampling actions can actually stimulate the grass to put down deep roots and actively remove carbon from the atmosphere. This is plausible under certain circumstances, which is why we considered it in our report.
Some even argue that the amount of carbon removed by this type of grazing can actually exceed the cattle’s total emissions. In other words, they should be seen as an essential part of the climate solution.
Advocates of grass-fed cows also point out that methane gets broken down in the atmosphere after about 12 years, so it’s only a temporary problem. These and other arguments are even leading to moves to award carbon credits to grazing initiatives.

The evidence
So are these claims justified? We decided to sift through the evidence to find out. We recognised that the grass-fed issue is about multiple social, ethical and environmental concerns but we decided to focus on just one concern: climate change. We asked one question: what is the net climate impact of grass-fed ruminants, taking into account all greenhouse gas emissions and removals?
We found that well-managed grazing in some contexts – the climate, soils and management regime all have to be right – can cause some carbon to be sequestered in soils. But, the maximum global potential (using generous assumptions) would offset only 20%-60% of emissions from grazing cattle, 4%-11% of total livestock emissions, and 0.6%-1.6% of total annual greenhouse gas emissions.
Grazing ruminants’ emissions versus potential carbon sequestration. Author provided
In other words, grazing livestock – even in a best-case scenario – are net contributors to the climate problem, as are all livestock. Good grazing management cannot offset its own emissions, let alone those arising from other systems of animal production.
What’s more, soils being farmed using a new system of management, such as grazing, reach carbon equilibrium, where the carbon that flows into soils equal carbon flows out, within a few decades. This means that any benefits from grass-fed cows are time-limited, while the problems of methane and other gases continue for as long as the livestock remain on the land. Plus, a change in management or climate – or even a drought – can overturn any gains.
As for methane, the argument that its impact is temporary and so not important is flawed. While the warming effect of any given pulse of methane is temporary, the total warming impacts will continue for as long as the source of methane continues. Methane will be emitted and continue to warm the planet as long as cattle are still reared. The problem only disappears if ruminant production is abandoned.
How we use land is also changing, which poses new challenges. Grazing ruminants have historically driven deforestation and the carbon dioxide emissions associated with it. But today, demand for soy and grains to feed pigs, poultry, and intensively reared cattle poses a new threat. This drives the conversion of grassland to grow such grains and the release of carbon stored in it.
That said, ruminants are still implicated. Forests are still cut down while grasslands are being intensified to support more livestock farming. This means using fertilisers or planting legumes, which cause nitrous oxide emissions, on top of the methane the animals produce. In other words, whatever the system and animal type, rising animal production and consumption is driving damaging changes in land use and associated release of greenhouse gases.
The priority for now and coming years is to figure out the least bad environmental way of using land and other resources to feed ourselves and meet our other developmental goals. We need to question the common assumption that high levels of consumption in affluent countries, and rapidly rising demand in developing countries, are inevitable. The more that demand for meat increases, the harder it will be to tackle our climatic and other environmental challenges.

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