(Art design – featured image: Jean-Dominique Lavoix-Carli)
During a meeting with senior leaders and decision-makers, one participant remarked how difficult it is to warn about impending or future danger. Doing so entails the risk of being labelled negative or unpleasant, and ultimately pushed aside. In such conditions, how can we carry out proper strategic foresight and early warning if telling inconvenient truths puts us at risk of exclusion?
This story is not an isolated case, but repeats itself again and again across all organisations. It permeates our social and personal life. It blinds politics and geopolitics. Crises often end in congratulations for the way they were “managed,” when many should never have occurred in the first place.
What is happening and how can we overcome this challenge? Can ancient wisdom and current research help us understand—and solve—the problem? And how can we ensure we deliver strategic foresight and early warning without being silenced?
To explore these questions, start with the short video below “Why the Messenger Gets Shot”, then dive deeper into the issue with the article ‘Why the Messenger Got Shot and how to Avoid this Fate’, which also served as the basis for the video (created with NotebookLM) and includes the complete bibliography. Finally, discover a concrete illustration of these dynamics, which contribute, along other factors, to shape our world today: the outcome of COP30 and Iceland’s new commendable stance on the potential slowing of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).
Watch the video
Read the article
Motivated Ignorance at Work?
The outcome of the 30th UN climate conference (COP30) can be seen as the result of a case of motivated ignorance at work, besides a host of operating and interacting factors related to international relations.
The COP30 is finally hailed as “not a failure”, when, for example, neither the transition away from fossile fuels, nor deforestation were tackled practically and included in the final document, and thus when the COP30 fell truly short of success (e.g. Fiona Harvey,”‘Fossil fuel giants finally in the crosshairs’: Cop30 avoids total failure with last-ditch deal”, The Guardian, 25 Nov 2025; Damian Carrington et al., “UN warns world losing climate battle but fragile Cop30 deal keeps up the fight“, The Guardian, 23 Nov 2025).
Yet, according to Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief,
“COP30 showed that climate cooperation is alive and kicking, keeping humanity in the fight for a livable planet, with a firm resolve to keep 1.5C within reach [see UNEP assessment below].
I’m not saying we’re winning the climate fight. But we are undeniably still in it, and we are fighting back.
Here in Belem, nations chose unity, science, and economic common sense.
This year there has been a lot of attention on one country stepping back.
But amid the gale-force political headwinds, 194 countries stood firm in solidarity – rock-solid in support of climate cooperation.
…
For the first time, 194 nations said in unison:
‘…the global transition to low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilience is irreversible and the trend of the future.’
194 nations agreed this word by word, because it is the truth – backed up by investment flows into renewables that now double fossil fuels.
This is a political and market signal that cannot be ignored….”
Simon Stiell closing speech: “COP30 showed that climate cooperation is alive and kicking, keeping humanity in the fight for a livable planet” 22 November 2025, United Nations Climate Change. [my comments]
Worse still, thirty climate conferences have resulted in greenhouse gases being emitted at ever increasing levels, with global temperatures likely exceeding 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels over the next decade, to say nothing of the following decades, as explained by the United Nations Environment Programme: “The world is likely to exceed a key global warming target soon. Now what?“. Yet, year after year, the same system with the same consequences is applied.
As a result too of the repeated failure to address climate change, another expected consequence is starting to be increasingly likely: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is possibly slowing down (e.g. Gerard McCarthy, Maynooth University et al. “Is the Atlantic ocean’s “wobble” a warning for Ireland?”, Raidió Teilifís Éireann, 10 September 2025). In a nutshell, at best, this slowing down would mean that, in Europe but also in the tropics, and along the North Atlantic track for storms, “drier summers and stormier conditions will exacerbate the impacts of climate change, even if warming is muted” (Ibid).
Figure from Nico Wunderling, Jonathan F. Donges, Jürgen Kurths, and Ricarda Winkelmann
“Interacting tipping elements increase risk of climate domino effects under global warming“, Distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, Articles, Volume 12, issue 2, ESD, 12, 601–619, 2021.
Already, in October 2024, 42 scientists had addressed a letter to the Nordic Council of Ministers warning of the risks related to the AMOC, as those risks had been previously underestimated (ICOS, “Scientists warn of collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation AMOC“, November 2024).
The threat is serious enough for Iceland to declare the potential failure of the AMOC a national security threat (e.g. Steve Hanley, “Iceland Warns Slower AMOC Is A Security Threat To The Nation“, CleanTechnica, 13 Nov 2025).
Here, Iceland appears not to have shot the messenger, on the contrary. It has overcome the bias of motivated ignorance and seriously considers the threat.
Will other countries follow Iceland and overcome motivated ignorance? Indeed impact will not be limited to countries directly hit but have ripple effects on the entire world, including China and India, for example. Will considering an AMOC slowdown be done soon enough to allow for necessary actions? How would the international world look like in that case?
