How to Communicate About Climate Change

Two Stonehouse members have recently contributed to new, evidence-based guides for communicating about global warming – two documents that have the capacity to make major advances in the integrity and efficacy of the conversation about climate change.

The first of these documents comes from the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED) at Columbia University in New York. Entitled The Psychology of Climate Change Communications, it is framed as “a guide for scientists, journalists, educators, political aides and the interested public.” Stonehouse scholar Anthony Leiserowitz, Director of the Yale Project on Climate Change, was a leading contributor.

The second document, penned in part by Stonehouse scholar and former Earthjustice communications VP Cara Pike, is called Climate Crossroads: A Research-Based Framing Guide,offered “for global warming advocates; from global warming advocates.”

It’s clear that both papers have been extensively researched. The CRED paper, written by Debika Shome and Sabine Marx, arises more from an academic tradition, while the Climate Crossroadsdocument is a compilation of the learning of a host of environmental organizations. In fact, the contributors’ list is a who’s who of climate change activism, ranging from gold-standard traditional environmental organizations like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club to newer climate-focused groups like 1 Sky and 350.org. So, while the CRED paper is more theoretical in its approach, with some of its excellent advice originating in careful experiments and labs, the Climate Crossroads material is more likely to be experience-based – although a goodly amount has also been focus-group tested. In both papers, this is clearly information you can rely on.

A final rough distinction between the two papers is that CRED talks more about how to communicate about climate change, while Climate Crossroads spends more time offering arguments and suggestions for what to communicate, even at the (acknowledged) risk of offering advice that might time out if not acted on promptly.

To give a broad, though in no way complete, sense of the content, here follows a brief synopsis of highlights from both papers.

CRED offers eight Principles of Climate Change Communication:

1. Know Your Audience – You can’t communicate to someone if you don’t know what language they speak, what mental models they already use and, perhaps especially, what biases guide their thinking. CRED talks about a “confirmation bias” that causes people to “look for information that is consistent with what they already think, want or feel.” This bias, when it goes against you, must be overcome.
2. Get Your Audience’s Attention – Here CRED talks more about “framing,” setting an issue in an easily understood context. If you have established the frame – a central organizing idea that is used to make sense of the story – then people are inclined to see the issue “your way.” If not, if for example someone has cast climate change in a frame of doubt and confusion, you have a greater challenge.
3. Translate Scientific Data into Concrete Experience – “The human brain has two different processing systems: the experiential processing system, which controls survival behavior and is the source of emotions an instincts and the analytical processing suspect which controls analysis of scientific information.” As you might expect, we respond quickly to information processed through the first system and sometimes not at all to that coming through the second.
4. Beware the Overuse of Emotional Appeals – Notwithstanding the earlier point, humans have a finite pool of worry and can be overwhelmed to the point of paralysis (suffering “emotional numbing”) if the bad news just keeps coming. Alternatively, people fall prey to a “single action bias:” they change a lightbulb and decide that they have done their part.
5. Address Scientific and Climate Uncertainties – People think that scientific uncertainty about the pace of climate change, and uncertainty about aspects of how it works, might mean the global warming is really nothing to worry about. You can’t overplay the hand – you must acknowledge uncertainty – but you can leave people to take refuge in uncertainty as an escape from reality. The best way to approach uncertainty, to really gain public understanding, is to work through the information in groups.
6. Tap into Social Identities and Affiliations – In a world awash in mistrust, people are more inclined to believe information that comes from trusted sources – from their “affiliates.” They also are inclined to react on the basis of their own identity, as a parent, a CEO, or other identity that makes them feel responsible or accountable.
7. Encourage Group Participation – Per Point number five, people are often more successful working through complicated topics if they do so in a group. And when a group arrives at a decision, the members of the group are more likely to support it.
8. Make Behavior Change Easier – The principal advice here was to make the environmentally positive option the “default.” That is, if you must go out of your way to choose a good option, most people are likely to pass it up. Thus, if policy makers can set up circumstances where the default choice is also the choice that’s best for the environment, more people will likely accept it.

In Climate Crossroads more prescriptive text, the authors talk about a “common message platform” that “provide(s) organizers with a shared set of key points and perspectives that will lead to both more effective communications on their own particular issues, and a more engaged and constructive national conversation on the topic with sympathetic groups.” Within that platform, they offer six major recommendations:

1. Communications should use the current Economic and Energy context to develop lasting support for addressing global warming – If you only talk about global warming as an environmental issue, you open up the possibility that people will leave it as “a problem for environmentalists.” If you frame it as an energy issue to positive and negative economic consequences, you are more likely to engage a larger audience.
2. Communicators should emphasize the role of “too much carbon” in creating the problem and should frame solutions in terms of how we can handle/manage carbon – Before humans began burning fossil fuels in earnest, there were 700 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Barely 200 years later, there are 800 billion tons. Given carbon’s function as a warming blanket in the atmosphere and an acidifying force in the ocean, that’s too much.
3. Communicators should expand the relevance of the issue beyond environmental (plants and animals) concern by emphasizing a broader and more concrete picture of what it means for the climate to change – Again, it is important that people not think global warming is only a risk to plants, trees and polar bears.
4. Communicators should emphasize that we are at a crossroads, a moment of choice – This is particularly critical because climate change is a long term issue, while our emotional temperament and our political processes are all designed to deal with short term threats.
5. Communicators should balance discussions of problems and impacts with a vivid picture of the actions we can and will take – Once again, an unrelenting discussion of negative impacts can be demotivating. People need to know there are solutions.
6. Communicators can foster a new relationship to the problem by connecting the issue with supporters’ identities – This speaks to a group dynamic similar to that identified in the CRED paper.

Reading through both papers, it was clear that much of this kind of communications advice is art rather than science – that iron clad rules are few and far between. For example, CRED suggested that it can be useful to use extreme weather events as “teachable moments,” during which people are more inclined to listen to information about climate change. But both papers cautioned against overstating the cause-and-effect relationship of climate change on particular weather events. So often, effective – and honest - communication is a balancing act.

Another example of the potential for confusion arose in the advice over what to call the problem. CRED’s paper says: Call it “climate change.” That makes it clear that this is not only an issue of slow, minor (and inconsistent) warming.

But Climate Crossroads says: Call it “global warming” – a term they say tested better for its emotional impact.

Both make compelling arguments for their positions – arguments we at the DeSmogBlog have heard before. Our response has been to use the terms interchangeably, on the (not-formally-tested) theory that “climate change” is the problem and “global warming” is the driver.

A final point that neither paper addresses specifically is the Climate Cover-up. It’s true, as both papers say, that climate change is a complicated issue. It can be confusing and hard to understand and people are inclined to push those kinds of issues to the bottom of their personal “to-do” lists, even when the risk isn’t distant and indistinct. On this file, however, there is another, bigger problem. A well-organized, generously funded and morally bankrupt cast of characters are out gathering communications advice and prosecuting a campaign of disinformation, actually trying to convince people that they CAN ignore this issue with impunity. So, try as we might to find good words, good frames and good messages to inform and energize people, we are fighting an uphill battle – often against people who don’t care about whether they are being fair and accurate in the way that they address issues like scientific uncertainty.

Both these papers show an excellent way forward in improving climate communication. But no one should doubt the necessity – the responsibility – for every activist to demand accountability and transparency from every communicator in the climate conversation.