12/05/2018

How Big Oil Distorts Climate Change Reality With Tweaks In Language

The Conversation - 

Kanok Sulaiman / shutterstock
Almost every climate scientist agrees human-caused climate change is a major global threat. Yet, despite efforts over the past 30 years to do something about it, emissions keep increasing.
Any successful coordinated international response will require action from businesses. However, some organisations, especially those in sectors that significantly contribute to environmental degradation such as the oil industry, seem rather reluctant to embrace the challenge. Those climate initiatives they have embraced were more often than not prompted by litigation risks or enforced by governmental policies rather than a result of an intrinsic “green” commitment.
This isn’t the impression the industry likes to give off, of course, and it’s no wonder oil companies’ statements on corporate social responsibility and environmental reporting tend to highlight their greenest side. Yet the fact these documents give the oil firms the opportunity to construct their own narrative means they are a useful source for my research in applied linguistics. When a huge volume of language is analysed, features and patterns can emerge that would be invisible to the casual human reader.
My latest study looked at the “climate change reality” constructed by oil industry in its corporate reporting, what language was used to create this reality, and how this changed over time. This sort of analysis of language is important. Language not only mirrors the social world but acts as a lens through which objects, situations and people are given meaning. Features and associations that are foregrounded can point to some level of significance, while what is kept in the background or not mentioned at all can highlight a lack of interest.
‘Climate change’ or ‘global warming’? ‘Fixable problem’ or ‘unavoidable risk’? Giorgiogp2 / NCDC, CC BY-SA
This is why I used corpus-linguistic tools – essentially, using a computer to analyse vast amounts of text for certain patterns – to investigate nearly 500 corporate documents produced between 2000 and 2013 by major oil companies (including all the big names). This comprised some 14.8m words published in corporate social responsibility and environmental reports and relevant chapters in annual reports. That’s a lot of words – roughly equivalent to 25 copies of War and Peace.
Using software program Sketch Engine, I looked at how frequently the key corporate terms “climate change”, “greenhouse effect”, and “global warming” were used in each year to reveal how patterns of attention changed over time.
My analysis shows that the most frequently adopted term in the studied sample is “climate change”, while other terms such as “global warming” and “greenhouse effect” are rarely used. The preference for “climate change” and near absence of “global warming” reflects patterns observed in public and media discourse, too.
The use of the term “climate change” experienced peaks and troughs over time, with most mentions between 2004 and 2008, and fewer and fewer mentions since 2010. Less attention to climate change in public debates and overt anti-climate change attitudes on the parts of some governments in recent years might have contributed to the decline in attention given to climate change in corporate reporting.
The rise and fall of ‘climate change’ (frequency per million words). Sylvia Jaworska, Author provided
I then looked at words used alongside “climate change” to gather clues as to the company’s attitude towards it. This showed a significant change in the way it has been portrayed. In the mid-2000s, the most frequent associated terms were “tackle”, “combat” and “fight”, showing climate change was seen as a phenomenon that something could be done about.
However, in recent years, the corporate discourse has increasingly emphasised the notion of “risks”. Climate change is portrayed as an unpredictable agent “causing harm” to the oil industry. The industry tends to present itself as a technological leader, but the measures it proposes to tackle climate change are mainly technological or market-based and thus firmly embedded within the corporate world’s drive for profits. Meanwhile, social, ethical, or alternative solutions are largely absent.
It seems that climate change has become an elusive concept that is losing its relevance even as an impression management strategy. The proactive stance of a decade earlier is now offset by a distancing strategy, often indicated through the use of qualifying words like “potential” or “eventual”, which push the problem into the future or pass responsibility to others.
In doing so, the discourse obscures the oil sector’s large contribution to environmental degradation and “grooms” the public to believe that the industry is serious about tackling climate change.

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Climate Activists Are Lousy Salesmen

