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How Extreme Weather Convinced Obama to Fight Climate Change

Apocalyptic imagery forced Obama's climate strategy to 'evolve.'
Image: White House.gov

Climate change is on the president's brain these days—after years of pushing the issue to the bottom of the agenda, it looks like a bitter taste of the apocalyptic finally bumped it up.

The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin took a long look at how the Obama administration is approaching global warming, and found that the president is suddenly devoting large swaths of his time to the issue. He's receiving a stream of science briefings, scheduling meetings with governors to push for policy, and looking for every feasible way to reduce carbon emissions with his executive powers. He's rarely, if ever, been this animated on the issue before.

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Sure, Obama is probably thinking about his legacy as he heads down the home stretch of his second term. But he's also been galvanized by at least two extreme weather disasters: Hurricane Sandy and the drought that's currently crippling California and the southwest. When Obama was shown before-and-after satellite images of California, White House counselor John Podesta reportedly said it was "a 'Houston, we have a problem' moment." The president went on to press eight governors in western states to begin planning for further climate disruption.

Other aides say that Hurricane Sandy also shook the president, and changed his thinking on the issue. Sandy was devastating in a sort of disaster flick-meets-biblical End Times sense; floods, fires, winds, and rain swallowed lives, overtook buildings, and knocked out the lights of the nation's biggest city. The images of post-Sandy New York were conventionally and disturbingly apocalyptic, yet they offered a glimpse of a condition scientists had long been warning could become permanent in our CO2-saturated world.

Of course Obama had been aware of anthropogenic global warming on an academic level—in 2008, he campaigned on promises to rein in carbon pollution and bolster clean energy (so, it should be noted, did his rival John McCain), and supported a bill that would have put a price on greenhouse gas emissions if it had ever made it through Congress. He even delivered that infamous line at his inaugural address that claimed it would be the moment "when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." A palliative to a disaster of apocalyptic proportions, if there ever were one.

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Yet he frustrated green groups by giving precedence to other issues, like health care, and failed to make climate change a dominant theme of his presidency.

So you can imagine the impact that walking through the drowned rubble of the most iconic American city while the headlines were blaring "It's Global Warming, Stupid" might have on a scientifically informed president—this was what those models projecting rising sea levels and increasingly intense hurricanes were describing, and according to the stats, it was only going to get worse.

Drought, storms, and floods—it looks like the apocalyptic amalgam may finally have put some fire in Obama's veins.

Why does it matter how and when Obama decided roll up his sleeves on climate? For one, there's an ongoing debate in the science, media, and activist communities about how the threat of climate change should be communicated to the public. Some note that floods, drought, wildfires, and hurricanes are all increasingly fueled by climate change, and each applicable event should be explained in that context. Meanwhile, others argue that when the media emphasizes disaster impacts, it can overwhelm the public or even tip them towards frustrated skepticism.

In a 2009 study published in Science Communications, researchers wrote that “Although shocking, catastrophic, and large-scale representations of the impacts of climate change may well act as an initial hook for people’s attention and concern, they clearly do not motivate a sense of personal engagement with the issue and indeed may act to trigger barriers to engagement such as denial." Surely, conservatives who doubt climate change mock environmentalists for their apocalyptic warnings, and have branded them "alarmists."

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However, responses from the public and Obama to Sandy, as well as other analysis, provide a rebuke to that conclusion—when you're afraid for the future of your own home (which those scientists might consider a small-scale representation of the impact of climate change) or the homes of those you're directly responsible for, fear can surely be a motivator.

Mayor Bloomberg invested in upgrading New York's infrastructure to make it more resilient, and the federal government has chipped in—most recently, it's building a network of emergency gas tanks to be used in future Sandys. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the storm, 69 percent of New Yorkers said they thought that global warming had urged Sandy on.

How and why people come to believe that climate change is a politically actionable threat—and whether they maintain that belief—still isn't well understood. Political and ideological biases factor in, recent weather events play a role in formulating public opinion, and so does the temperature at any given time: Polls swing in favor of climate belief in hotter months, and away in unusually cold ones.

Right now, despite the mountain of evidence that demonstrates humans are fueling planetary warming, climate change denial is dipping to depressing lows in the US. The dip can be explained in part by misinformation from conservative news outlets, organized political opposition to government solutions, and the might of fossil fuel industry lobbying, but not entirely.

Scholars have argued that climate change lacks a clear bridging metaphor—the ozone layer, for example, was depicted as a shield that was being destroyed, an image that conjured urgency and easy digestion—and leaves global warming ill-defined and less examined in our popular culture. Getting locked inside a greenhouse just doesn't seem as eminently pressing a threat, perhaps.

So, the debate over how scientists and the media can most accurately convey the existential risk climate change poses to human civilization, as well as over why and when people choose to pay attention, is more heated than ever. But Obama's "evolution" on climate change, it seems, is a case study of the efficacy of extreme weather narratives. Unlike his stance on gay rights, which was spurred on by political organization and rapidly spreading institutional tolerance, Obama seems inspired to action by the destruction he's witnessed, firsthand, playing out in his backyard.

A garden variety apocalypse might not be a good bridging metaphor for climate change, either—if the world is crumbling inexorably away, everywhere at once, perhaps our will to act would be stymied. But once you've seen the waters rising up to your doorstep, maybe the need for metaphors becomes obsolete, and the instinct to start hauling sandbags takes takes over.