Transcript Making Climate Hot: Communication Strategies for Climate

Making Climate Hot:
Communication Strategies for Climate Change
Susanne Moser, Ph.D.
National Center for Atmospheric Research
Boulder, CO
Climate Change Forum | San Diego Natural History Museum | November 16, 2004
Let’s talk about climate change!
“Communities are groups of people
communicating…”
Bill McDonough
Does anyone care?
~90% of American public is aware of “global warming”
 For ~30% it is personally serious, urgent, worth
worrying about
 Still confusion about causes of global warming
 Global warming seen as inevitable and unfixable
 Related to irreversible deterioration of moral values
 Few know about solutions; most are believed to be
ineffective or irrelevant
 We know little about what people think of adaptation

“The typical global warming news
story overwhelms and immobilizes
people.”
(Frameworks Institute 2003)
Why do we “not care”?
Creeping nature of climate
change
 Complexity and uncertainty
 System lags and lack of
immediacy
 Human perception limits and
priorities
 Communication failures

– Media channels and practices
– Failure to explain causes, solutions
– Bad choice of frames, wrong
mental models
– Active efforts to distort science
=> polarized debate
So where are we now?

Climate change is viewed as
– uninteresting and irrelevant
– uncertain, controversial, far off
in the future
– overwhelming
– unsolvable (at least personally)
– not urgent like terrorism, economy,
health care, or education
How can we make climate change
more salient?

Make the problem more scary?

Make us feel more guilty?
There are better alternatives!
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Abide by basic communication
rules
Address the emotional and
temporal dimensions of
“urgency”
Increase the persuasiveness
of the message
Use trusted messengers,
broaden the circle
Use opportunities well
Tap into individual and cultural
strengths and values
Unite and conquer
400
It will take a long breath
Communication legacies of
the past
 Ups and downs of issue cycles
 Conundrum: when
governments take charge,
public concern declines

Strategies for the long haul

Connect climate change to
issues for which we feel
abiding concern and personal
responsibility

Facilitate internalizing
motivation to act green

Measuring success as pats on
our collective backs

Define a vision of a “better
future”
Which future?
“The future may well be decided by the
images of the future with the greatest
power to capture our imaginations and
draw us to them, becoming self-fulfilling
prophecies.”
adapted from:
Historian Frederik Polak (1973)