Upbeat? Downbeat? We can manage our attitude.
Our choices can spur or curb our climate actions.
Always hopeful, Buddy didn’t easily accept discouragement.
How hard we fight climate change depends a lot on our attitude. Hope can be a driver. Fear can be a driver. But a whole lot of Americans are simply experiencing discouragement.
There are many causes, both outside of us and, surprisingly, inside as well.
Climate threats themselves are depressing.
Heat, drought, floods, wildfires and most of the other physical aspects of our lives are getting worse. More than 40 percent of us lived in counties hit by climate disasters in 2021, and more than half of Americans say they’ve personally felt the impacts of climate change. The simple facts push these events and trends into our consciousness every day.
But apparently we’re depressing ourselves too.
As Walt Kelly, creator of Pogo, wrote “We have met the enemy and they are us.”
There are two little-known forces working to make what we read and talk about have more negative effects on us. And both of those forces come from within ourselves.
First, we seek out the negative. People predominantly pay attention to negative information, about others but also about ourselves. Editors know that negative headlines catch more eyeballs. Such stories can dominate our reading and our conversations.
Second, we’re hard-wired to think things are getting worse. Our brains are tricking us into thinking our world is in decline. Two psychologists at Harvard, while looking at more general topics than climate or environmental problems, have demonstrated that
overwhelmingly, people believe that humans are less kind, honest, ethical and moral today than they were in the past. Respondents of all sorts - young and old, liberal and conservative, white and Black - consistently agreed: the golden age of human kindness is long gone.
At the same time the researchers found strong evidence that people are completely wrong about this decline!
We assembled every survey that asked people about the current state of morality. Across 140 surveys and nearly 12 million responses, participants’ answers did not change meaningfully over time. When asked to rate the current state of morality in the United States, for example, people gave almost identical answers between 2002 and 2020, but they also reported a decline in morality every year. [Adam Mastroianni, Daniel Gilbert]
Third, we’re self-selecting what we read. It happens in ways most of us are not even aware of. Google News, for example, adapts the stories it presents to fit our interests. It’s called personalization and is based on things like our past search history, the websites we visit, and the topics we follow on Google News. If, like most people, we click on a lot of negative headlines, Google sends us more negative headlines.
It’s not just Google. Many online news sources personalize the stories we see, including BBC News, The New York Times, CNN, The Guardian, and Reuters.
WHAT WE CAN DO
If we think our selection of readings is depressing or misleading, we can change the type of stories we see by changing our clicking pattern, e.g. clicking on positive stories we see, even if we don’t read them all, just to let the site know we like to be offered those types of headlines. In some cases, we can ask to change our personalization by contacting the source's customer service department. And we may even be able to affect what a news source publishes by contacting its news staff or editors, asking for specific topics to be included or avoided.
Google News gives us the choice to Follow topics and sources, and we can also hide stories from sources that we don't want to see. You can help the news site learn about your interests by Liking or Disliking, and Hiding stories from sources that you don't want to see.
News aggregators like Feedly or Inoreader, allow us to subscribe to multiple news sources, and we can then choose which stories we want to see.
News filters like PunditFact or FactCheck.org show us only stories that have been fact-checked.
Apps like SmartNews or Flipboard allow us to customize our news feed, so that we only see stories that are relevant to our interests.
And AI sites like GPT Chat and Bard can understand our complex requests and preferences for certain types of information.
On the hope-or-dread scale, where are we most effective?
As readers, do we want the authors we read to wring their hands or flash the V sign? To choose upbeat news, reducing our climate anxiety, even depression, is a good enough reason. But I’m thinking particularly about our eagerness to get involved in fighting climate change and its dangers. Fear and negative expectations can spur some of us to greater effort. Others are turned off by negative news, while the right amount of hope can be a big stimulus to our efforts.
Each of us can strive for the right balance.
As I’ve said earlier, our thoughts about climate change, our personal climatescape, should be grounded on facts and projections we believe, but should also reflect the risks to our family and neighborhood and to what we can do—what actions we can take—to help slow climate change and lower our own risks. Those actions will vary from person to person
from turning down the thermostat to marching in Washington,
from building a flood berm on our street to organizing group solar purchases,
from lobbying our state legislator for local protections to creating a kids’ program on climate change,
from cutting air flights out of our vacation plans to . . .
Well, there’s hundreds of actions we can be taking.
What climate scenario should we create in our heads—how positive or negative and based on what information sources—to keep us committed to our actions?
Can ClimateDog help?
Every day most of us face this sort of hope-versus-discouragement in big and little ways. But it hits some of us particularly hard. For instance, pity all those poor newsletter writers and commentators trying to encourage their readers to take climate action! How should we present our news and commentary?
Buddy and I have had those tough decisions to make. As ClimateDog researchers, we wrote many negative stories like “Worsening forecasts,” “Tipping points,” and “Huge costs of sea level rise.” Other weeks we turned out upbeat letters about “Climate-proof hometowns,” “Low-carbon heating systems,” and “Our electric car powering our house?”
We always wanted our stories to educate, catch attention, introduce the right amount of fear or hope, and help readers say to themselves, “Gotta do more to help the planet . . . or the neighborhood”
But I can never figure out which stories did that best. Any advice?
LEARN, THINK, ACT
We can read More than half of Americans say they’ve personally felt the impacts of climate change or More than 40 percent of Americans live in counties hit by climate disasters in 2021.
The illusion of moral decline report is covered by the New York Times; we can read the original in Nature.
To learn more about how Google News personalizes the stories it presents to us, we can visit their help center article.
To help decide what’s the best motivator, we can look back at the ClimateDog letters on personal climatescapes and climate anxiety. Or at the archive of other letters.
And if we need reminding how illusory hope or fear can be, recall what Joan Howard Maurer, daughter of one of the Three Stooges, once said,
Cheer up. Things could be worse. So I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse.