Scared into Despondency: Why the Fear Appeal Hasn't Stopped Climate Change

Fear appeals like Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth were very successful in scaring people about climate change - but has overemphasizing the possibility of catastrophe backfired?

Read almost anything written about the environment in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and you’ll find bone-chilling forecasts of how terrible things will be by the year 2000. If all the things they predicted had come true, the world today would be a horrible, polluted, overpopulated nightmare where we couldn’t drink the water, we would have to wear gas masks outside because the air pollution was so bad, and we couldn’t go anywhere on vacation because all the national parks had been strip-mined to make junk. And yet, like I pointed out last week, almost all of these things are better today than they were in 1970. How can that be?

The answer to why these scenarios were too pessimistic is because they were meant to be. They were using an age-old persuasive tactic called the “fear appeal”—scaring people into changing their behavior by telling them something horrible is going to happen if they don’t. And in many ways, it worked. But as effective as the fear appeal has been in the past, I wonder if it’s outlived its usefulness. Climate change is a case in point. Environmentalists have been very successful in scaring people into thinking that the future will be catastrophic if we can’t keep global warming below 2°C. Yet global carbon emissions had their largest annual increase ever in 2024. This time, the fear appeal doesn’t seem to be working. Why not?

The problem, as Richard M. Perloff explains in his book The Dynamics of Persuasion, is that a fear appeal only works when “perceived efficacy exceeds perceived threat.” If there’s a clear, straightforward, simple way to avoid danger, people are likely to listen. That was the case with a lot of the environmental victories of the 1970s. But if people aren’t convinced that the suggested action will solve the problem, they’ll focus on “fear control” instead of “danger control.”

Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is a great illustration of why the fear appeal doesn’t work with climate change. I just recently read the book version, and boy, it’s scary—he said that sea levels were going to rise 40 feet! (The worst-case IPCC predictions are actually around 3 feet). But his solution was just to use compact fluorescent lightbulbs, put up solar panels, and drive hybrid cars. Well, we’ve done all that—and more—and we haven’t stopped the glaciers from melting, decreased the frequency of hurricanes, or even lowered annual global carbon emissions. It’s becoming more and more obvious that individuals (and even governments) don’t have the power to stop climate change. The fear appeal just makes people think disaster is inevitable.

Perhaps environmentalism today would be more effective if we focused on problems that we can actually solve. We could, for example, stop mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia. We could reduce our dependence on the rare metals in our electronics that are produced with enormous environmental damage and oppression. We could educate consumers to eat healthy, whole foods instead of processed junk. We could eventually transition all of America’s farmland to organic. In fact, there are a ton of practical things that we can do to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels while helping both people and the environment. But we’ve overlooked them in our attempt to do the one thing that we actually can’t do—stop climate change.

Climate change is not the end of the world, and we can still make it a better place to live for the next generation—even if it is a bit warmer. Let’s do what the successful environmentalists of the 1970s did and focus on the things we can change. And maybe we’ll have more success if we abandon the fear appeal and focus on the positive goal of making the world a better place.