Cold Science Meets Hot Weather: Environmental Threats, Emotional Messages and Scientific Storytelling

Abstract

Science is frequently called upon to provide guidance in the work towards sustainable development. However, for science to promote action, it is not sufficient that scientific advice is seen as competent and trustworthy. Such advice must also be perceived as meaningful and important, showing the need and urgency of taking action. This article discusses how science tries to facilitate action. It claims that the use of scientific storytelling—coherent stories told by scientists about environmental trajectories—are central in this; these stories provide meaning and motivate and guide action. To do this, the storylines need to include both a normative orientation and emotional appeals. Two different cases of scientific storytelling are analyzed: one is a dystopic story about a world rushing towards ecological catastrophe, and the other is an optimistic story about a world making dramatic progress. These macrosocial stories offer science-based ways to see the world and aim to foster and guide action. The article concludes by stating that using storylines in scientific storytelling can elicit fear, inspire hope, and guide action. The storylines connect cold and distant scientific findings to passionate imperatives about the need for social transformation. However, this attachment to emotions and values needs to be done reflexively, not only in order to create engagement with an issue but also to counteract a post-truth society where passionate imperatives go against scientific knowledge.

COVID-19, the Climate, and Transformative Change: Comparing the Social Anatomies of Crises and Their Regulatory Responses

“…Similar to the (contested) graphs of human progress, such as those provided by Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling/Gapminder, and graphs of environmental decay, such as those of the Great Accelerations and Planetary Boundaries [59,72] graphs, form prominent parts of the discussions on COVID-19 and climate change. These graphs communicate a lot about the direction, speed, and severity of the issues, without burdening the message with details on how units are defined and measures are performed.…”

“…By telling not only what has happened and why, but also what to do about it, factual statements and normative orientation are combined as a guidance and trigger for action [59]. Additionally, when an issue is unexpected and unknown it may be anchored within a familiar context and related to more well-known phenomena as a guidance for action [16].…”

“…Stories, metaphors, and symbols (including graphs and models) are powerful in explaining how the world works, and thereby affect how actors relate to the world [57]. Thus, visualization is a powerful vehicle to make problems understandable, but also to create dramatic stories and evoke feelings of hope and fear, thereby motivating and legitimating action [59].…”

Thinking Climate – A Mind Genomics Cartography

“…The result is the ongoing lack of specific information, compounding the growth of anxiety, and the increasingly strident rejectionism by those who fail to respond to what is believed to be an impending catastrophe. Another result, just as inaction, is a deep, perplexing, often consuming discourse on the problem, written in way which demonstrates scholarship and rhetorical proficiency, but does not lead to insights or answers, rather to well justified polemics [2][3][4][5][6]. The study reported here, a Mind Genomics 'cartography' delves into the mind of the average person, to determine what specifics of climate change are believable, what solutions are deemed to be workable, and what elements or messages about climate change engage a person's attention.…”

The institutional machinery of expertise: Producing facts, figures and futures in COVID-19

“…Graphs, projections, models and maps work seductively to present dynamic, ambiguous and contingent issues as ‘hard facts’: empirical measures that are resistant to public and political debate (Lidskog et al, 2020b). They become ‘immutable mobile’ (Latour, 1987), permanent and stable phenomena that easily travel between contexts and place – from the world politics of WHO and the UN to national discussions on closing borders to casual chats in the workplace, school and home.…”