In science communication you hear about “natural frequencies” and communicating large numbers.
People’s minds shut down when you try to feed them numbers. No matter how good they are at adding up their grocery bill, if you try to get someone to comprehend the weight and meaning of a billion, they just nod along blankly, with a teakettle whistling sound happening behind their eyes. A shut-down mind can’t receive your message. And often a mind will do a preliminary shutdown if you make it feel Bad or Guilty.
That’s a huge, huge problem with trying to communicate science. Especially the science that needs to enter people’s brains to give us a hope of survival. Especially in a political climate in which people genuinely feel that they can pick which facts to believe in, and dismiss competing facts as conspiracy theories.
That’s why one should express scientific concepts and Big Numbers in ways that people will recognise and understand. For maximum impact, use things that people can immediately visualise. Say, “in a room full of 100 people, three of them are at risk.” Say, “this could fill a football field.” Say, “the dinosaur was the size of a golden retriever.” Say, “if you got in your car and drove, this distance would take a week to cover.” Say, “that amount of money would be like you and everyone you know having an extra £500 in your bank account every month.”
The first article linked in the OP is by The Guardian. And it has a splendid example of this.
It tells you that the decision-makers of climate change - the people holding the reins - the humans responsible for 2/3 of the planet’s emissions - “could fit on one or two Greyhound buses.”
If you have the space, just allow that mental image some headroom for a bit.
Climate change feels so big that maybe you feel that it’s hopeless; you could never do anything about it; you didn’t even recycle that plastic fork. The neoliberal idea is that everyone else is your enemy - that everyone else (those fuckers) is eating up your future, and it can’t be stopped because you can’t stop All Humans. You picture all those hungry mouths jostling and competing and gobbling, and perhaps complain edgily about overpopulation, thinking that the Unstoppable Greed of Humanity Is Ushering Us All To Our Inevitable End. In this worldview (which is rather deliberately inculcated) everyone is responsible, and everyone has failed. The insidious idea is that destruction is a key part of humanity (those fuckers) and obviously your horrible neighbors are GOING to water their lawn anyway, so we all deserve to die horribly together, as the punch line for some meta-SF novel. Or maybe you’re a vegan and If Everyone Else Was Too Then We’d All Be Saved, but they’re not, so in the meantime you can prance about explaining this at length on social media, which probably feels amazing? Or something. I don’t know, I don’t really read those subreddits and I’m not on Insta, but they’re extremely common reactions. And of course plenty of people have conveniently decided that it isn’t a problem at all, which is a brilliant decision because they’re obviously untroubled by any speculation.
So perhaps sit with this image instead. Of the decision-makers fitting on two Greyhound buses. That isn’t All Humanity. That’s 90 corporations. A few dozen people. They’re the ones doing it (although they’re quite happy for you to be An Jaded Vegan ™ or to perpetuate Overpopulation Discourse ™ - both are so marvellously distracting and enjoyable - bread and circuses.)
While we run about in a panic forgetting to carry canvas shopping bags, and furiously glaring at our neighbors for leaving their engines running? That handful of people could change the world with remarkably little inconvenience; they just rather prefer not to.
In conclusion - by all means eat mindfully, and limit your consumption, and strategically place your canvas bags in places where you’ll remember to grab them. But when you feel yourself blaming The Humans for the next wave of nebulous fear and panic about the future: stop it. And think of those greyhound buses instead.
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