Which Climate Persona Are You?
A Language of God reflection
On the most recent episode of the podcast I host, Language of God, I talked to climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. She’s a pretty big deal. On the same day this episode dropped, she was also a guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
Katharine is also a Christian, and she has been a big help to us at BioLogos as we have moved further into the intersection of science and faith as it relates to climate change. Lots of Christians prefer to talk about creation care instead of climate change. Caring for creation ought to include supporting actions that will limit climate change, but it’s bigger than that. And the real issue with the terminology is that supporting “creation care” doesn’t sound quite so much like you’re in the pocket of the liberal side of the culture wars.
Rhetoric — in the classical sense of using language effectively — is really important in talking about climate change. We are hard-wired to identify with groups, and for whatever reason the groups most conservative Christians identify with have been suspicious of climate change. Appealing instead to the theological idea that we have been commissioned by God to care for creation is a more productive strategy.
But it turns out there are not just believers and the deniers. Hayhoe has just released a new book, and in it she describes six different groups and their attitudes toward climate change (drawing on the book by Leiserowitz and Maibach, Global Warming’s Six Americas). In the world of internet user experience, we would call these six different audiences or personas. And when you’re having a conversation with someone about climate change, it is good to know which persona you’re dealing with.
Of course assigning distinct categories across a continuum is never a perfect science — kind of like determining where one species stops and another one starts in the process of evolution. There are lots of gradations, and the lines between categories are blurry. But it is helpful to see some general criteria around which people are clustered.
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At one end of the spectrum are the Alarmed. As of 2020, they make up 26% of the U.S. population. They fully accept the scientific consensus that human activity is primarily responsible for the increase in overall temperature and resulting extreme weather. But even as they support policies that address climate change, many of these are not sure what else they should be doing.
The next group is the Concerned. They are about 28% of population and also support climate policies in principle. But they typically see the threat as more distant and not so dire.
Then we have 20% who are described as Cautious. They are not convinced that climate change is a serious threat.
The bottom half of the spectrum starts with the Disengaged. They are at 7% of the U.S. and don’t know much about the climate crisis, and don’t really care.
More active in their dismissal of climate science are the Doubtful. They make up 11% of the population and believe that rising temperatures are not a serious threat.
The far end of the spectrum is occupied by 7% of Americans who are the most susceptible to conspiracy theories and to passing on misinformation. They are best described as Dismissive. They angrily reject that humans have caused climate change and that it is a threat.
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So the good news is that the Disengaged, Doubtful, and Dismissive make up only a quarter of the population as of 2020. And it’s going to be harder and harder to be Disengaged or Doubtful as the climate gets warmer and the extreme weather worse. Some of them may be pushed into Dismissives, but some will move the other direction on the spectrum and become more open to considering the threat.
It’s mostly pointless to try persuading Dismissives with facts and reason. They are not (at least as a rule) bad people, but have already made up their minds that climate change is a hoax, and cherrypick data and latch onto misinformation. There are a lot of similarities with evolution deniers and anti-vaxxers. There are values like freedom which they hold more dearly than care and compassion, and so must believe that the scientific establishment is massively deluded or corrupt.
Katharine Hayhoe has some really interesting things to say about how to connect with people in the other groups. She has a winsome way of speaking the truth in love. I hope you’ll give my conversation with her a listen. In my (not-so-humble) opinion, it’s interesting and important.