Wall Street Journal - Stewart Easterby*

From turgid battle cries to hypocritical spokesmen, it’s no wonder they turn so many Americans off.
Illustration: Phil Foster
Politicians, bureaucrats, activists, scientists and the media have warned Americans for decades that the Earth is headed toward climate catastrophe.
Yet surveys consistently show that less than half of U.S. adults are “deeply concerned” or “very worried” about climate issues.
If, as Leonardo DiCaprio insists, climate change is the “most urgent threat facing our entire species,” why do a large percentage of Americans not share his fear? Climate crusaders tend to lay fault with nonbelievers’ intransigence.
But this is its own form of denial and masks the real reason: poor salesmanship.
The promotional efforts of the climate catastrophists have lacked clarity, credibility, and empathy. These are the cornerstones of effective persuasion.
Successful advocacy campaigns use lucid names to frame and sell their issues—“living wage,” “welfare queen” or “death tax.” Climate can be confounding; it is long-term weather, but environmentalists chide anyone who dares call it that.
Since Earth’s climate is always fluctuating, the word “change” muddles it with redundancy. Swapping between “climate change” and “global warming” confuses the public.
A good battle cry can rally the troops, but the Paris Agreement’s aim is “to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.”
That is a far cry from “Remember the Alamo!” And Americans are always turned off by the use of metric units. In the U.S., Toyota wisely markets the 2018 Prius’s fuel economy as 52 miles a gallon, not 22 kilometers a liter.
American TV audiences bought Carl Sagan’s explanations of how the universe works because of his obvious scientific expertise. Bold statements about complex systems are always more plausible when they are made by people with impeccable credentials. As a Harvard sophomore, Al Gore received a D in a natural=sciences course. Mr. DiCaprio dropped out of high school in 11th grade.
The rank hypocrisy of many of the environmental movement’s superstars also alienates potential followers. Messrs. Gore and DiCaprio lead lavish, jet-setting lives. It is hard to heed Tom Steyer’s demand to ban offshore oil and gas drilling when Farallon, his hedge fund, invested hundreds of millions of dollars in coal mining.
Climate change activists tend to be aggressive advocates, but over-the-top selling doesn’t sway people who are undecided. This is as true for political surrogates attributing society’s ills to the other party’s candidate as it is for green activists linking all manner of extreme weather to climate change.
Scientific impropriety has triggered a popular backlash against the climate change activists.
The hockey stick chart, Climategate and questions about the integrity of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climate data have all fueled public suspicion. Only 39% of Americans believe climate scientists can be trusted a lot to give full and accurate information on causes of climate change according to Pew.
Failed forecasts diminish believability. A Wall Street firm with multiple wrong market calls would lose clients. The actual rate of warming has come in below what climate models projected, casting doubt on future calculations.
 Likewise, claims that anyone can precisely estimate what global average temperatures will be decades from now don’t pass muster with the average person. There are currently no betting odds for Super Bowl CX in 2076 or S&P 500 futures with December 2099 expiration dates.
The burden of proof in the climate debate lies with those claiming rising temperatures stem primarily from human activity and not other factors. While the prosecution may feel it has a winning case, the jury’s verdict is what counts.
Labeling dissenting jurors “deniers”—an insidious association with Holocaust denial—is a losing courtroom strategy. Most people are naturally disinclined to obsess daily about a phenomenon that started long before they were born and won’t reach fruition until long after they die.
It’s true that almost all climate scientists believe human-caused global warming is real. Similarly, American adults understand that expert opinions can change or turn out to be spectacularly wrong. Think of the recently overturned consensus on the link between egg consumption and coronary heart disease, or the reports during the 1970s that a new ice age was imminent.
Against this backdrop, calling skeptics “anti-science” is counterproductive, especially since skepticism is the essence of the scientific method.
From 2006 to 2016, China increased its annual carbon dioxide emissions 37% while America’s yearly output decreased far more than any other country. In the Paris Agreement, China pledged to begin reducing emissions around 2030, meaning it can spew even more greenhouse gas for years to come. The U.S. vowed to reduce its 2025 emissions by 28% from 2005 levels.
Yet questioning if the accord is fair to America or will forestall global warming is reliably met with sanctimonious scorn.
My advice to the activists is this: you will attract more supporters to your cause if you can pick a name and stick with it, create a clear call to action, enlist a convincing spokesman with a small carbon footprint, tone down the alarmism, and fix the computer models.
Most important, listen to the doubters, don’t lambaste them.

*Stewart Easterby has worked as a sales executive for three publicly traded technology companies.

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Inspiring Terms Are Simple. ‘Climate Change’ Isn’t.

