When a global catastrophe is destroying entire towns overnight via fire, flood and storm, it shouldn’t be hard to convince people that we should take things seriously.
If only.
It has been 20 years since I began writing stories that warned about the alarming things climate change will do to us, and it’s been about five years since I mostly stopped. I stopped because the only people paying attention already knew all about it; the rest turned away. If those articles ever changed the mind of a climate-denier, I never heard about it.
Not everybody has given up, however. A group called Climate Up Close is about to tour New Hampshire, starting with a 5 p.m. potluck and a 6 p.m. discussion Thursday at Gilford Community Church, and are taking an approach that warms the geekiest cockles of my heart. They bring together legitimate climate scientists, people who have spent years learning about physical, mathematical, chemical and biological details of our planet, to tell us what is known and not known and, most importantly, to answer questions from anybody who shows up.
“The goal is not to make people more or less scared about global warming, more or less believers in global warming. We want to inform people about specific impacts of global warming in the context of broader environmental change … and give specifics about what scientist know and don’t know. What are the edges of our knowledge?” said Aaron Match, who has a Ph.D. in atmospheric and oceanic sciences and is one of the group’s leaders.
On Saturday, Climate Up Close will be at Franklin Unitarian Universalist Church at 10 a.m. and Temple Beth Jacob in Concord at 7 p.m. All are welcome. They’ll also have events in Plymouth and Holderness.
Climate Up Close has been doing this sort of thing since 2019, giving one tour a year at a variety of places. It is a low-budget operation – Match says they choose venues partly based on having “a place to crash” nearby – and while a lot of what they do is end up preaching to the choir, they say they’ve also had reasoned discussions with skeptics.
Even if it’s unclear how many minds they’ve changed, March thinks that adding reality to society’s knowledge base can only help.
“Someone came up after (a previous talk) and said she was very scared of tipping points .. She had a sense that it was too late,” he said. After the talk, “she felt like she would sleep better at night.
“If a good-faith presentation of science happens to make an attendee less fearful, that’s a good outcome!”
I’m sympathetic with this point of view because I used to hold it. In 1991, it led me to start this column – originally called Science From The Sidelines, celebrating those of us who cheer on research even if we don’t participate – and later to join the founders of the Science Cafe NH discussion series, which ran here for a decade. I thought that “Just the facts, ma’am” would win the day. (Note to less-old people: That’s a reference to a TV show called Dragnet.)
No longer. I’ve been worn down by a world where lies about vaccines keep spreading, where the Flat Earth Society is becoming less of a joke, where back-to-back “100-year floods” don’t change minds, and where ignorance about a topic (“I’m independent!”) is considered better for making decisions than knowledge (“you’re elitist.”).
I mention climate change in many stories because it’s part of the world we report on, but I’ve stopped trying to change minds about it. Why doesn’t Climate Up Close feel the same way? Time, probably.
Match is my son’s age and the rest of the team appears to be his contemporaries. They’ve got youthful energy and optimism to go with their research chops (the current group is associated with Harvard University, NYU and Princeton).
That’s good because my generation isn’t going to solve climate change. Even if we wanted to, and too many of us don’t, we’re starting to shuffle off this mortal coil. It’s up to younger folks to start undoing our damage. Let’s hope they can.
In our talk, Match said one other thing that surprised me: He has gotten more optimistic, or at least less pessimistic, since joining Climate Up Close.
“I would say that I had higher amounts of climate pessimism than I do now, and a huge part of that comes from the experience of Climate Up Close. … In order to get up on the stage, I have to do a lot of education that wouldn’t have come up in my normal training and in that process, some of the things that I was personally fearful of, runaway global warming caused by positive feedback in the system … from the IPCC reports one learns that these are highly uncertain, not in any sense expected. That has given me more personal optimism.”
Optimism about the climate? I don’t mind writing about that.
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