Why we shouldn't make Climate Change about Nature

In today's world, there are very few topics which are uncontroversial enough that a person can freely write about. Luckily, climate change and its media coverage seems to be one of them.

When it comes to climate change, media has taken a stance where mitigating the ill effects of human-induced climate change is portrayed as "helping nature." While any attempt to mitigate ill effects is commendable, I feel that portraying climate change in a "digestible" fashion focusing on the narrative rather than the hard truth is trying to manipulate people into doing the "right" thing.

The biggest threats of climate change are shrinkage of land area, worsening of weather phenomenon, changing of crops and crop cycles, and acceleration of carbon absorption. Each of these results reduces the long-term survival chances of human beings. Mitigating these effects must be our primary concern -- whether it's by curbing industries, or planting more trees.

While I may not be well versed or agree with the short-term prediction made by climate science, I think it's overwhelmingly clear that some changes could lead to irreparable effects. To some extent, I do empathise with the challenges faced by the climate scientists, who have to work with unreliable data and unrealistic models to predict a relentlessly chaotic phenomenon. It may be that the current predictions turn out to be wrong, but historic evidence and potential irreversibility of a few phenomena urge us to be cautious.

Most general public cannot fathom the idea that the smartest of the people, the scientists, actually make progress stumbling over at every step, just like babies learn to walk. To the general public, scientists cannot be wrong; and if the scientists are wrong even once, they lose credibility. But this phenomenon is completely at odds with the way scientific progress works. And to explain to the general public that science is mostly wrong but is still worthwhile is a tremendously tough task. So, it is no wonder that most scientists and journalists take shortcuts to avoid burdening the public with "unnecessary details." Such a view has some merits.

However, when it comes to climate change, the media portrayal of the problem currently is so far removed from reality, that today, the general public associates climate change with something completely different. Planting trees, being one with nature, going eco and bio, and carbon taxes are probably beneficial, but these are not what climate change is about. It's about a possible long-term threat to human survival on timescales that are so ridiculously large that no human mind can easily grasp. So much so, that sometimes, simple solutions to climate change can actually have the opposite effect! -- e.g., replacing a plastic bag with a cotton one is a bad idea unless the cotton bag is reused to replace plastic ones for more than about a 1000 times. What such altered media portrayal allows for is the commercial exploitation of general public by appealing to their emotional side about climate change.

Hence, from a long time, I'm a proponent of the idea that climate change should be portrayed to be about long-term survival. It may be difficult to grasp at first, and may not be commercially attractive, but may lead to broad policy decisions that may have a chance to mitigate ill effects, rather than individual decisions driven by commercial propaganda, which likely will have no or the opposite effects.

First draft: 30.08.2020

Minor edits: 05.04.2021, 19.05.2021