How Climate Became Religion

Editing aerosols out leaves you with a neat, but misleading, morality tale.

Ambiguity won’t fit on a protest placard

There was another way we might have talked about climate change.

A more honest, more scientifically nuanced way that would’ve made our public conversations much better grounded in reality.

We could have rallied around a message like this:

We’re destabilizing the climate by adding unprecedented amounts of heat-trapping gasses to the atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide. At the same time, we’re adding aerosols to the air that partially offset the heating effect of the greenhouse gasses, but at a terrible price to the environment and to human health. We must stop emitting greenhouse gasses and harmful aerosols, but we have to be mindful that the two work on different time-scales: when we stop emitting aerosols, the atmosphere will heat quickly; when we stop emitting greenhouse gasses the atmosphere will stop heating up, slowly. 

This is not the framing the climate movement adopted.

You can see why.

Foregrounding aerosols makes for a much more nuanced story, and the 2000s and 2010s, when the current climate orthodoxy was hardening, were no time for nuance.

With politicians bringing snowballs into the U.S. Senate chamber to argue global warming was a myth, the very basics of climate science really were under attack.

Nobody wanted to be the guy bringing a spreadsheet to a knife fight. 

Climate communications people were under strong pressure to strip their message down to its essential core. This meant running a simple, clean narrative designed to reach distracted, disengaged news consumers half-listening as they fixed lunchboxes for their kids in the morning. 

The narrative they settled on was, accordingly, much simpler:

We’re destabilizing the climate by adding unprecedented amounts of heat-trapping gasses to the atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide. We must stop emitting greenhouse gasses.

I get the urge to simplify. I know there will always be a gap between science as scientists understand it —messy, uncertain, constantly shifting— and the scientific consensus the public can absorb. 

But a decade on from Senator Inhofe’s snowball stunt, the costs of writing aerosols out of the public conversation on climate are becoming harder to ignore. 

First, because the brutally simplified carbon-only story can’t make sense of the rapid warming we’re now seeing. But it goes deeper than that. The simplified narrative has started to deform our climate conversation in ways nobody foresaw. It’s become the core of a strange new secularized religion that is becoming almost as serious an obstacle to reasonable climate action as outright denialism was a decade ago.

The simplified climate vision, centered narrowly on carbon dioxide, has spawned its own rough-and-ready moral cosmogony, itw own account of virtue and vice, of why vice leads to suffering, and of why virtue holds out hope of redemption:

Burning things is bad. It hurts nature. Nature hurts people because people have hurt nature. Nature will heal if we stop burning things. A healed nature wouldn’t hurt people. 

In this moral universe, climate chaos is just retribution for the sins of humanity. Keeping this morality tale tractable is the ultimate reason aerosols had to be edited out of our climate conversation. It was a question of meta-cosmic alignment as much as one of political tactics.

Aerosols aren’t morally neat the way CO₂ is. For one thing, there are many of them, and it’s hard to generalize. Some aerosols, like sea salt, seem benign all around, others like soot are bad for both the climate and human health. But then you have things like sulfates, compounds that do some good things and some bad things. Sulfates cool the planet, but they make you sick when you breathe them…presuming they’re in the lower atmosphere. In the stratosphere, sulfates cool the planet, which is good, but tend to destroy ozone, which is bad.

With aerosols, it’s ambiguity all the way down. Researchers are comfortable with this kind of ambiguity. The public, it was presumed, wouldn’t be able to handle it. 

Which is why the people in charge of communicating The Science opted to just elide the whole confusing mess. Climate scientists were dragged into public communcations workshops were they were instructed to keep provisos and uncertainties safely tucked well away in the footnotes of papers only other academics would read. They saw what it took to have successful publishing careers: keep it simple, focus on carbon, and above all, keep uncertainties and ambiguities out of the reach of journalists, because journalists would put them in newspapers, where ill-intentioned denialists would instrumentalize them against the public good.

Tactically, this was a no brainer. 

Strategically…we’re now starting to see the consequences. 

For one thing, journalists and their audiences are both now genuinely confused about the actual drivers of rapid warming and extreme weather. For another, they’re catastrophically myopic about what can be done about it. Rapid aerosol abatement is the one eventuality we never prepared them for. 

A few heroic voices here and there will try to explain the “aerosol masking” to the public —and thank God for that— but it’s too little too late.

People don’t have the basic conceptual framework they would need to integrate the odd news story into a coherent picture of climate reality.

This isn’t just an intellectual problem. People have built entire moral and religious identities around the brutally simplified carbon-only account of anthropogenic climate change. They’ve signed up to a worldview where bad things happen because we committed a sin against nature: the sin of affluence. They’ve concluded the road to redemption goes through the renunciation of that sin. This is the moral logic of degrowth, the religious impulse behind Extinction Rebellion: the farthest out ripples of a decision about how to talk about climate made long ago on what people imagined were tactical grounds. 

In my moments of wildest ambition, I want to imagine One Percent Brighter as a place to help craft a corrective: to propose an alternative narrative that’s more true to the science, more comfortable with the nuance, and much better able to help us make sense of the confusing and upsetting climate we’ve created. We deserve a much more sophisticated grasp of our climate realities than mainstream climate discourse can offer. You can help me make it happen, by clicking this button: