Dr. Susanne Moser

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Joe: Hello, and welcome to Communicating Climate Change, a series of conversations with social scientists whose research focuses on communicating with the public. I’m Joe Cone with the Oregon Sea Grant program at Oregon State University.

The goal of this series is to provide insights from social science to those who are out on the front lines, communicating with the public about climate. That includes a range of professionals, such as meteorologists, government agency personnel, university outreach specialists, and spokes-persons for non-governmental organizations.

Today’s conversation is with Dr. Susanne Moser, a research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. A German citizen who has lived and worked in the United States for two decades, Moser is a leader in bringing natural and social scientists together around the climate issue. She was an instigator and co-editor of a collection of essays, Creating a Climate for Change, published by Cambridge University Press in 2006.

Joe: Susi, thanks for visiting with us. You’re a scientist; tell us about the path that you took that got you involved in public communication.

Susi: Hmm. Well, I started out in the physical…earth sciences; physical geography, geology, soil science, climatology, those kinds of things. And you know, was actually driven to that because I very much cared about the environment and the state of the environment. And I thought simply knowing about the environment would help, you know, address its problems.

And then by chance had an opportunity to study for a year at Clark University where the main focus is, within the geography department, on the human-environment interactions. So, not just the social science side, not just the physical side, but actually the interaction around resource use, around hazards management, global change, those kinds of issue. And, that was like, oh my god, that is what I want to study. Um, and ended up doing a dissertation.

I was very much focused on how policymakers, decision makers respond to very uncertain climate change related problems in coastal areas. . . . And what I learned in exploring that…that interaction was all these human dimensions and the challenges and communication and interaction between people. It seemed that had way more to do than anything we don't know yet about climate change or what might happen along the coast.

So, uh, got very interested in the interaction between science and policymaking, or…or practice more generally, and in the communication.

Joe: You were telling me earlier that after a post-doc at Harvard, you went to work at the Union of Concerned Scientists, making connections between the worlds of science and public policy and public communication. And along the way you’ve come to recognize some “myths” about communicating science, which you write about in the climate book. One of them is the so-called “information deficit” myth; tell us about that.

Susi: So the way I would capture that is, if people only understood, if they only knew how bad this problem is, then they would act. And, I guess in psychology it has a name, this myth, which is the information (or knowledge or understanding) deficit model. And, you know, what we know from that science is that it's been proven wrong again and again and again. [Chuckles.] And that is more information does not necessarily lead you to take the right actions. It may lead you to, you know, pay attention to the issue or it may lead you to take some action; not necessarily miraculously the right action. But, somehow we assume that will automatically follow.

I think it's deeply rooted in our culture since the Enlightenment. I mean, you know, knowledge will set you free, right? [Chuckles.] It will liberate you and empower you to do the right thing.

When I hear that especially coming from scientists, I give them the example of the parking lot at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. One of the most…highest concentrations of climate change information anywhere in the world. And yet, people do not necessarily behave in the, you know, most appropriate ways. They drive SUVs, they drive…everyone drives to work, you know, individually. [Chuckles.]

So, is that the right behavior? Not necessarily. But why do people do it? Because there aren't alternatives that are really feasible and convenient and allow people to do what they need to do.

Um, if I…you know, I used to live in Boulder about three and a half miles away from my place of work. With a bike, twenty minutes in the summer to, you know, ride to work. If I wanted to cross that same distance by public transportation, an hour and a half. I'm not gonna do that. I have things to do. I'm busy. [Chuckles.] So I'm going to drive my car. And those are the kinds of real life obstacles all of us face that need to be addressed.

Joe: You were just talking about barriers to behavior, and of course Al Gore, for example, is hoping to motivate people. How do you think about barriers and motivators as factors in successful communication?

Susi: If you want to link your…whatever you have to say to the behavior change or policy change or management change, or whatever you want to achieve, you need to elevate the motivation. Give people really good reason to do that and lower all the…or, at least help lower and address the barriers and resistances people face in making that change.

I think communicators have spent a lot of time focusing on the motivation side. You know, NGO's love to scare people or to make people feel guilty or, you know, scientists love to give information. But, they don't address the barriers people face when they have to make the changes. And so, I think we need to spend a lot more time really thinking hard about the particular audience we're dealing with. What obstacles are in their way of doing the right thing? And only when we are very specifically thinking about that can we actually begin to help them overcome them.

