An Informative, Infuriating Look At How To Effectively Talk About Climate Change May 25, 2017

An Informative, Infuriating Look At How To Effectively Talk About Climate Change

If you want to convince people about the dangers of climate change, what’s the best way to do it? A new video from Vox explains how the most effective way is not by explaining the science, but by talking about the moral obligations we have to protect our planet.

In other words, play to people’s hearts, not their minds.

MoralEthicalClimate

The strategy may be intuitive, but it’s also frustrating that the scientists who understand the issue better than anyone have a better chance of warning people about the effects of global warming if they don’t refer to the data.

It’s a strategy that works everywhere, though, from politics to religion. Many of the people who voted for Donald Trump didn’t care one bit about his policy proposals or tax returns. Hell, they don’t care about the numbers behind the GOP’s health care “plan” or the two trillion dollar budget mistake now. They just liked how he made them feel — unabashedly patriotic, if you were the right kind of American — and they knew they hated Hillary Clinton no matter what the facts showed about the attacks against her.

Pastors, too, know the power of telling an emotional story. They have to be good at that since logic and reason aren’t on their side.

But as the video shows, the facts mean nothing if people don’t get behind the conclusions you draw from them, and the way to sell those conclusions may be by glossing over the facts.

It’s not hypocritical to do that. Still, it’s disappointing that not everyone values facts (or the reasoning behind a policy decision) as much as they should.

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