Many types of action are required to tackle climate change

Sir

Sanjay Khanna's survey of climate-campaign activities (Nature 461, 1058–1059; 2009) implies that the arts and advertising ought to be helping to bring into being a “worldwide consensus for action”. But the point is not to engineer a global consensus for action, as though the 'action' that is being sought is somehow self-evident, unambiguous and uncontested. Palpably, it is not.

Instead, the urgency is to articulate the many types of action — individual or collective, selfish or altruistic, conservative or radical — that can be justified by the prospect of climate change, and to understand why, in a plural and contradictory world, these actions may differ. And then to accommodate them.

To paraphrase one of the six messages that came out of the Copenhagen climate congress in March, it is not inaction that is inexcusable. What is inexcusable is to pretend that there is just one message, one voice, one number to be communicated, that there is just one action agenda that (the science of) climate change demands from us, and that the arts and advertising can deliver it.