And that's where all communication…[chuckles]…should focus much more than…People have heard. People are convinced climate change is here. You know, people have heard that, yeah, the coast is eroding. I mean, those are established fact. People see it now too. Um, it's what to do about it. People don't know a lot about the solutions. People don't know where to get the help to do it. People feel quite disillusioned or pessimistic that their little action will address this global overwhelming problem. Sometimes they don't even know what the solutions are or what they could possibly do.

Um, I think we, as communicators, have failed to show them how their action is one of many, many, many others that can actually shift, you know, the trajectory that we're on.

Joe: This is interesting. I've been intrigued by the idea that environmentalism, in the last forty years in America, has emphasized the myth of the fall. We've been in the Garden of Eden, so to speak, but we've spoiled it, and now we're going to pay. In literary terms, this is a tragic story.

An alternative storyline is the literary form known as romance. It's a story about overcoming adversity, of renewal and change. Much of popular culture, of Hollywood movies, for instance, tells this story of heroic-overcoming, again and again. Young man slays dragon – of whatever sort – real, inside himself, imaginary, methaphorical -- and gets the girl: that’s the hopeful pattern of romance.

So are those who are concerned about the environment telling the wrong story? Is the public being given hope, for instance, in the face of climate change?

Susi: When Martin Luther King gave his famous speech about I have a dream? He didn't say, I have a nightmare, people. Here's, you know, how bad it is. He said, I have a dream. I have told you a positive vision of what we want to work toward together. That's what he gave people. And he was, obviously, a rhetoritician, you know, was wonderful at doing it. But basically, he gave a message of hope. He gave an image of hope.

And, you know, what we're hearing from environmentalists mostly is…you've screwed it up. You know, it's the world is coming…going to hell in a hand basket. . . . I think you're absolutely right in that we are giving people a doomsday future, not a hopeful visionary…you know, vision of what…what it's worth fighting for. And, I believe we need that and we will need that intensely so.

Um, let me give you one sort of very optimistic scenario of the future. And that is that we get together, all of us collectively, and we work as hard as we can on changing our energy system, changing our transportation system, changing our buildings all over, you know, and we get to a very low CO2 emitting future. If we do that, with the still growing population that we have, if we're really, really, really lucky and working really hard, we might get to a scenario that is now on the lower end of what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is projecting. You know, 550 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere.

That is still double prehistoric levels of CO2, that is still a four degree, five degrees Fahrenheit warming, it's a hugely different world than what we have, you know, lived in in the past. So, in other words, we are going toward a future that will not look any better climate-wise…[chuckles]…that what we currently have. So, basically, people will see more negative impacts…get negative feedback from the environment for trying really, really hard, it's not gonna sustain them staying engaged in doing the right thing. We need to show people, first of all, the right indicators of change, which are gonna be social change indicators, not environmental change indicators. They will all go down negative…[chuckles]… for a long time. For anyone living today, they're gonna see degradation rather than improvement in the climate.

But, we might see positive social change. And that's where we need to direct our people's attention to. And, showing them how that is actually moving toward that positive vision. Eventually we might get back to a climate that is far more conducive and less, you know, disruptive as the one that we will probably create right now. But we need to give people a vision, a positive vision that's worth fighting for and that will sustain their engagement in working toward it.

And it's not gonna be looking at the climate; it will be looking at a sustainable community where there's a lot of social interaction, where we love, you know, being with each other. Where we're not hitting each other over the heads but, you know, giving each other…I don't know, a sense of community and togetherness and… you know, enjoyment…[chuckles]…despite a difficult climate, despite a difficult world. So I think that's a really important thing.

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Joe: You’re listening to Communicating Climate Change. I’m Joe Cone of Oregon State University, and we’re talking today with Dr. Susanne Moser of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. We’ve been talking about cultural myths and the stories we tell ourselves. So Susi, thinking broadly why should public communicators, people who do the practical daily work of outreach at universities or with government agencies, or who try to organize public participation activities, for instance, with governmental or non-governmental organizations, why should they want to be familiar with social science research?

Susi: The reason why I think social science would be really, really helpful for communicators is that it allows us, and it's my deepest motivation, to actually be effective. To actually achieve what I assume communications can achieve. You know, it's…communication itself has evolved and the…the, you know, theories and practices of communication have evolved over time. We ought to stay up with that and…and learn, you know, what do we know about it. We used to think of communication as a one-way transfer of information.

Well, that's an old hat in communication theory at this point. You know, it's a dialogic interactive two-way street of exchange and engagement. What do we know about that? So it involves two people, it involves, you know, a message. It involves feedback from the audience. It involves different channels. What can we achieve, you know, through different channels? Interactive, sort of personal face-to-face dialogue can do much different things than, let's say, mass media communication through a mediated channel. So, you know, as communicators we ought to be interested in what makes us most effective.

