Staying cool when talking about global warming

We all know it: cold weather makes the discussion about global warming more heated. When weather is commonly mistaken for climate, it's the role of experts and educators to ensure the quality of debate. But how? Here are some experiences I've made.

Since last week, cold wintry weather has gripped much of Poland. The temperatures have dropped below zero and cities are shrouded with snow. This prompted Tomasz Rzymkowski, the vice-minister of education, to question the reality of global warming in a tweet that he posted after a family sledding trip: if things really were as climatologists present them, it would not be possible to have fun in snow! 

Piękna zima, jak zapowiadali zwolennicy ocieplenia klimatu. A my poszliśmy na sanki🛷 pic.twitter.com/4HqEj5uZUy

— Tomasz Rzymkowski (@TRzymkowski) January 30, 2021

While we also enjoy winter sports and games, we certainly dislike deficient arguments such as this one. Here at Swarmcheck, our mission is to improve the quality of public debate by offering innovative tools to revise common mistakes in a respectful, friendly environment. Our motto is: it’s not the people who may be right or wrong, it’s the arguments! Our solution: we assist groups and individuals in formulating correct, conclusive reasonings.

And while Minister Rzymkowski’s argument still prevails in some discussions, the main discourse among education experts and policy-makers concentrates not on the question whether climate change is real but what can be done to counteract it. This question has been the focus of a number of projects that we at Swarmcheck have implemented, including our recent work in December 2020.

This time, a group of teachers, educators and practitioners from the Visegrad countries (Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) gathered to discuss the model of climate-focused school: How do we introduce climate education to schools? Should it be incorporated into the existing curriculum or should it be a separate subject? Who should be primarily responsible for its introduction?

These are just a few questions discussed during our workshops. 334 opinions were contributed in several days. It might seem that there were as many answers as there were participants - but thanks to employment of the argument mapping method it was possible to make sense out of it. Each of four groups worked with two trainers who assisted them in formulating logically correct, comprehensible theses. Focus on argumentative relations between individual voices helped to organize and visualise knowledge without giving priority to any particular cluster of opinions or problems.

The benefits of using Swarmcheck when debating complex matters such as climate change are manifold. Participating in our workshops helps to:

→ improve collective intelligence and the quality of decision-making processes in a group,

→ teach participants to avoid costly mistakes caused by cognitive biases,

→ stimulate knowledge-sharing,

→ reach a common understanding of issues and common conclusions,

→ make every participant feel comfortable and heard when expressing their opinions.

Let’s go back to minister Rzymkowski and imagine he had participated in the workshop: he would have had the chance to articulate his argument (which would have probably gone as follows: we don’t need climate education because climate change itself is questionable: in Poland, we’re currently experiencing frosty weather). The structure of the map would have made it clear, however, that the argument doesn’t hold since there is no logical relation between its parts (climate education in Visegrad countries / weather conditions in Poland). Each participant could easily correct it by formulating their own premise: Why should one not think so? Because global warming is an ongoing, gradual process that does not prevent cold, snowy weather from occurring. They could even add a source to that premise: the website of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute of America. Assuming that most participants, trained by our rationality experts, would have detected the flaws of the Minister's thinking, they would also have generated a number of undermining premises, thus clearly marking their disagreement on the map and giving Minister Rzymkowski the chance to correct his beliefs. And last but not least, thanks to the principle of anonymity of the mapping process, he would have had the comfort of doing it incognito.

Let’s hope, then, that more people involved in education and policy-making will participate in argument-mapping workshops. Teaching how to avoid biases and prejudices on daily basis, we welcome co-operations from all sides.

Alicja Rybkowska holds a PhD in philosophy from the Jagiellonian University, Cracow. Her academic interests are centred around the question how intellectual trends influence cultures and societies. In Optimum Pareto she works as an argument analyst, rationality trainer and program coordinator. She's currently based in Vienna.