Continued commentary on How to talk climate change with a skeptic: 5 critical tips by Sam Parry.

The five tips are:

1.     First of all: Don’t get angry.

2.     Leave apocalypse to the movies.

3.     Seek common ground.

4.     Tell your own stories.

5.     Stick to the facts.

This time I’ll address the second tip and Parry’s elaboration:

“Leave apocalypse to the movies”

“Avoid drawing a picture of planetary catastrophe. You might suggest that combating climate change could lead to economic opportunities, job growth, greater social justice and improved public health. Climate change doesn’t have to be about how the world ends.”

Parry's right: you're not going to get anywhere with doom-and-gloom scenarios.  Environmentalists have been predicting imminent catastrophe for decades and they’ve been wrong again and again. Skeptics are well aware of this track record of crying wolf while claiming the support of science.  For many skeptics, "alarmist" environmentalists are just the latest in a long line of arrogant catastrophizers.   There is little trust here, and given the history of predicted environmental disasters that never happened, it’s healthy to be a bit skeptical of the latest scare this time around. 

Some examples of disasters that were supposed to have happened by now: global cooling, overpopulation, mass starvation, resource depletion, and mass extinction. In 1970, at the first Earth Day, its political sponsor Senator Gaylord Nelson warned: “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” Around the same time, Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

Just about all the climate change skeptics I know point out this sorry record of doom mongering. If you want to start a conversation with a skeptic, you’ve got to acknowledge that they have every reason to mistrust the latest predictions of impending catastrophe. Don’t just change the subject, own the history and be prepared to explain why it’s different this time around.

Next: More on Tip #2.