Words Have Power: How to Change Minds on the Climate Crisis

They say that actions speak louder than words, but silence can be deafening. In the 1930s Hitler carefully forged a rise to power. Germany was crumbling in the aftermath of the First World War, and Hitler leveraged the resulting nationalist sentiments to consolidate power, working his way up to Chancellor. Once there, he got to work dismantling the democratic institutions of the state and removing civil liberties. But why did no one stop him? Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, a German political scientist who experienced Hitler’s rise first hand, developed her theory of the spiral of silence to explain why ordinary German citizens stayed silent.

Humans have evolved to thrive as cooperative, social animals, whereby the success of the group is directly tied to social cohesion. Fears of exclusion and social isolation are a powerful driver of human behaviour: we constantly adjust to try and ensure the approval of those around us. In Noelle-Neumann’s theory, this is also true of our opinions. Someone with an unpopular opinion is less likely to voice it, for risk of being ostracised, but someone with a popular opinion will share it vociferously. A spiral of silence ensues, with one camp getting louder, and the other camp getting quieter. Eventually, the latter camp falls silent.

An important, and sometimes dangerous, stipulation of this theory is that public opinion is dictated not by facts and reasoned debate, but popularity, and this perceived popularity is not related to how many people actually agree with the opinion in question. In the right hands, Noelle-Neumann argued, a spiral of silence could be used as a form of social control. Hitler certainly used it to his advantage, manipulating the perceived popularity of his rhetoric through loud, aggressive demonstrations, and tearing down the freedoms of the press and individual expression. The story is an extreme demonstration, but it shows us just how much power words — or the absence of them — can have.

Climate change is facing its own spiral of silence, facilitated by powerful players and vested interests. They have deployed an array of tactics, such as denying and undermining climate research, but the real masterstroke has been to frame climate change as a debate. You don’t need to spend millions of dollars on lobbying or paying dodgy scientists to produce contradictory evidence. You just need to amplify the opinions of climate sceptics by giving them a platform, and then let the spiral of silence do the rest. And the media provides perhaps the most powerful platform, giving space to one set of opinions at the expense of another. Often those opinions serve their paymasters, rather than reasoned debate.

The problem is that the media are at the mercy of advertising income. How much money a news outlet makes is inextricably linked to ratings and readership, so if climate change kills ratings, they’re not going to cover it; who or what gets platformed isn’t dictated by objective reporting. During the 2016 primaries, US cable news networks cashed in on 2 billion dollars as a result of the ratings boost from covering Donald Trump’s campaign. He was elected at the end of the hottest year on record without being asked a single question about climate change during the televised debates.

By giving a platform to climate deniers, the media have propagated climate scepticism, emboldening those who already hold those opinions and silencing those who don’t. We can see the resulting spiral of silence in full effect. Research from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) has shown that only 10 per cent of Americans firmly deny climate change. But despite the vast majority that believe in it, most people rarely, if ever, discuss it with family and friends. It would seem the powerful evolutionary forces behind our fear of social isolation have stopped us talking about the climate crisis.

Thankfully, the solution is staring us in the face — we simply need to keep talking about climate change. Keep spreading the word. Keep climate on the agenda. Arrange peaceful demonstrations, lobby MPs, organise seminars. The YPCCC found that people's minds are most likely to be changed by family and friends, so that’s a good place to start. Discussing emotive and potentially divisive topics like climate change with those close to you can be challenging, but thankfully the YPCCC has put together an excellent resource to help you do it in the right way. I will link to it at the bottom, but below are some of the main points:

• Pick the right person: It will be hard to change the mind of someone extremely opposed to you, but there is common ground to be found with those with more moderate views. Find the things they care about that will be affected by climate change and explore them.

• Remind them of the scientific consensus: Research has shown that acceptance of scientific consensus is a “gateway belief” that ultimately leads to support of public action. Only 10 per cent of Americans understand that there is near universal scientific acceptance of man-made climate change, so significant yardage can be gained here.

• Be hopeful: Evidence shows that hopeful individuals are more likely to support climate change policies, and also more likely to discuss with family and friends.

There are also things we can do as media consumers. The Guardian recently divested from fossil fuels, and no longer host adverts from companies like Shell and BP in their papers or on their website, a move that lost them half a million per year in revenue. If we want to sever the reliance of the media on corporate advertising, we have to fund high quality journalism directly: for traditional outlets like a newspaper or magazine by paying for a subscription; for new media, platforms like Patreon or GoFundMe allow you to pay content creators directly.

The media outlets themselves have to change as well. They need to dedicate desk seats and column inches to climate change, with diverse perspectives and editors that put climate stories on the front page. It is important to report on climate change in ways that are aware of the severity of the situation (i.e. calling it a climate ‘crisis’), but focus on solutions — as we already know, hopeful individuals affect more change. Perhaps most importantly, we need journalists, communicators, and educators who understand the science and can explain it clearly and respectfully to their audiences.

They say that actions speak louder than words, but I’m not so sure. In fact, actions and words are often one in the same. Speaking up, talking to friends and family, protesting — these things are all vital, because silence is dangerous. Silence lets someone else control the conversation. Silence lets powerful people decide what society deems important. So keep talking, because your words have power.

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This blog was inspired by an episode of the podcast How to Save a Planet: Is Your Carbon Footprint BS? Head to their website to listen to the episode, and make sure to check out their Calls to Action, which are things you can do right now to help fight the climate crisis.

Head to the Yale Program for Climate Change Communication for more details about having meaningful conversations about the climate. Check out the Covering Climate Now project, a global journalism initiative committed to more and better coverage of climate change. The Carbon Literacy Project is a great resource if you want to promote your own, or your organisation's carbon literacy.

As usual, you can find all my references here. Thank you so much for reading!