Cognitive Challenges Of Climate Change
Should cognitive sciences get involved in climate science? Recent history has made the computer the primary tool in climate science, enabling researchers to produce increasingly complex models of general circulation which are better integrated into systemic approaches. These integrated models help identify the impacts of climate change, economic responses, and policy scenarios. But climate science seems to be caught up in a paradigm of computation, which the evolution of cognitive sciences towards interpretation and situated cognition allows us to question. Cognitive sciences are no longer defined as a science of information processing, but as humanities, social and behavioral sciences of cognition between humans and their social and physical environment.
The main objective of this ISC Summer School is to put the human – « The Neural Man » (following a book’s title by Jean-Pierre Changeux) – at the heart of climate science. This is the challenge addressed by behavioral scientists who seek to contribute to climate models and create a social climate science to study our interactions, perceptions, reasoning and actions in this period of awareness, transition and implementation of mitigation and adaptation policies.
By reflecting on the cognitive challenges of climate change, the ISC 2021 Summer School aims to think beyond the disciplinary boundaries to expand knowledge on climate issues. A unique international and transdisciplinary event bringing together 35 specialists to help understand how to mobilize globally, in particular through the carbon market, against emissions causing the greenhouse effect or to decarbonize our practices and our tools in a distributed and decentralized way.
From “Think globally, act locally” to “Think, feel and act fractally”
“Think globally, act locally” (Wikipedia)
The phrase “Think globally, act locally” or “Think global, act local” has been used in various contexts, including planning, environment, education, mathematics, and business. For many environmental activists, the phrase has been changed into “act globally, act locally” due the growing concern for the whole planet and thus the need of activism everywhere in the world.
Different scales: From Robert Perey (2014)
The other feature characterizing sustainability discourses is recognition that organizational change for “sustainability” is a multiscalar problem. For example, Aguilera, Rupp, Williams, and Ganapathi’s (2007) micro (individual), meso (organization), macro (country), and supra (transnational) categorization is an attempt to both explain the multilevel differences and provide direction for change interventions targeting one or more of these levels. What is notable in the literature is that scholars also recognize the need to work across more than one level (scale; e.g., Stead & Stead, 2013; Stoddart, Tindall, & Greenfield, 2012) to effect sustainability changes.
Fractals and Their Usefulness: From Robert Perey (2014)
Fractals are structures that display self-similarity regardless of scale, and in mathematics the equations that produce fractals have an iterative quality where feedback is an important aspect of generating a new structure at a different level of observation and analysis (Mandelbrot, 1982). Each fractal structure represents a whole within a whole, and while we talk of scale in a linear sense with a linear logic, fractals are anything but linear. All scales of a fractal manifest at the same time: They are coexistent, and it is only the position of the observer in relation to the “fractal network” that changes—fractals are paradoxical. Mandelbrot (2006) also noted that culture has many aspects of roughness that may be described through fractals. For example, while stable patterns of meaning or social mores organize interactions and exchanges within and among groups, they are difficult to define or delimit with detailed precision. Roughness is a paradoxically precise word for describing the fuzziness and ambiguity of social structures and the dynamics of social systems.
To think, to act and to feel:
Kimberly Nicholas: Scientists need to face both facts and feelings when dealing with the climate crisis – The Guardian US – Opinion – Wed 24 Mar 2021 06.00 EDT
My dispassionate training has not prepared me for the increasingly frequent emotional crises of climate change. What do I tell the student who chokes up in my office when she reads that 90% of the seagrasses she’s trying to design policies to protect are slated to be killed by warming before she retires? In such cases, facts are cold comfort. The skill I’ve had to cultivate on my own is to find the appropriate bedside manner as a doctor to a feverish planet; to try to go beyond probabilities and scenarios, to acknowledge what is important and grieve for what is being lost.
Only in the most recent decade of my life have I realised that feelings, manifested as physical sensations in the body such as my stomach clenching or my heart lifting, have their own wisdom. I don’t have to react to these feelings in any dramatic way if I don’t want to; all I have to do is make eye contact, wave, and not run away. Like all feelings, sadness is valid; it need not dictate my actions singlehandedly, but it deserves acknowledgment.
I know that there is much greater suffering than my own, such as in the low-lying communities in Bangladesh where rising seas are salting their drinking water and threatening their homes. I know that I have been shielded from many hardships and inequities. But I’ve decided it’s pointless to try and place the consequences of climate breakdown in competition with one another. It does not diminish the monumental losses to also grieve my personal, smaller ones.
I’ve realised that giving space to my feelings gives me more empathy with what others are going through as part of the shared human experience and helps me connect with them more deeply. Katharine Wilkinson of Project Drawdown makes a distinction in her 2018 Ted Talk between two responses to loss: a heart that simply breaks, that curls up on the couch and hides away, and a broken open heart that reconnects with the world around us, that is “awake and alive and calls for action.” No matter the object, grief and sadness focus our attention on what matters in our lives, and they turn us into human distress signals: they summon help.
It has taken me a long time to come to terms with my climate and ecological grief, but swimming through it is the only way forward. One role environmental scientists can play is to be “stewards of grief, to hold the hand of society as we enter the unknown space of the climate crisis,” as my friend Leehi Yona so beautifully wrote when the IPCC’s 1.5C report launched. As scientists, we have had much more time observing the decline of what we love. We are further down the line of where we all must get to as a society, facing hard truths and still finding ways to be kind and resilient, to do better going forward, to get through this together. We still have so much we love at stake that is worth fighting for.
Kimberly Nicholas is associate professor of sustainability science at Lund University in Sweden. This is an edited excerpt from her new book, Under the Sky We Make
Rebecca Huntley: Scientists need to face both facts and feelings when dealing with the climate crisis – The Guardian US – Sat 4 Jul 2020 16.00 EDT
It took me much longer than it should have to realise that educating people about climate change science was not enough. Due perhaps to my personality type (highly rational, don’t talk to me about horoscopes, please) and my background (the well-educated daughter of a high school teacher and an academic), I have grown up accepting the idea that facts persuade and emotions detract from a good argument. Then again, I’m a social scientist. I study people. I deal mostly in feelings, not facts. A joke I like to tell about myself during speeches is that I’m an expert in the opinions of people who don’t know what they’re talking about. Over the 15 years I’ve been a social researcher, I’ve watched with concern the increasing effects of climate change, and also watched as significant chunks of the electorate voted for political parties with terrible climate change policies. There is clearly a disconnect between what people say they are worried about and want action on and who, when given the chance, they pick to lead their country. When social researchers like me try to analyse how a person responds to climate change messages the way they do, we’re measuring much, much more than just their comprehension (or not) of the climate science. We’re analysing the way they see the world, their politics, values, cultural identity, even their gender identity. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say we’re measuring their psyche, their innermost self.