Stunning News from the Memesphere: Forest Fires had no Effect on the Public's Perception of Climate Change

In 2018, the fires in California and in other parts of the world have been especially devastating. But they had little or no effect on people's perception of global warming and climate change. It seems that we are operating on the basis of a wrong model of governance: the bottom-up mechanism is simply not working.

This year, we had the largest forest fires ever seen in history in California. And we had terrible forest fires in Greece, Portugal, and Scandinavia. Climate scientists were quick in stating that these fires were made more likely and more severe by global warming, but you don't need to be a climate scientist to understand that higher temperatures mean drier conditions and more fires.

Then, if you live, as I do, in a bubble in the memesphere where climate change is regarded as a serious and imminent problem, you surely had the impression that the fires of this summer was an important factor in affecting the perception of the general public. All that sound and fury couldn't signify nothing, right? I saw several self-congratulatory messages in the meme bubble stating something like, "now they will start understanding the problem of climate change!"

Alas, that's not true. The results are stark clear: there is NO evidence of an increased public interest in global warming as a result of the fires. Below, you can see the results of a search on Google Trends for the United States. These data record the number of times that a certain term was searched on the Google Search Engine.

Note how the interest in the term "wildfires" spikes up in correspondence with major wildfire events. You can see in the graph the three California fires of 2017, August, October, and November. You can also see the rising interest in the 2018 fires. But climate change? No detectable effect. At best, a very minor increase, not even compensating the decline generated by the Trump administration starting to use deception by omission. (note how the spike in interest in climate change in 2017 is the result of Trump's announcement that the US would withdraw from the Paris treaty). Other countries showed the same pattern: I could detect some rising interest in climate during the 2018 fire season only in France, in Germany, and in some other countries of central Europe. A minor effect, anyway.

All that is nothing less than stunning. We had this big disaster, fires everywhere, giant columns of smoke, incinerated buildings, all pointing directly to global warming. Of course, it is possible to argue that there are other factors that caused the fires, but at least you would think that people would have been stimulated to look over the Web on the subject. Instead, nothing, zero, null, zilch, nada. No detectable rise in interest in climate change despite the fires. People just didn't make the connection.

So, what's happening? One of the problems is that the media didn't emphasize the climate factor in causing the fires. The many articles published on the subject normally contained a few sentences about the effects of climate change buried somewhere in the text, but the subject never appeared in the title and was never emphasized in the summaries. But it was not a conspiracy of the media: simply, they found that mentioning climate change in the news about the fires was a "palpable ratings killer." So, the media had no interest in diffusing a subject that the public found uninteresting and the public found the subject uninteresting because it was not diffused by the media. It is a damping feedback which is gradually marginalizing climate change to the status of a non-problem. (see this post on Cassandra's Legacy and this article).

In the end, the problem is that we have a wrong model for how to generate action against climate change. We tend to think that, as the change becomes more evident in the form of major disasters, people will take notice and that will force politicians and opinion leaders to do something. That's not happening. We are having giant fires, scorching heatwaves, and droughts, besides, of course, rising temperatures. But people don't care if they are not directly affected and, if they are, they have other priorities than worrying about climate change. The bottom-up model of diffusion of the climate change meme is simply not working.

So, what do we need? One thing that can be said is that no major environmental problem was ever solved by means of a bottom-up meme diffusion mechanism: refrigerator owners never pushed for their CFC refrigerating fluid to be replaced with non-ozone depleting fluids. Instead, manufacturers were forced by law to stop their production of CFCs. We need to find a way to go in that direction in order to stop greenhouse emissions, hoping that it is not too late.


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As a further note, during this year's fire season, I published a comment on an Italian newspaper on the fires in Greece, trying to highlight the connection with climate change. The result was discouraging: most commenters angrily disagreed with me and much preferred a conspiracy theory that attributed the fires to "arsonists." It seems that not only people can't see the connection between forest fires and climate change, they become positively angry when it is pointed out to them.

Cecil the lion: understanding the secret of a supermeme (and its relevance to climate change communication)

A "meme" is a unit of knowledge in the communication space. Memes tend to go viral and diffuse rapidly; some diffuse so fast that they can rightly be defined as "supermemes". Above, you can see the result of a Google Trends search where the meme "Cecil the Lion" shows an incredibly rapid growth, overtaking the number of searches of a well known political term, such as "Hillary." And it keeps growing! It is a true "supermeme".  

