January 21, 2019
A New Year’s solution: Generating climate optimism
Posted by Laura Guertin
Back on January 1, I wrote and posted about A New Year’s resolution: help students (and Chuck Todd) feel hope towards climate action. Here are some ways that we each can feel “climate optimism” for ourselves and how to inspire others to take action and feel the same way. Starting with…
Good for the new year: “We can’t give in to despair. We have to go out and look for the hope we need to inspire us to act — and that hope begins with a conversation, today.” — @KHayhoe addressing climate change in a @TEDTalks appearance. https://t.co/XK02EyV19c #ActOnClimate
— Earth Day Network (@EarthDayNetwork) January 1, 2019
(You can access Dr. Hayhoe’s TED Talk directly from the TED website)
All of the tweets/articles/posts I’ve seen come online since the beginning of the year boil down how to have climate optimism to two ingredients – conversation and action. Follow the links in the following tweets, and you’ll see what I mean.
My Op-Ed for @theInvadingsea just ran in the @MiamiHerald
Let’s make 2019 the year of climate action.‘Jack Ryan’ can’t fix the climate for us; we have to do it ourselves https://t.co/hMnqpG9oSZ
— Andrea Dutton (@DrAndreaDutton) January 1, 2019
This message is so much better than ’12 years left to stop global warming’ pic.twitter.com/tyl6Q9Xsw2
— Eric Herring (@eric_herring) December 15, 2018
If you’re looking for a New Years resolution and are worried (read: share my unending unquenchable existential fear) about our planetary crisis, here is what science says are the most effective individual actions you can take.
(short thread)https://t.co/Q2fUvqN0C4
— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) January 2, 2019
Conversation and action.
Yale Climate Connections has an article to help us along with ‘How do I break bad news about climate change?’ A six-step guide to honest and compassionate conversations. And there is no shortage of other suggestions for how to move forward on the topic of climate, such as hosting a community screening of NOVA’s Decoding the Weather Machine. As well as…
When addressing climate change, our individual / personal choices matter — a lot — not only through their direct impact on emissions, but even more so through the market, political, and social signals they send others.
Act, share, talk, vote… it’s all important, folks.
— Dr. Jonathan Foley (@GlobalEcoGuy) January 20, 2019
1. Remember you wear many hats
2. Individual choices matter (bike/transit/walk vs car/insulation/efficiency etc)
3. Advocacy in all your networks (PTA/faith groups/interest groups)
4. Make your voice heard (LTEs, town halls)
5. Vote your values https://t.co/gN726kshdn— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) January 20, 2019
Remember for 2019 – conversation and action can provide the climate optimism and hope we want and need. My main networks are campus networks. This semester, I’ll be working on spreading this message among the students, staff and faculty – but I know I can’t stop there. Keep an eye and ear out for effective strategies for spreading climate optimism, and most importantly, share those with others, so we can all have the most impact with our words and activities.
Druckman & McGrath (2019) recently published in Nature Climate Change “The evidence for motivated reasoning in climate change preference formation”. The abstract can be found at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0360-1 and “suggests a new research agenda on climate change preference formation, and has implications for effective communication.”