Making Climate Hot: Communication Strategies for Climate Change

1
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
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Lets talk about climate change!

• Communities are groups of people
  communicating
• Bill McDonough

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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)
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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 gt polarized
  debate

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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

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How can we make climate change more salient?

• Make the problem more scary?
• Make us feel more guilty?

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There are better alternatives!

• 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

8
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

9
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

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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)