Photograph by Abstract Aerial Art / Getty Images
WORDS BY JASON P. DINH
This year has brought an onslaught of deadly climate extremes. Heat waves scorched land and sea; wildfires burned from Hawaii to Canada; storms flooded Beijing, India, and Libya. The planet’s soaring temperatures have left global leaders scrambling for words, coining terms like “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas,” and “the era of global boiling.” Still, as thousands have died, even those feel insufficient.
“I haven’t ever seen a time when we’ve broken so many records all at the same time,” said Susan Joy Hassol, a climate change communicator and director of Climate Communication. “It’s upsetting. I don’t think we fully anticipated what we’ve seen over the last couple years.”
If we didn’t know before, we know now: Climate change is scary, and it’s here. Now, scientists are ready to admit their fear, too.
In their annual “state of the climate” report published in late October, an international research team declared, “Life on planet Earth is under siege.” Strewn across the pages are blood-red lines streaking above historical precedents, marking smashed records in temperature, sea ice loss, and wildfire. Photographs depicting fallen homes, injured people, and upended lives sit beneath a damning headline: “Untold Human Suffering in Pictures.” The tone is not just alarming; it’s somber, and it’s candid. “Unfortunately, time is up,” the authors write. “We are afraid of the uncharted territory that we have now entered.”
For years, scientists have urged society to act, to avoid potential climate impacts in the future. “No more,” said Hassol. “Now, we’re living it. It’s outside our window.”
“We are emotional creatures. We’re not only communicating to people’s brains; we’re also communicating to their hearts.”
The annual report has long been alarming, but this year’s edition shifts its tone in a subtle yet notable way. Urgency has moved into fear: Fear of extreme weather, of another lost year without meaningful climate policy, of the cataclysmic feedback loops that could consume the planet if we don’t act now. “The climate situation is much scarier in 2023 [than before],” said lead author Dr. William Ripple, an ecologist at Oregon State University.
Afraid as he is, Ripple implored us not to get caught in the headlights. Fear can paralyze, but it can also galvanize. “Our situation is not hopeless,” he insisted. Our actions today still matter; every tenth of a degree could save millions of lives, he said. And the report lays out a comprehensive plan to achieve it: End fossil fuels, deploy renewable energy, and stop overexploiting nature.
“There was a huge call to our collective responsibility that points to our consumption and behaviors,” said Dr. Marija Verner, a political scientist studying climate change perception at Yale University. “The policy proposals I thought were really well formulated and specific.”
The fearful framing of the report wasn’t strategic, Ripple said. They’re not trying to scare us. They’re just telling it as it is. Still, the nagging question lingers: Does being vulnerable about their fear make readers more likely to support the proposed policies? Will emotional appeal change hearts and minds? And is this the most efficient way to do so?
The answer, evidently, is as complicated as human emotions themselves.
“We are emotional creatures,” Hassol told me. “We’re not only communicating to people’s brains; we’re also communicating to their hearts.”
Emotions can orient attention, improve memory, and increase support for climate policy, according to Dr. Amanda Carrico, an environmental social scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, and storytelling is the doorway to access emotions. Of course, that includes books, film, and photographs, but it also includes science.
Science has always told stories using data, said Professor Ezra Markowitz, an environmental social scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The new climate report is no exception. Its graphs tell the story of unprecedented climate extremes; its photographs tell the story of lives disrupted by global heating; its words tell the story of scientists who have warned the world for decades, but who fear that time is now running out.
Stories unite people in shared causes, and they weave together the complicated threads of science, economic systems, political regimes, vested interests, and the human experience. They are, in large part, the reason that the climate movement became a true social movement, Markowitz said, rather than a niche interest area. But for all the value stories and emotions can bring, their execution is much more complicated.
For starters, there’s no single emotion that captures the reality of climate change, even for a single person. Markowitz, for example, feels a confluence of fear, worry, concern, and most saliently to him as a parent of two young children, sadness. “Sad that things are happening that are already so terrible across the world… sad that we know what we need to do and are doing some of it but not enough of it,” he said. While some feelings like concern might motivate, others like sadness could devastate.
Moreover, the same story can pique different emotions in different people. Seeing, say, the photos of “Untold Human Suffering” in this year’s climate report could make people determined, anxious, sad, despondent, angry, and more. This all depends on what a person brings with them when they interact with climate information—their past experiences, affordances, education, and values.
Even the same emotion can yield different results in different people. For some, fear could spur action, but for others, it might be too much to bear. It could cause them to shut down and give up. “If it’s fear all the time, that can lead to anxiety and depression, which makes people want to pull the covers over their heads… It’s antithetical to action,” said Hassol.
Teasing apart a causal pathway from story to emotion to action is the “trickiest link” in climate communication, Markowitz said, but there are certainly good practices to follow. Most critically, emotional appeals must be paired with actionable plans. “We’ve got to tell people what’s happening honestly, make sure they understand what we need to do—that we can do it… and encourage their action to get involved,” Hassol said.
How these actions are framed is just as important. Telling someone to turn off the lights to combat climate change can feel trivial. The difference in scale of action and consequence can lead to skepticism and, at worst, nihilism. Instead, individual behaviors need to be framed as collective action. “It’s about becoming a part of a larger movement,” Markowitz said. It’s not about any individual, say, eating less meat, but about joining a group of people with similar passions already doing the same thing, collectively reimagining what a net-zero world might look like. “That’s where hope is able to come forth—from being able to envision the other side.”
“There was a huge call to our collective responsibility that points to our consumption and behaviors.”
In writing the new report, Ripple admits he wasn’t crafting some narrative to optimize emotional appeal. “I may not be an expert in all this,” he said when asked about the value of feelings in his work.
He is just being honest. He’s fulfilling what he views as his “moral obligation” to warn humanity, to speak directly and clearly about the predicament the planet is in, and to lay out a path to fix it. Critically, that means being honest about his own fears and emotions, too. “People want to hear the truth more than anything,” he told me.
Scientists who communicate this directly often get accused of being alarmists, but Hassol said that’s patently untrue; they’re simply alarmed. “An alarmist is someone who yells fire in a crowded theater if there is no fire.” But if the building is ablaze, they’re just telling the truth, she said. And scientists wouldn’t set off a false alarm; it’s not in their nature. “Scientists are not prone to hyperbole,” she said. “On the contrary, they err on the side of least drama.”
For decades, climate scientists have been told to distance themselves from the science, to remain “objective.” They used to hope that the data would speak for themselves. Once people saw the numbers, they would have no choice but to act, they thought. But decades have passed, and little has changed. Now, they have no choice: They have to speak on data’s behalf.
These days, scientists are communicating more emotionally and emphatically than ever before. It’s not because of some political agenda or strategic messaging scheme. They’re doing it because they’re people, too. They’re scared, angry, sad, distressed, and anxious themselves. They bring their whole humanity with them to their work every day.
And while they’ve certainly improved their communication in recent years— their willingness to tell stories and invoke emotions is a big part of that—Hassol doesn’t want the point to be missed: We’re not in this position because scientists didn’t communicate clearly. “The reason we’re in this fix is because of the fossil fuel industry and the politicians supporting it.”
Scientists have warned us for decades, only to be silenced, discredited, and ignored by vested fossil fuel interests. Now, she said, researchers are taking matters into their own hands. “They’re communicating more clearly now. Our hair’s on fire because the world’s on fire.”
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Climate Scientists Fear the ‘Uncharted Territory’ Earth Has Entered