How does policy change happen? How does organizational change happen, behavior change? There are, you know…thousands of experts who studied just that and we ought to take that into account. Can we somehow connect our… whatever we have to say and what we think ought to be heard…[chuckles]…to the people and to the places where those changes can be made. I mean, where are the leverage points? Who is the strategic audience we ought to be talking to?

I think it's actually a really interesting thing that…that a whole bunch of people are debating right now in the communication field. You know, I…I sort of call it “going Lovelock” on people. You know, after James Lovelock who…was a…you know, founder or…or creator of the Gaia Hypothesis and who with his most recent book said you know, it's too late. We have basically screwed up the earth and past any, you know, point of recovery. Um, we're gonna suffer greatly and, you know, basically we've lost the fight.

Um, and I think, you know, there is a…there is some necessity to…to tell the truth; how badly things actually are. But is that the most motivating thing? I mean, what does that do
. . . I think James Lovelock only looks at sort of the social…the…the physical indicators of, you know, what's happening to the earth, you know. And he sort of is actually forgetting the possibility for surprises, which happen in the social system as much as they do in…in the physical system. I mean, it would be incredibly hard to get a massive shift in consciousness.

And, is it completely out of the question? Probably not. [Chuckles.]

Joe: This shift in consciousness -- you’re referring to the idea of the tipping point, isn’t that right? What, from your perspective, would tip the behavior of the developed world? What's the first step we need to be taking, society as a whole?

Susi: I think, actually, there is a lot of things going on already that could be those first things that need to happen. There's a lot of alternative ideas that are being tried out in very small cells of experiments. Um, they may or may not be the… the seeds for, you know, alternative ways of being with each other and being with the earth, so they're happening all over the planet.

I think what's probably needed now, more so than before, is not just to raise the awareness about the problem but the awareness about alternatives. The alternative solutions, what would that look like? I think part of the reason why we don't automatically jump to something else – not just, you know, economics, the cost, whatever, or whether or not the technology is there – is that, do we have to give up something we really value? I mean, the vision currently that's out there for an alternative lifestyle is sort of like we're all gonna be freezing and sitting, you know, at candlelight and going back to the cave.

What if we could collectively create a vision of a beautiful, communal, peaceful way of living with each other in which you can still have your e-mail or watch TV, or whatever. I mean, ways…don't necessarily have to give up all the conveniences, but very different ways of achieving them. Maybe where the values are set differently.

I mean, you know, we now say that we value having our own car to get wherever we want. The result of that is that we all get to sit, individually, in our little boxes in traffic jams. Um, is that what we really want? Or, what will we rather do in that time?

Let's sit together and discuss our future visions, our fears. How do we want to be human in an increasingly difficult world? How do we want to do that? What does it mean to be a community, a society, in the world that has twice as much CO2 and is, you know, five degrees warmer than what we had? I think those are the kinds of questions that tap into our deeper motivations for change, that tap into our creativity, that tap into what we really, really want and I don't think we can get to anything better if we don't begin even saying what do we really want.

Joe: Americans would seem to have a split personality, on the one hand professing beliefs and value in family and community, and on the other, the belief in the individual and in the individual first. And I think we have that tension sort of constantly in our consciousness.

You know, democracy American style was expressed by so many individuals who came here as getting away from somebody else's authority. And so, being independent, being individualistic is part of our collective identity.

Susi: Can we make individualism work for us as a community. You know, is it me against the rest of the world and at the expense of? You know, is that truly a freedom. I mean, there's people who'll say, you know, the minute that you forget responsibility freedom becomes meaningless. We have a Bill of Rights. Do we need a bill of responsibilities? I mean, those are the kinds of things that, you know, if we put them together would be a really interesting dialogue to have. A difficult dialogue, but, uh, one that I think is really valuable, vis-à-vis, what's the world we want to live in?

Joe: Can we go back to your observation that successful communication about climate involves lowering barriers? So, give us an example where you've seen them lowered successfully at a community level. What did that look like? How was that done?

Susi: Um…well, I think the most important point about the…the focus on lowering barriers is that it sometimes shifts who you're talking to and what you're talking about. . . If I want to help you change your behavior in transportation, how you get from point A to point B. But, you know, for example, there is even a public transportation system. But, at the bus stops, it doesn't have a schedule, so you don't know when the bus is coming, whether you can get to where you need to be. Well, then I need to actually go to city council. I need to go to the planners of the city. I need to go… whoever puts together your public transportation system and talk to them about putting up schedules. It's not something that I need to convince you to take the bus. You already want to do that.

