FILE – Storm clouds approach a church in Mequon, Wis., on Sunday, Aug. 2, 2020. A new Pew Research Center report published Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022 explores how religion in the U.S. intersects with views on the environment and climate change. (AP Photo/Morry Gash) As sweltering heatwaves increasingly shatter world records and wildfires spread smoke over thousands of miles, it is becoming ever-more apparent that climate change is endangering countless species, including our own. Many of us hoped that such catastrophic weather would shift public attitudes and U.S. government policies, reducing fossil fuel use. But the Trump administration and millions of Americans still refuse to act.
Despite its disastrous effects, recent extreme weather also provides an important teachable moment. We should use it to more fully develop and disseminate effective messages by drawing on commonly shared moral principles and narratives that have meaning to climate change deniers, and improving education about how to address such polarized political debates.
Recent studies show that shifting attitudes about climate change is possible. Yet such research has not informed practice very much — we need to use it more.
Studies reveal that debunking misinformation with facts fails to alter public opinion, but that targeted, strategic messages designed for particular audiences, reframing the issues in ways that appeal to these groups, can help. Effective messages aimed at conservatives can appeal to national security, moral issues of purity and religious beliefs in stewarding the Earth.
Climate change deniers often claim that they have a right to burn as much fossil fuel as they want. Reframing might emphasize the benefits of alternative energy sources that reinforce energy security and national security, the importance of family values that include the well-being of one’s future descendants and the purity and sanctity of nature as embodying divine creation.
Effective communication can also involve emotional appeals — instilling both sadness and guilt about the impact of climate change, and hope about possible solutions. It can offer positive examples and moral arguments. For example, an individuals’ short-term benefits and rights to burn as much fossil fuel energy as they want are far outweighed by the longer-term harms to people and other species, the rights of present and future generations to have healthy lives and the principle of justice, since climate change disproportionately harms poorer individuals and countries.
Messaging for evangelical Christians — the largest Christian religious group and the most powerful religious bloc opposing efforts to reduce climate change — can highlight other narratives and values with which they are comfortable and familiar. This group is far less likely than other religious groups to think that climate change is happening or poses danger or that the Earth is warming mostly because of human activity.
While evangelicals are more likely than other faiths to feel that God granted humans dominion over the Earth at 80 percent versus 67 percent, 86 percent also believe that God gave people duties to protect and care for the planet.
The Bible, for instance, tells us to serve as stewards over His creation, to recognize and respond to, rather than ignore, climate change, and to protect ourselves and other species. In the Bible, Joseph, for example, correctly interpreted the Pharaoh’s dream, and told the leader to store grain for an upcoming seven-year drought. When the famine arrived, only Egypt was ready.
Likewise, in one of the most beloved and famous Old Testament stories, God commanded Noah to build an ark, to save all species because of 40 days of rain causing a “Great Flood” — catastrophic climate change.
Yet these narratives about Joseph, and especially Noah’s Ark, are almost always treated merely as stories. We fail to draw on the full implications. Noah, for instance, protected countless species when cataclysmic flooding endangered them.
To shift attitudes — and thereby, climate policy — educators, religious leaders and policy makers should use these approaches more. Many of us also encounter people who resist addressing climate change, and we, too, can draw on these recent studies to try to alter attitudes.
We should also enhance education for K-12, college and public discourse about the need to think about moral conflicts using more systematic approaches, to know how to respond to moral arguments, by drawing on shared moral principles.
The field of bioethics has, for instance, developed a framework for doing so that invokes commonly endorsed values. It requires examining relevant facts and considering ethical principles such as maximizing the benefits to individuals and society, minimizing the risks, protecting stakeholders’ rights and upholding justice by reducing inequities and avoiding undue burdens on vulnerable or disadvantaged groups.
This rubric can help by taking into account more than one principle, recognizing all facts, not just those that support our own view and consideringall stakeholders, including those who disagree with us and those who are most at risk of harm.
Though research has begun to examine how to alter public attitudes, more studies are critically needed, and social scientists and others, including graduate students, should be encouraged to pursue these topics more.
Recent climate crises should lead not to suffering alone but to creatively brainstorming to develop and spread novel ways of persuading others of the problem. Otherwise, our extreme political polarization and weather will both only worsen.
Robert Klitzman, M.D. is a professor of Psychiatry at the Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons in the Joseph Mailman School of Public Health and director of the Online and In-person Masters of Bioethics Programs at Columbia University and the author of “Doctor, Will You Pray for Me?: Medicine, Chaplains and Healing the Whole Person.“
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