The Climatic Socratic Method

Greetings and Happy New Year!

I don’t run into climate skeptics very often, but I encounter what I call adaptation skeptics quite frequently. These are individuals and sometimes organizations who acknowledge that climate change is happening and that many impacts are important and notable, but that we do not need to do anything differently to account for them — our existing solutions in governance, data management, decision making, planning, and resource management are all good enough.

The clearest “tell” of an adaptation skeptic is someone who insists that, because of climate change, we just need to accelerate the implementation of current — often unchanged and longstanding — initiatives. In print, you can spot adaptation skeptics in documents where any mention of climate disappears after the first paragraph or so. Adaptation skeptics are pretty widespread, cloaking their programs in the words of climate justice or environmental protection but they are unable to explain how their work will actually compensate or anticipate climate impacts. They are often at a loss to define resilience in any different way than we might have in the nineteenth century, much less the twentieth or twenty-first.

These are not bad people — they are often struggling with the transition to a new world. They are conservative when they need to move quickly.

How do you talk with an adaptation skeptic? Often the most gentle, effective approach is to point to a recently documented extreme event or climate-driven stressor and ask how their intervention would have prevented negative impacts. Asking what happens when their program loses efficacy is also useful. What options are available then? Climate change is a profound disruptor of our assumptions, and a kindly climatic-Socratic process of provocation can provoke a shift in world view.

This will be an important year for water and climate — we have the chance to change a lot of minds this year.

John Matthews

Corvallis, Oregon, USA