Bloomberg - Faye Flam*

The doubters and believers aren’t even talking about the same thing.
Some global warming is caused by Jupiter. But most of the blame belongs on the third rock from the sun. Source: Universal Images Group, via Getty Images
As scientific terms go, “climate change” is failing.
Good terms are specific, descriptive and help people to understand complex concepts.
Climate change is ambiguous, referring perhaps to the most pressing human-generated environmental problem of the century, or to other kinds of changes that happen through natural forces and have been going on since long before humans arose.
Last week I chatted with Columbia University paleontologist Dennis Kent about some new work he and his colleagues published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about the surprisingly big influence of Venus and Jupiter on the climate of Earth.
The gravitational tug of the second and fifth planets from the sun act to stretch Earth’s annual orbit like a rubber band, pulling it into a more oblong ellipse and then back to something very close to a perfect circle over a cycle of 405,000 years. And that leads to big changes in our climate – or the climate of whatever creatures lived here.
The ambiguity of “climate change” plays into the problems that a Wall Street Journal op-ed identified last week in a piece headlined “Climate Activists Are Lousy Salesmen.” This is science, not advertising, and the terms that scientists come up with aren’t decided by public-relations experts using focus groups.
 Most of the burden of explaining climate changes, past and present, has fallen not to “activists” but to scientists, whether or not they have an interest in or aptitude for persuasion.
According to historians, the same people who were fascinated by dramatic natural climate changes were the ones to discover that burning up lots of fossil fuel was likely to cause a short-term spike in the global temperature. The start of that spike is already measurable.
 Research on human-generated and natural climate changes are related, and many of the same people still study both kinds in order to get a better handle on where things are headed in the coming decades, centuries and millennia.
Back in the 19th century, scientists started to investigate signs in the geologic record that dramatic ice ages had been occurring every 40,000 years or so, during which glaciers crept over much of the Northern Hemisphere.
Eventually, they realized that these are driven by what Kent calls an ice age pacemaker – the interplay between the tilt of the planet’s axis and our planet’s distance from the sun. Those factors change the way sunlight is distributed, concentrating more or less over the Northern Hemisphere, where there’s more land and the potential to build up glaciers.
Glaciers reflect sunlight, absorbing less of its heat energy than dark surfaces would, which makes the cold periods colder worldwide. Similarly, warmth releases carbon dioxide, which acts as a greenhouse gas traps solar heat and amplifies warm periods.
Adding to all this complexity is the subject of the new paper – a 405,000-year-long cycle caused by our fellow planets. Kent said that basic Newtonian physics shows that Venus and Jupiter actually change Earths’ orbit significantly.
At its most oblong, the long axis of the orbit is five percent longer than the shorter one. During that more oblong part of the cycle, the Earth strays farther than normal from the sun (twice a year) and also flirts closer to the sun than usual (twice a year). So other natural changes reach greater extremes – the ice ages colder and the periods in between warmer.
What Kent and his colleagues did was expand the record of those cycles by digging out cores of Earth hundreds of feet long from Arizona and Northern New Jersey. They used the natural clocks provided by radioactive materials and signs of reversal of the Earth's magnetic field to figure out when and how the climate changed. The cycles, he said, go back more than 200 million years, to the time when dinosaurs first appeared.
We are currently in the rounder, more even phase of our orbital cycle, Kent said, meaning the ice ages should be relatively mild. We’re also in between ice ages and could go into a new one in a few thousand years, though some think that human-generated global warming will be enough to offset it.
And herein lies the confusion.
People hear "climate change" and think, what’s the big deal? The climate has been changing for millions of years. Or they note that scientists used to think we were headed into another ice age. But the time scales matter. Fossil fuel burning and other human-generated changes are likely to warm the overall planet’s temperature by more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit over the coming decades. The next ice age isn’t expected for a few millennia. That’s a long time to wait for a potential cooldown.
One could distinguish the current, more rapid climate change by calling it "anthropogenic climate change," but that term makes people trip over their own tongues, so it’s understandable that people shorten it. There’s also the term "global warming," which is a little more descriptive, but scientists say it fails to capture changes in rainfall patterns, wind and currents that go along with the general trend of warming.
The Wall Street Journal piece was right about a sales problem. It’s too bad there isn’t a catchy term or acronym — such as WMD or GMO — to describe the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning, deforestation, domestic cattle and other human activities.
The complexity of climate science may always be at odds with the simplicity that's key to inspiring action.
Remember the hole in the ozone layer? It was more of a thin spot, but in the 1980s, that dramatic term may have helped spur a global movement to reduce certain pollutants staved off disaster.
It's too late to prevent anthropogenic climate change, or unnatural climate change, or global warming -- call it what you will.
But it isn't too late to slow the warming, and perhaps even reverse it. If only someone could sell the idea.

*Faye Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She has written for the Economist, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Psychology Today, Science and other publications. She has a degree in geophysics from the California Institute of Technology.

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