A big climate question: Where lies the balance between optimism and pessimism?

If the power of positive thinking could be parlayed into action, it’s likely the global climate emergency would have been dealt with a long time ago. Instead, after years, even decades of upbeat pronouncements from can-do politicians and business leaders, the situation has never been more ominous.

The drastic escalation of the climate emergency this year has been signalled with record-shattering temperatures across much of the northern hemisphere, including simultaneous heatwaves on three continents. July 2023 has been confirmed as the hottest month on Earth on the instrumental record, and likely the hottest in at least 120,000 years based on palaeoclimatological evidence.

So extreme have conditions been this summer that UN secretary general, António Guterres declared: “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.” This is in stark contrast in both language and tone to previous can-do pronouncements from politicians and public officials. The omerta on speaking bluntly about the climate emergency may have been finally lifted.

The early optimism on the ability and willingness of the global community to come together and act in line with the science has now largely evaporated. During three decades of intergovernmental climate action more heat-trapping greenhouse gases have been ejected into the global atmosphere than in all of human history pre-flight.

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Despite this manifest failure the dominant messaging within mainstream climate communications has been to keep it positive. This was brought home forcefully some years back during a talk to a group of environmental activists. While outlining the stark reality of rising emissions and policy failure I was interrupted from the floor by a seasoned campaigner saying they were “sick of hearing all this negative stuff”.

The understandable desire to shut down ecological bad news involves focusing on the wafer-thin silver lining while ignoring the giant black clouds. This is as pervasive as it is common, even in environmental circles.

The tendency to look on the bright side appears to be hard-wired into our species, and in the context of the climate emergency the argument now most frequently deployed is that optimism is necessary in order to stave off fatalism and doomism, the growing sense among many that it is already too late to avert a global catastrophe.

This was tested in a study in the journal Climatic Change in July titled Fanning the Flames or Burning Out, which set out to test the various hypotheses on how people react to threatening or frightening climate messaging.

The fact that the tone and frequency of media messaging on a given topic can impact people’s beliefs and emotions and even behaviour is not in doubt. The researchers set about testing this in relation to climate messaging.

They reported that in the short term exposure to gloomy media coverage led to increased fear and a reduced feeling of hope among participants. However, a more surprising effect was then detected when a second, longer term study was carried out. Here the results were reversed.

“People’s efficacy beliefs increased over time”, according to lead author, Christofer Skura of Penn State University. “The more exposure people had to these threatening news stories each day they were increasingly likely to think they could make a difference in addressing climate change”.

What is critical here is what the researchers call the “agenda-setting effect”. When people only see climate coverage sporadically in the media they assume it’s a fringe issue. “What may be more important for motivating them to take action is that they see coverage of it on a daily basis”, said study co-author Jessica Myrick.

Dublin-based psychologist Dr Eoin Galavan is vice-chair of the Psychological Society of Ireland’s group on the climate and environmental emergency. He rejects what he calls the binary notion that either pessimism or optimism are necessarily the correct responses. “What I think is needed is a balance between our capacity to bravely, creatively and constructively meet challenges around the climate crisis and the recognition of the peril that we are in and the damage we’ve already done.”

The research on the role played by fear and anxiety in how humans respond to the emerging climate threat is, he suggests, mixed. “There’s enough research to suggest that it’s important that the peril that we’re facing, which can evoke fear and anxiety, is a significant ingredient in climate messaging.” Without the public being aware of the true nature and scale of the risks, he believes we will not be successful in getting people to engage in pro-environmental behavioural change.

What has yet to happen to effect dramatic change on both an individual and societal level is that we shift into what’s called “emergency mode”. When someone says their house is on fire, “we don’t get worried about whether they are being optimistic or pessimistic, we ring the fire brigade, we move into action”, he adds.

Dr Galavan cites the recent Covid pandemic as a case study in what happens when there is such an overwhelming focus on a clear and present danger that all the usual political and social considerations, including the concerns of vested interests, are put to one side and the focus is on tackling the emergency, at almost any cost. “I don’t remember people saying should we be optimistic or pessimistic about how we talk about Covid; we just said it’s dangerous, it’s going to kill us, so here’s what we have to do to protect ourselves”, Dr Galavan added.

A 2020 study in Humanities and Social Sciences Communication found that while excessive pessimism in climate messaging could lead to people becoming paralysed with anxiety, an unduly optimistic spin tended to lead to complacency.

Participants exposed to more negative scenarios reported higher levels of emotional arousal, which in turn led to heightened risk perception. Interestingly, in people self-identifying as conservative, emotional arousal as a result of pessimistic messaging had the biggest impact in terms of changing their views around climate change.

Those reporting greater emotional arousal also felt more inclined to believe they could make a positive impact on tacking the climate emergency. While it has many downsides, fear is a potent emotion when constructively harnessed.

The idea that optimism can induce complacency was also examined in a 2017 study exploring “belief in a favourable future”. Behavioural scientist Todd Rogers of the Harvard Kennedy school reported that “ironically, our findings indicate that this belief in a favourable future may diminish the likelihood that people will take action to ensure it becomes a reality”.

[ Finn McRedmond: Despair may be a natural response to the climate crisis, but it’s not an effective mode for inspiring action ]

Decades of self-help mantras and upbeat business slogans have trumpeted the idea that we can, though the power of positive thinking, shape our lives and perhaps even bend reality to our will. Pessimism has been seen as negative and unhelpful yet it can be also extremely valuable.

People known as defensive pessimists worry deeply about stressful events such as exams or job interviews, but they tend to do better as a result, as they work harder, prepare better as they overestimate their likelihood of failure.

Professional pessimism, after all, saves lives. It leads engineers and scientists to check and recheck their calculations, or pilots to conduct more rigorous pre-flight checks. To borrow an old phrase: if you can keep your head about the climate emergency when the scientists around you are losing theirs perhaps you just haven’t been paying attention?

John Gibbons is an environmental journalist and commentator