In this week’s issue of Science: Climate communication —Has ‘climate fatigue’ set in?
Saturday, November 14th, 2009
Richard Kerr asks this question1 amid new polls by Pew and Gallup suggesting that fewer Americans (from 2007 to 2009) think warming is happening (71% to 51%) and that the seriousness of warming is being exaggerated (30% to 41%).
Scientists and politicians have been doing their part to convey the seriousness of our situation:
- Chris Field (Stanford ecologist): We are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we’ve considered seriously.
- Ban Ki-moon (UN Secretary General): The [2007 IPCC] report is a wake-up call. The time for hesitation is over.
- Stephen Schneider (Stanford climate change scientist): Things are looking much worse than was thought in the 1970s and ’80s.
But Roger Pielke, Jr. suggests that climate scientists may have boxed themselves into a corner after such a strong consensus statement in the 2007 IPCC report: “Where do you go after ‘unequivocal’?”
One direction, which some scientists have turned to, has been to ramp up the sense of urgency by emphasizing how changes in the Arctic are happening faster than expected, as we saw in the last post on accelerating Greenland ice thaw. As someone who studies climate impacts in boreal and Arctic ecosystems, I can attest that this approach is not exaggeration.
However, this may not be working. Matt Nisbet suggests there is still a messaging and communication problem:
“[I]t’s very difficult for any single [climate] event to break through competing issues and information.” For Americans, those issues now include two wars, a lurching economy, and health care reform. “Given the complexity of climate change,” Nisbet says, “any one event will be downplayed [by partisan critics]. I think the real long-term challenge is public education, to prepare people. What does it mean to be an American in an era of climate change?” Climate scientists need to refocus their message, he says, from the broad sweep of global warming to small regions such as New England and the Southwest and to immediate issues such as personal health. At the same time, new conduits to individuals need to be created to replace crumbling traditional media. A tall order (underlining mine).
That’s part of the purpose of this blog, and it needs to become part of the mission of higher education.
Update: Nisbet also wrote this week about the reach of scientific claims at his blog, Framing Science.
Related posts:
- Why don’t people engage climate change? Overview
- Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 1: Environmental Literacy
- Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 2: Communication
- Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 3: Personal perceptions, values, and behaviors
- Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 4: Political-economic context
- Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 5: A perfect storm of climate change denial
1Kerr, R. (2009) Amid worrisome signs of warming, ‘climate fatigue’ sets in. Science 326:926.
One Response to “In this week’s issue of Science: Climate communication —Has ‘climate fatigue’ set in?”
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I highly recommend Nisbet’s work for anyone interested in this problem of communicating scientifi information to the general public. Drawing quite effectively on the communication literature and his own empirical research, he challenges our familiar pedagogical models and offers some a fresh, insightful perspective.