Updated at 17:10

As a journalist, I’ve written about climate change long enough to know that no matter what is your approach to tackle the issue, you will always face some comment of disagreement. I’ve tried everything: longs stories, short stories, beautiful explanatory graphics, bullet key points, pure scientific stories, stories with the human side. You name it. Still there were always some people insisting in don’t believe in it. Period.

This feeling was reinforced when I heard this 14 year old girl, Erin Gustafson, maintain her disbelief in what she calls as a “propaganda” even after a very long explanation with the best scientific knowledge about climate change available today. I had the impression that she simply chose not accept, even with a professor answering absolutely all her questions.

So I had what I thought a brilliant idea. Reach as many climate scientists and communicators as I could to ask their help with this challenge using a new strategy: a tweet with 140 characters trying to convince a skeptical, denier, disbeliever – whatever name you prefer – about climate change.

My intention was to have a nice collection of strong sentences and then work with them in same graphic way. Following the suggestions of “The Debunking handbook”, I imagined the tweets could be effective for at least two aspects: would focus on the facts and be simple enough to be more cognitively attractive. I also suggested them to use not just science, but also emotions and values in their sentences.

I sent 22 e-mails with the same request to renowned climate researchers at MIT, Harvard, Yale e from some Brazilian institutions as well to a few climate communicators from NGOs. Seriously, 22! Hoping that I could get maybe 10. But the result surprised me negatively:

3 positive answers

1 traditional answer suggesting me some papers, but without a tweet

1 “interesting idea, I will think about it”

1 “ I’d be glad to help but I am dealing with a medical emergency with my daughter”

1 “I’m not sure I can reduce this argument to 140 characters”

1 “If I understand correctly, you are asking Prof. XXX to distill mountains of data into a single sentence?”

I guess the last answer was probably what some of the others also thought because the rest 16  14 people invited to participate in this challenge just decided to ignore me.

In a sincere appreciation to those three (two Brazilian researchers and one environmentalist that were my sources in several occasions) who gave me answers (more than one, in fact), I will share them here.

“Believe in science or not, reducing emissions, pollution, preparing ourselves for severe weather is unreservedly good. It is about your and mine welfare.”
Carrlos Rittl, environmentalist, Observatório do Clima

“The problem with deniers is not lack of information. Some of them are paid for the fossil fuel industry, so their concerns are economical not scientific”
Paulo Artaxo, professor of Environmental Physics, University of Sao Paulo, and member of IPCC

Wei-Hock Soon, scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, have been claiming that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming. Released documents showed he has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade.

“What about we try to build a sustainable society considering the responsible use of natural resources?”
Paulo Artaxo, professor of Environmental Physics, University of Sao Paulo, and member of IPCC

“The extreme events are getting more frequents. The number of days with temperatures above 34ºC has been growing exponentially since 1990.”
Eduardo Assad, agronomist, Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa)

***

I think my unsuccessful task can at least bring some thoughts for discussion. I wasn’t expecting to explain the entire issue just in 140 characters. But imagine something like a campaign in Twitter. If hundreds of smart people, with strong messages, started tweeting these messages with hashtags like #thinkclimate, #changeyourmind, #climatematters. It wouldn’t just be one sentence, but many. Honestly I think could be a powerful thing.

Of course that by myself, for the sake of this assignment, I could have found hundreds of facts to present here as a truth claims about climate change. Just for the record, for me, one of the most eloquent is this:

2014 was the warmest year since 1880. The 10 warmest years in the record, with the exception of 1998, have now occurred since 2000.

But my intention was to use real people, that dedicate their lives to this issue, to help me think in a different way to convince people. I guess the idea of a tweet may have sound offensive and almost absurd. But what shocked me was to find almost no one willing to try something new. At least not here in a school project.