AT A recent dinner at the University of Oxford, a senior researcher in atmospheric physics was telling me about his coming holiday in Thailand. I asked him whether he was concerned that his trip would make a contribution to climate change – we had, after all, just sat through a two-hour presentation on the topic. “Of course,” he said blithely. “And I’m sure the government will make long-haul flights illegal at some point.”

I had deliberately steered our conversation this way as part of an informal research project that I am conducting – one you are welcome to join. My participants so far include a senior adviser to a leading UK climate policy expert who flies regularly to South Africa (“my offsets help set a price in the carbon market”), a member of the British Antarctic Survey who makes several long-haul skiing trips a year (“my job is stressful”), a national media environment correspondent who took his family to Sri Lanka (“I can’t see much hope”) and a Greenpeace climate campaigner just back from scuba diving in the Pacific (“it was a great trip!”).

Intriguing as their dissonance may be, what is especially revealing is that each has a career predicated on the assumption that information is sufficient to generate change. It is an assumption that a moment’s introspection would show them was deeply flawed.

It is now 44 years since US president Lyndon Johnson’s scientific advisory council warned that our greenhouse gas emissions could generate “marked changes in climate”. That’s 44 years of research costing, by one estimate, $3 billion per year, symposia, conferences, documentaries, articles and now 80 million references on the internet. Despite all this information, opinion polls over the years have shown that 40 per cent of people in the UK and over 50 per cent in the US resolutely refuse to accept that our emissions are changing the climate. Scarcely 10 per cent of Britons regard climate change as a major problem.

I do not accept that this continuing rejection of the science is a reflection of media distortion or scientific illiteracy. Rather, I see it as proof of our society’s failure to construct a shared belief in climate change.

I use the word “belief” in full knowledge that climate scientists dislike it. Vicky Pope, head of the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change in Exeter, UK, wrote in The Guardian earlier this year: “We are increasingly asked whether we ‘believe in climate change’. Quite simply it is not a matter of belief. Our concerns about climate change arise from the scientific evidence.”

I could not disagree more. People’s attitudes towards climate change, even Pope’s, are belief systems constructed through social interactions within peer groups. People then select the storylines that accord best with their personal world view. In Pope’s case and in my own this is a world view that respects scientists and empirical evidence.

But listen to what others say. Most regard climate change as an unsettled technical issue still hotly debated by eggheads. Many reject personal responsibility by shifting blame elsewhere – the rich, the poor, the Americans, the Chinese – or they suspect the issue is a Trojan horse built by hair-shirted environmentalists who want to spoil their fun.

Many people regard climate change as a Trojan horse built by hair-shirted environmentalists
The climate specialists in my informal experiment are no less immune to the power of their belief systems. They may be immersed in the scientific evidence, yet they have nonetheless developed ingenious storylines to justify their long-haul holidays.

How, then, should we go about generating a shared belief in the reality of climate change? What should change about the way we present the evidence for climate change?

For one thing, we should become far more concerned about the communicators and how trustworthy they appear. Trustworthiness is a complex bundle of qualities: authority and expertise are among them, but so too are honesty, confidence, charm, humour and outspokenness.

Many of the maverick, self-promoting climate sceptics play this game well, which is one reason they exercise such disproportionate influence over public opinion. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on the other hand, plays it badly. Rather than let loose its most presentable participants to tell the world how it achieves consensus on an unprecedented scale, it fails even to provide a list of the people involved in the process. It has no human face at all: the only images on its website are the palace or beach resort where it will hold its next meeting.

Since people tend to put most trust in those who appear to share their values and understand their needs, it is crucial we widen the range of voices speaking on climate change – even if this means climate experts relinquishing some control and encouraging others who are better communicators to speak for them.

Another key to achieving a widely held belief in climate change is collective imagination. We will never fully appreciate the risks unless we can project ourselves into the future – and that requires an appeal to the collective emotional imagination. In the past years I have been delighted to observe a growing partnership between scientists and the creative arts, such as retreats for scientists, artists and writers.

It is clear that the cautious language of science is now inadequate to inspire concerted change, even among scientists. We need a fundamentally different approach. Only then will scientists be in a position to throw down the ultimate challenge to the public: “We’ve done the work, we believe the results, now when the hell will you wake up?”

George Marshall is founder of the Climate Outreach Information Network in Oxford, UK

A small milk producer north of Stockholm is expected to be the first company to sport the “climate-certified” tag. One way it cut its use of energy and nutrients was by switching from chemical-based fertilisers to manure.

The scheme is voluntary and firms must prove they have reduced greenhouse gas emissions in order to earn a label. “The only thing we’re guaranteeing is that improvements have been made,” says Anna Richert, an adviser to the Federation of Swedish Farmers (LRF), and head of the team developing the criteria for labelling products. “This could mean reductions in emissions of anything from 5 to 80 per cent.”

Danielle Nierenberg of Worldwatch Institute, a Washington DC based think tank, says that there is still a shortage of firm figures for emissions produced when growing, processing, shipping and selling most foods. “Because we don’t have a lot of good scientific data, I think there’s a risk that companies will claim things they can’t back up, and greenwash products that might not be climate friendly,” she says.

Richert says this won’t happen because each product will be certified independently. “We’re quite certain the system won’t be abused.”

Despite the financial recession, venture capital investment in green technology rose, for the first time in six months, during the second quarter of 2009 – and the biggest winner was transport-related technology, according to the report, issued this week by the Cleantech Group and Deloitte.

The problems faced by the traditional automobile industry, particularly companies in the US, are well documented. But for many investors, now is an “historic opportunity” to take a chunk of the market themselves by supporting new clean transportation options, says Brian Fan, senior director of research at Cleantech.

Chock full

Those investors were perhaps buoyed by government initiatives to support green technology, including President Obama’s high-profile multi-trillion-dollar budget request for 2010, which was chock full of funding for US science and technology ventures.

Over the past three months, venture capital invested $600 million in green transportation – biofuels, and new vehicle and battery technology. The big winners include V-Vehicles, a San Diego based startup that raised $100 million to build fuel-efficient cars in Louisiana.

Reyer Gerlagh, an economist with a specialism in environmental policy at the University of Manchester in the UK, thinks the new trend is good news. “Venture capitalists not only shape their own future by their self-fulfilling beliefs – they’re probably also very influential in shaping other’s beliefs,” he says.

That’s important, because venture capitalists are far too small to make a difference alone. “The amount of funds required to turn our energy system around are beyond the scale of venture capitalists,” says Gerlagh.

Solar slump

Andrew Simms, policy director at New Economics Foundation (nef) agrees. “The big technological changes almost never happen without substantial injections of public money,” he says. Despite government rhetoric, he thinks the amount spent on green technology is lower than it could be.

The boost in transportation spending is likely a hangover of last year’s oil crisis as much as a result of government cash injections, he says. “That sent out a profound message about the need for the next generation technology.”

Although green technology was up 12 per cent on the first quarter of 2009, rising to $1.2 billion, that’s still 44 per cent down on a year ago – and venture capitalist investment in some areas continues to fall.

Solar power has been particularly badly hit. Investment dropped from $1.2 billion in the third quarter of 2008 to $114 million by the second quarter of 2009.

But Mark Jensen, managing partner of the Venture Capital Services Group at Deloitte, and a co-author of the new study, remains positive. He says solar power investment is down because companies are investing in smaller and less expensive projects – including improvements to solar chips to boost efficiency – rather than focusing on thin-film solar or concentrated solar-thermal technologies.