Who will take care of the climate scientists?
On why having climate emotions doesn't make climate scientists less objective, and how engaging in climate activism doesn't undermine their credibility.
Welcome back to Climate Psyched, the newsletter where we explore all things psychological, behavioral and emotional related to the climate and ecosystem crises.
The other day my husband - a scientist who studies sustainability transitions - came home and sighed. He’d given a seminar to master students about their potential future roles in academia, and the topic of how to be a scientist in a world flooding with large crises had come up. The students wanted to know whether research on climate even matter if it doesn’t bring about societal change? A question that doesn’t have an easy answer.
When working in climate, especially if it’s in a professional role, you’re often expected to be a bearer of not only knowledge and solutions, but also of hope. People expect you to know about the problem, about how to fix the problem, and about how to stay hopeful, without compromising your objectivity. It’s a lot to ask of anyone, and it sometimes neglects the fact that every single one of us who work on the climate issue in different capacities first and foremost are humans living in the very same world we’re researching or trying to help and heal. And that this: being a human, is a good thing. Even as a professional.
This month’s post delves into what leeway climate scientists have to communicate their research, but also to be living, feeling humans who exist in the midst of the climate crisis.
Situation
Recently there’s been some debate in the scientific community about how climate scientists should communicate climate research in a way that conveys the acuteness of the climate crisis, but without risking being perceived as not objective. A debate that also taps into whether scientists in their role as professionals are allowed to also be humans with emotional responses to the issues their studying.
Ulf Büntgen, a professor of environmental systems, recently wrote a comment in Nature expressing concern over climate scientists acting as activists, saying that scholars should not have a priori interests in the outcome of their studies, and that engagement in activism poses a risk that scientists become less objective in carrying out their research. Büntgen argues that blurring boundaries between science and activism potentially could diminish academic credibility, harm the environmental movement as well as political agreements for sustainable growth and energy transition.
Far from everyone would agree with Büntgen, and scientists engaging in activism is becoming increasingly common. Perhaps the most organized form climate activism in the scientific community is Scientist Rebellion who, contrary to Büntgen, argue that there’s no point in academically documenting the catastrophe humanity is facing if not willing to do anything about it. They also argue that academics are perfectly placed to rebel, since they have a high degree of credibility, exist in hubs of expertise, connected across the world and often fairly close to decision-makers. They visualize the various methods of activism in the picture below.
Explanation
Scientists Christel W. van Eck, Lydia Messling and Katharine Hayhoe wrote a response to Büntgen’s comment, called Challenging the neutrality myth in climate science and activism, in which they state that it’s a fundamental misconception to think that science can be entirely free of social, political and ethical values. A few days earlier scientists Lisa Schipper, S.S Maharaj and G.T. Pecl published an article on a similar topic: Scientists have emotional responses to climate change too.
Scientists are, as much as anyone else, humans, and they’re not the least humans who are citizens of societies facing the ongoing climate and planetary crises. In complex crises, van Eck and colleagues write, scientists often play a crucial role through engaging in dialogue with society. Conducting research is part of the job. Putting the results of that research in the ongoing societal context and communicating it to relevant people is an equally important part of the job. When the results of any research implicates that status quo is united with disaster, communication of the results will by many be considered as non-neutral. Science isn’t separate from society, and scientific results that challenge the current status quo are not less objective. Neither does it make results from climate studies any less objective if they evoke emotions in climate scientists.
Emotions are crucial to stay motivated and to guide our actions
The idea that it’s bad that scientists feeling things about the things they’re studying is, from a psychological standpoint, uneducated.
Motivation, especially intrinsic motivation (which is necessary for carrying out complex tasks over time) is closely tied to our emotions, not the least feelings of interest and curiosity. Emotions help us stay motivated, even when things get hard. Even if emotions influence decision making in multiple and sometimes complex way, emotions do provide information about both what’s important to us, and what’s going in our surrounding world. Not the least negative emotions have been essential for the survival of the human species. Fear, for example, has throughout evolution notified humans about danger and guided action towards staying safe of threats. Emotions are important for our ability to identify problems, but also to problem solve.
As Schipper and colleagues state:
Indeed, worries about the future, expressed as emotions, may also stimulate scientific curiosity and lead to success in ongoing research. Looking at the data and suggesting that the situation is grave should not be equated with being doomist or alarmist.
Having climate related emotions, that are triggered by encountering information about or experience consequences of the climate crisis is generally a very sound response to a very real problem. It doesn’t mean you’re not objective or that you’re hysteric. It means you’re paying attention. That is a good thing.
van Eck and colleagues are similarly saying that values, which also have an emotional component, are an important part of the scientific process:
For instance, societal and political values shape research questions, ensuring that policymakers can make informed decisions in addressing societal challenges. Similarly, ethical values guide data collection methods, preventing researchers from conducting intrusive studies on vulnerable populations. Social, political, and ethical values even indirectly influence the conception of the norms for scientific inquiry, such as ‘reproducibility’, ‘transparency’, and ‘generalisability’.
Emotions can act as a guide for rational and sound behavior, but emotions can of course also cloud any judgment, play into confirmation bias and dismiss data and arguments that trigger anger or disgust. Especially when emotions are unprocessed or when someone lacks skills to deal with and regulate their emotions. Part of learning emotion regulation entails learning to identify one’s own emotional tendencies, identifying one’s emotions and practicing viewing one’s emotions at enough distance to not be overwhelmed or clouded by them.
