Catherine Conlon: Anger motivates activists more than hope does
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From scorching heat to deadly storms, floods, wildfires and hurricanes, the northern hemisphere has had no rest this year from the "summer of hell".
Despite repeated climate catastrophes across Europe, Asia, Canada and the US, a new study reported that on average people have fairly mild feelings about the planet heating up.
The study published in asked 2,000 people in Norway how they felt about the climate crisis. It found that activism was seven times stronger for anger than it was for hope. Fear and guilt were the best predictors of policy support while sadness, fear and hope were the best predictors of behavioural change.
"The problem isn’t that people feel too scared about climate change," said lead author and climate psychologist Thea Gregersen at the Norwegian Research Centre. "The problem in Norway, at least, seems to be that they’re not scared enough."
The evidence showed that for every two steps a person took along the anger scale, they moved one step along the activism scale. A weakness of the study is that the researchers only looked at what people said they would do, rather than what they did. Previous studies have shown that intentions are only weakly aligned with actual behaviour.
Concerns are mounting that the constant doom-laden headlines and negativity will push people into despair and dissuade people from action. A survey of 10,000 young people in in 2021 found that the majority agreed that "humanity is doomed", even though they understood that planetary heating could be curtailed in a matter of years if the greenhouse gas emissions were curtailed.
Climate psychologist at the University of Bath and lead author Caroline Hickman suggests that the negativity is related to a lack of faith in society rather than a denial of physics.
"Rather than climate anxiety we should be calling it politician anxiety, because it’s the people in power who are failing to do the right thing whilst lying to us, or doing the opposite that is causing the terror," said Hickman.
Other researchers are working on the role that hope can play in the fight against climate change. A recent article published in found some evidence that increasing hope can make people more engaged with climate, particularly if hope is based on the ability to make a difference rather than hope that is based on a belief that climate change is not a serious problem.
Of all the books I have read on climate change the most optimistic and hopeful is (2020) by Cristiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac. Figueres has reason to be hopeful. The UN Secretary of Climate Change between 2010 and 2016, she was the public face of the most pivotal climate agreement in history, the Paris Climate Agreement, in 2015.
Her father was three times president and is considered the father of modern Costa Rica. Not only did he initiate some of the most far-reaching environmental policies in the world, he remains the only head of state ever to have abolished a national army.
Figueres and Rivett Carnac state that all the studies to date consider the unprecedented levels of destruction that have been caused in five decades and the underlying assumption is that the die is cast and there is little room for hope.
"We take a radically different view. We argue that devastation is inevitably a growing possibility but not yet our inevitable fate. While the beginning of this period of human history has been indelibly earmarked the full story has not been written.
"We still hold the pen. In fact, we hold it more firmly than ever before. And we can choose to write a history of regeneration of both nature and human spirit. But we have to choose."
Change is on the way. Christiana Fugueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac suggest that if we want to be part of that change we have to filter every action by the question: "Does it actively contribute to humans and nature thriving together as one integrated system on the planet? If yes, green light. If not, red light. Period."
The authors state this is not a distant dream. It is already happening. Together with Arundhati Roy we can say: "Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be there to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing."
To meet the challenge of the climate crisis, it is time to make profound change in how we live, work and relate to each other.
The first step is to honour the past and let it go. Fossil fuels have given a huge boost to humanity’s development, but their continued use is no longer supportable because of the extraordinary damage they cause to our health, our ecosystems and our climate. Viable alternatives are safer. Now is the time to thank fossil fuels, retire them and move on.
The same is true for so many of the profound shifts we need to make today. The building blocks of society — energy, transportation and agricultural systems — which we now know to be harmful must change radically.
We all find change difficult. We tend to cling to what we know — even when the new brings tremendous benefits. But there is no way back. Figueres and Rivett-Carnac suggest that we cannot go back to a way of life that created the climate emergency in the first place, but treading new ground is politically challenging and the political shocks currently reverberating across the world are just the start.
Research shows repeatedly how corporate interests have the power to capture our democracies. Figueres and Rivett-Carnac highlight how a minority of companies can use their power to purchase extraordinary influence in major legislative capitals and thereby prevent elected representatives from protecting the people.
The authors suggest that civil resistance by members of the public can outdo efforts by political elites to achieve radical change, suggesting that civil disobedience is not only a moral choice, it is also the most powerful way of shaping world politics.
"Historically, systemic political shifts have required civil disobedience on a significant scale. Few have occurred without it.
"History has shown that when approximately 3.5% of the population participate in non-protest, success becomes inevitable. No non-violent protest has ever failed to achieve its aims once it reached that threshold of participation."
In Ireland, this would be 175,000 people.
In 2019, the head of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) described the mass mobilisation of world opinion against oil as the greatest threat its industry faces.
Every additional person who chooses to participate will bring the tipping point for change closer to success.
Now is the time for us all to participate — in our schools, colleges, businesses, communities, towns and countries — to ensure the battle for the climate crisis becomes the biggest political movement in history. Corporations, cities, investors and governments are listening to the call of emergency from the streets.
Time to add your voice to that call.
Dr Catherine Conlon is a public health doctor in Cork and former director of human health and nutrition, safefood.