The weird looking guys

Posted by: Georgina Combes

Now I thought I knew quite a bit about climate change but I was shocked to learn today that polar bears could be extinct within three decades. No more fluffy, white, 6ft tall, arctic grizzlies.

And that’s only the beginning. The Arctic is often referred to as the ‘canary in the coal mine’ or, my preferred alternative, the ‘rose at the end of the vine’, because it’s the world’s early warning system. Changes in the polar environment represent much larger shifts in climate to come for the rest of the world.

But how do we communicate these scary facts without frightening people into inaction? As we know from Futerra’s Rules of the Game, creating fear without agency is dangerous. And how do we get past all the confusing terminology that comes part and parcel with climate change chat?

I’ve got a few suggestions from clever stuff I've seen and heard recently.

As Al Gore says, to solve the climate crisis we need to first overcome the citizenship crisis. We need to be more vocal with our friends and family about what we believe in. We must challenge our MPs to do everything they can to push for an 80% emissions reduction target by 2050 (on 1990 levels) at the meeting of global leaders in Copenhagen next December. And we really need to walk the climate-friendly action talk.

WWF’s 18 student climate change champions from nine countries who’ve just returned from a trip to the arctic – The Voyage for the Future - are doing just this. They’re jumpstarting a political, social, and business movement around climate change. One of them, a former Futerra intern Casper ter Kuile, has just given us a lunch and learn on his trip which he said gave him amongst other things knowledge, skills, ideas, friends and, most importantly, hope that we can salvage the planet from this mess. He’s the one who enlightened me to the fate of the polar bears.

The group filmed a short Green Finger video on their trip. My favourite of their green-fingered (literally) ‘what would ending climate change protect for you?’ answers include smiles, Russian polar bears and a place called home.

And if you’re struggling to explain whether we should be going carbon neutral, low carbon, carbon positive or even oxygen positive, avoid the jargon and show people this beautifully hand-drawn animated video from Blunt Films which takes us virtually to the arctic, questions why some dudes get all the attention and reminds us to think about the weird looking guys too.

Now we don’t want to let the walrus go the same way as the polar bears do we?

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