So, that's what I mean. Sometimes it's helping you do something, you know, that you don't know how to do yourself. Sometimes it is actually working with somebody else to lower that barrier so that you can do what you are totally signed up for to do.

So, you know, for me the number one rule about communication for social change is you begin with the audience. Where are they at? What's their understanding? What do they care about? What are their concerns? What are their barriers? Then you can shape your communication and address either them, with a…you know, the right kind of message, or you talk to somebody else who can address whatever their barriers that they can't move. So…that's where I start.

Joe: I know you’ve been thinking about a new book on the idea of resilience – about making communities able to withstand and adapt to climate change.

Susi: Let's say we have…I don't know, Miami is gonna be hit, New Orleans is gonna be hit again by a hurricane. California goes up in wildfires. Um, the Southeast is in a 15 year drought not…along with the Southwest. Um, the Mississippi floods, whatever, you name it. Everywhere Rome is burning. Where are you gonna send the buckets first? Well, there are not enough buckets to go around and not enough money to pay for all of these… Um, I guess what I'm interested in, there was a book a few years ago, uh, called Collapse. It became, you know, very famous. And that author, Jared Diamond, was interested in why do things fail. I'm interested in why do things keep going. Um, I want to find the leverage points that we can affect now to make things more resilient. And so, I'm…I kind of want to do the reverse of Collapse.

Joe: This goes back to our earlier talk about myths and a new myth of renewal, of finding the ability to respond.

Susi: I guess for me it's the myth of the hero -- or the heroine, for that matter. I think we're out on a journey which may very well be very difficult and we may not come back from it. [Chuckles.] We may succumb. And, we may, in the course of that journey and through all the challenges we will go through, actually come out changed and very much different. It's actually one of the storylines…archetypical storylines that people, you know, really want to hear. That there is a hero’s journey here. That we can improve ourselves, we can mature, we can change through challenging times -- and I guess we're gonna…as a culture go through the earth's journey. [Laughs.] And, you know, hopefully come out semi-whole still, or more whole on the other side.

Joe: How well do you think we are prepared for that journey?

Susi: Um, there are some ways in which I think we're deeply undermining ourselves [in dealing with that]. And that is, for example, in our educational system. What do we do? We learn historical fact, things that have already happened and teach students to regurgitate exactly that, and expect that that will apply to a rapidly changing world. I think that's a disservice. You know, we're not giving people the tools and the knowledge to deal with a rapid change.

If we're as individuals insecure, then dealing with an uncertain environment we get reactionary. We get rigid. So, building in buffers, helping people understand that if they do certain things they are less vulnerable, they are less at that edge where something uncertain will really. . . destroy the fabric of a community, undermine the economy.

I think the more we can help people understand what they're doing and . . . maybe show them that they actually are pretty good at dealing with uncertainty, that might be more helpful.

Joe: The conventional wisdom is that climate change will hit the poorest nations, the developing nations hardest and we in the developed world actually are…you know, we have the resources, the capacity, the technology, and we can deal with it.

Susi: Well, what's really interesting is that we have used all our capacity to really insulate ourselves from a variable climate that we've had from these vagaries of nature. And, in some sense, you know, if you go to any school, you know, can you still grow your own food it's like, no. [Chuckles.] We have no answer. Um, we…we aren't really able to survive on our own without a lot of technological help that has made us so wonderful.

Whereas, in developing countries, you know, where people are constantly dealing with is there enough water, is there too much water to, you know, grow our crops? Um, where people are literally without air conditioning, without heat; you know, directly exposed to the elements. And I think people actually there might have the capacity to deal with these vagaries. . . . Maybe their living standard isn't as high, but they're actually able to…to confront some of these uncertainties much more than we are, who have isolated ourselves so well from all these different…from the…the different the way the climate is, or the environment is.

So I actually wonder sometimes whether we're not really, really fooling ourselves about our capacity to deal with climate change, rapid disruption in any way better than they can.
maybe we need to uncover some of our own wisdom again.

Joe: This has been a conversation with Susanne Moser of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, one of a series about Communicating Climate Change. This is Joe Cone of Oregon Sea Grant, an ocean and coastal research and education program at Oregon State University. This and other climate podcasts, and their complete transcripts, can be found online at seagrant.oregonstate.edu. That’s s-e-a-grant: one word, dot, oregonstate as one word, dot, edu. Thank you for listening.

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* Joe’s audio re-recorded from off-mic original questions.

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