Communication, nowadays, is mostly based on the ability to make certain concepts "go viral", that is able to diffuse by themselves over the Web, generating "memes," entities able to self- reproduce in the communication space. So, for years, scientists and policy makers have tried to create memes telling people about the danger of climate change. On the whole, it has been an abject failure, despite heroic efforts. The idea that climate change is real, it is human made, and it is dangerous just doesn't seem to stick in most people's mind. In other words, it doesn't generate memes.

So, what causes a concept to go viral? We can learn something on this point by studying a recent meme, the one relative to the killing of Cecil the Lion. Using Google Trends to measure the number of the relative Internet searches, we see that this meme grew so rapidly that it can rightly be defined as a "supermeme," comparable in intensity to searches relative to political and sporting events, that usually dominate the search space.

"Cecil the lion" is having so much success because it has the three basic characteristics that make a meme a supermeme. These are  1) Be simple, 2) Have a villain, 3) Be reassuring. Let's verify:

1. It is a simple story (man kills lion)
2. It has a villain (evil hunter)
3. It is reassuring (it is not us who are destroying wildlife, it is evil hunters)

These are very general features of all effective memes, in particular of political ones. Think of Saddam Hussein as another example: 1) Simple story (he is building weapons of mass destruction, 2) a villain (he hates our freedom) and 3) Reassuring (we bomb him and everything will be fine). Maybe it is possible to create supermemes with different characteristics, but it is surely very, very difficult.

From these considerations, we can probably understand why it is so difficult to create effective climate memes that carry the right message: climate science is not simple, the villain is us, and the story is disquieting, rather than reassuring. On the contrary, creating "evil" climate memes is so easy! The concepts that climate change is does not exist, it is not our fault, it is not dangerous, seem to be an everlasting spring of memes. For instance, the "climategate" story turned out to be a very successful meme because it has the three characteristics:

1. It is a simple story (scientists are conspiring against the public)
2. It has a villain (evil scientists)
3. It is reassuring (climate change is a hoax, hence not our fault).

We can compare the results of "climategate" with the most successful good climate meme that I could find; the Pope's encyclical on climate. Unfortuately, the Pope's text doesn't have the three "magic" characteristics and note how small its impact has been in comparison with that of climategate.

So, it is a steep barrier that we face in creating good climate memes. Not impossible, surely: we might consider the story of Cecil the Lion as an example of a positive meme about the need of conserving the ecosystem. At least, it shows that there are plenty of people, out there, who care about this issue. But it is also true that the meme rapidly degenerated into a witch hunt. In part, the killer of the lion deserved nothing less, but the three magic characteristics always involve something "evil", the hunt against the villain, which is not what we want to do with the climate issue.

It looks like we are doomed, aren't we? Maybe, but there is also hope. First of all, Google Trends gives us some data on the impact of a meme, but not the whole story. It tells us how many people actively search for a concept, not how many of them are exposed to that concept.

So, if you use Google Trend to get data on the concept of the "97% consensus" on climate, you find that the number of searches has been too small to generate a curve. Similarly, "climate consensus" doesn't generate a significant memetic behavior. Apparently, people are not actively searching for an estimate of the number of scientists who are convinced that anthropogenic climate change is real. However, if you search Google for ("97% consensus" climate), you get more than 350,000 results. That compares not so badly with "climategate", producing 570,000 results. Then, if you look for "Pope climate change," you have 25 million pages and "climategate" fades away in the distance.

From this, I think we can say that there are good climate memes having a significant impact on the debate. The "97% consensus" is one. It doesn't diffuse as fast as evil climate memes, but if you note how rabidly it has been attacked and denied, it is certainly very effective. Even better has been the impact of the Pope's encyclical; also strongly attacked by climate deniers.

So, I think that we can learn a few things from this analysis. One is that a lot of disinformation about climate change comes in the form of memes and it will continue to come in this form as long as there will be money to be made with fossil fuels. We need to learn how to recognize these evil memes in order to fight them. We should remember that one of the reasons why they are so effective is that most people don't normally understand that they being manipulated (as Baudelaire said, "the devil's best trick is to convince people that he doesn't exist."). But, if the inner mechanisms of climate disinformation memes are exposed, then they become much less effective.
 
We can also learn that we can fight effectively in this asymmetric communication war, even without supermemes and evil tricks. Clearly,  promoting action against climate change can't be done using the same methods used to sell a brand of cereal. We need to learn more about how to carry the message to opinion leaders and decision makers. We are learning how to do that, for instance by diffusing the concept of consensus and on the basis of the natural tendency of people to care for others (that's the core of the Pope's encyclical ).

In the end, it is a war that we can win and that we are going to win (with or without memes) as the evidence of climate change mounts and becomes impossible to ignore. It is comfortable to fight on the side of truth!