Numerous climate bombshells exploded at the Cop30 talks in Brazil – but none quite so quietly devastating as the remarks from the governor of California.
Midway through a summit where heart-stopping scientific reports showed relentlessly rising temperatures, rapidly depleting carbon budgets and fast-approaching tipping points, Gavin Newsom delivered a head-spinning dose of reality.
“With respect to the global audience, the vast majority of my audience doesn’t know what Celsius is,” he said.
“You’re talking 1.5 degrees Celsius. How many more degrees is that in Fahrenheit?
RM Block
“We talk about greenhouse gas emissions. Where? Do they float in the sky. Where do they land?”
[ Despite the fudges and bickering, Cop is still the best hope we’ve gotOpens in new window ]
So, most of the people in the richest, most powerful and most climate-polluting country in the world don’t understand the basics.
And 1.5 degrees Celsius? The binding pledge, the protest slogan, the holy grail of climate mitigation?
They don’t know what it means because Americans sweat and shiver in Fahrenheit. Oops.
So what’s to be done? “We have to use a different language,” Newsom said.
It was a theme that ran throughout Cop30. Communicating the climate crisis has become all the more critical as tackling the crisis becomes all the more urgent.
Yet it has also become more difficult, because in every unguarded nook and cranny of social media, disinformation is deliberately deployed to undermine efforts on both fronts.
Brazil’s president, Lula da Silva, had this on his mind in his opening speech to world leaders gathered in the host city, Belém.
He spoke of the “disconnection between the halls of diplomacy and the real world”.
“People may not understand the meaning of emissions or metric tons of carbon, but they feel the pollution,” he said.
“They may not assimilate the meaning of a one-and-a-half degree increase in global temperature, but they suffer from droughts, floods and hurricanes.”
Exploiting the disconnect were “extremist forces” who “peddle untruths to obtain electoral gains”.
But it’s not easy to build connections when the “halls of diplomacy” keep getting bigger and the “real world” ever more distant.
Holly Kaufman was at her first Cop in years and found the sheer scale of it astounding. As part of Bill Clinton’s climate team when he was US president in the 1990s, the environmental adviser had attended some of the earliest Cops.
“I remember when the whole thing took place in one hotel,” she said, arriving at an entrance where 50,000 people passed through.
Size brought opportunities and challenges.
Haufman researches plastics and climate change, gathering evidence that plastics, which are made from oil, are not only undercounted as a source of carbon emissions, but their impact on natural carbon sinks is ignored.
“Microplastics are in the soils and the seas and they affect the ability of these natural sinks to absorb carbon,” she explained, repeating the lines she hoped to use on official delegates.
With so many people in attendance, she had a good chance of bumping into some. But again, with so many people in attendance, she would be competing with others also trying to communicate their concerns.
She also worried about how to communicate the problem to the wider public. “People are told they’re doing a great job if they recycle, but recycling doesn’t solve the plastic problem. It just tells people it’s OK to use plastics.”
Anand Ethirajalu has also grappled with how to communicate climate issues, but thinks he may have cracked it – at least for his target audience.
A leading light in regenerative farming from the Save Soil movement, he’s spearheading reform of agricultural production in India.
[ Eamon Ryan: At Cop30 I ask myself, is this really working?Opens in new window ]
Soils exhausted by intensive monoculture farming, by artificial fertilisers and by heavy pesticide loads become weak, parched, depleted of nutrients, starved of biodiversity, useless as carbon sinks, and prone to being washed away in heavy rains or devastating landslides.
Ethirajalu says he rarely mentions any of this to the subsistence farmers Save Soil works with to develop small holdings into organic, multi-crop, tree-bordered, nature-supporting hubs of healthy production.
“The farmer doesn’t care about soil, he doesn’t care about nature, he only cares about his survival,” he claimed.
“So we stopped talking about soil and nature and climate change, and what we started saying was, ‘If you do this kind of regenerative practice you will save 40 per cent of your production costs’.
“‘If you forgo 10-15 per cent of your land to plant trees on your boundary, you are building an asset worth good money in 15 years so it’s a life insurance for you.’
“We are taking regenerative practices and packaging it and selling it as an economic plan, and that is why it works.”
Newsom’s message was much the same.
“It’s not about electric power, it’s about economic power,” he said, referring to the concerns of the average US household.
He pointed to analysis that showed Donald Trump’s abandonment of Biden-era clean energy initiatives would add 10 per cent to domestic bills this year.
“That’s a kitchen table issue,” he said.
But it’s not just how climate action is packaged that matters, but how it’s delivered.
Dr Clare Noone from University of Galway says discussion of the subject needs “urgency without despair, optimism without denial”.
“There are difficult conversations that we have to have,” she said.
“But I’ve been working in this field for a long time and, say 10 years ago, there was an awful lot of denial out there. Any time I told people I was a climate scientist they would hate you, they went straight for you.
“I think it’s really changed. I don’t really meet that many people who are climate-deniers any more. Now when I tell people I’m a climate scientist, they want to hear more. They want to know how can we change things.”
Her time at Cop30 tipped her towards more optimism. “It’s an amazing achievement that we can all come together and not kill each other.
“If we can keep talking to each other, we’ll find we have a lot of common concerns and everything to gain from working together to solve them.”