It is my firm belief and clinical experience as a psychologist that people who constantly avoid or who don’t learn to process their own emotions are more unaware by how they’re affected by them than those who adequately acknowledge and process what they’re feeling. But who also view their emotions as important information to help guide one’s decision making. Learning this takes practice and is helped by a safe environment.
Emotions get harder to handle and results get worse without psychological safety
Psychologically safe work environments are distinguished by employees feeling that they won’t be rejected for saying what they think or for being themselves, as well as by colleagues being interested in each other as humans. An environment where it’s safe to experiment and take risks. Psychological safety has been found to be associated with a better work einvironment and lower risk for burnout. When teams are psychologically safe they seem to become better at learning together, which in turn leads to better team performance. A work culture that is colored by silence and implicit demands to not show how you’re feeling is not only potentially dangerous for employees health, it increases the risk of bad perfomance.
This is why it’s ominous with reports from the scientific community about the lack of psychological safety. As Schipper and colleagues write:
Scientists who express their feelings and worries about climate change are often not encouraged by their colleagues and are instead expected to carry on without acknowledging or communicating the continued inadequacy of action required to secure a liveable and sustainable future. This forces climate scientists to ignore innate aspects of their humanity such as vulnerability, which is often a catalyst for not only courage and strength but critically for increasingly needed innovation that can improve, strengthen and transform research and methodologies
Climate scientist Kim Nicholas wrote about a similar topic a few years back:
My dispassionate training has not prepared me for the increasingly frequent emotional crises of climate change. What do I tell the student who chokes up in my office when she reads that 90% of the seagrasses she’s trying to design policies to protect are slated to be killed by warming before she retires? In such cases, facts are cold comfort. The skill I’ve had to cultivate on my own is to find the appropriate bedside manner as a doctor to a feverish planet; to try to go beyond probabilities and scenarios, to acknowledge what is important and grieve for what is being lost.
Nicholas writes how she was trained to use her brain but not her heart, to report findings but not how to deal with what those findings evoked in her. As if scientific data about how the planet is headed for disaster would be an emotionless fact. As if scientists had no stake in the world in which they live. As if scientists don’t need a psychologically safe work environment that allows space for these emotions to be processed and supported.
Psychological safety takes practice and cannot be accomplished individually in a work setting. Learning to ommunicate your own emotions as well as listening to others with patience and validation isn’t done in the blink of an eye. And as with most things, it’s better to practice step-wise when things are somewhat calm, than begin practicing once shit hits the fan and acute crisis is upon us.
Keeping credibility through acting in line with research
Büntgen’s concern about climate scientists engaging in climate activist is part of a larger ongoing discussion that lacks consensus in the scientific community. Some researchers stay strictly away from situations that can be perceived as activistic, whilst others regularly engage in demonstrations and other actions. This can partly be dependent on what type of researcher you are, as social scientist Dana R. Fisher talked about in our recent conversation in Climate Psyched.
Part of a scientists role is to communicate one’s findings in an efficient way, but what efficient communication is might differ between fields and types of results. Climate activism might be a way of efficiently communicating scientific results, without undermining scientific credibility. as initial research on scientists engaging in climate activism shows. It might even be that the engagement in climate activism communicates that the scientist considers the data to be something with real, material consequences rather than merely a paper product. There’s also american data showing that citizens want researchers to take a more active role in policy debates, to help guide political choices.
Standing at a conference and calmly talking about how the planet is in danger, while showing updated graphs, is communication filled with dissonance between the message and how it’s delivered. People perceive messages not just by what is communicated, but also how. If you don’t look, don’t sound and don’t act like you’re worried about what you’re saying, maybe it’s not that bad after all?
It seems like at least parts of the scientific community need to reconsider which different methods should be included in sound scientific communication in order to get important messages through.
There is no such thing as being neutral
Last year I wrote a post about how what’s perceived as neutral often has more to do with what lies within the current social norms, than whether it’s objectively true. When the climate research shows that carrying on with business as usual is combined with disaster and that the best chance of keeping safe is to make massive changes, it will be perceived as non-neutral since it challenges the current norm and system - this doesn’t, however, mean that it’s not a factual communication of the data.
What I wrote then is no less valid today:
When we frame actions as radical, it’s usually with reference to what happens to be the current norm or status quo - whatever breaks the norm is seen as non-neutral, political or radical. But in light of the vast body of climate research, taking bold action is about the least radical thing we can do, not to mention our best bet at upholding some sort of planetary and societal stability. Becoming passive in an attempt to stay non-political in relation to the current norm is anything but neutral in relation to climate research. When the norm is harmful, staying quiet and passive will contribute to that harm.
This is especially important in light of climate obstructive forces actively using misinformation to discredit science, but also paint activism on any message that challenges business as usual.
Action
Encourage and practice psychological safety, not the least if you’re working in climate.
Encourage the expression of climate related emotions. Offer support for these emotions and consider this to be part of strengthening the essential skill of emotion regulation.
Distinguish between what’s perceived as neutral as in existing within the current norm, and objective and nuanced facts that challenges status quo.
Remember that change often requires courage but that courage can be practiced in the presence of discomfort and distress. These emotions are valid and don’t need to be avoided - they are, as much as courage, facilitated by a strong, safe, social support.
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I Will upgrade to paid! I love your work Frida. Thank you for sharing your knowledge about climatepsychology.