Archive for the ‘communication and framing’ Category
« Older Entries |Parker: What happened to the seasons?
Sunday, May 2nd, 2010
This interesting piece by John Parker can be found in this quarter’s Intelligent Life, the lifestyle and culture magazine from The Economist.
With a seemingly distant and global challenge like climate warming, it’s been a struggle for science to convey the realities that warming is underway and that it’s likely human caused.
What would it take to persuade the 50% of Americans and others around the world who are unconvinced that warming is happening and that is has the potential to fundamentally alter our lives and experiences? A catastrophe like sudden, major ice loss from Antarctica or Greenland?
Subtle shifts like the timing of flowers, the lengthening of spring, the migration of birds, or thawing permafrost—things we have been documenting and writing about since the 1990s— seem to happen unnoticed.
Or perhaps not, as Parker indicates…
In the Indian state of Orissa, the black-headed oriole is the messenger of spring. It appears in the villages in January to greet the season’s start and flies away to the forest in March, signalling its end. Richard Mahapatra’s mother used the oriole’s fleeting appearance to teach her son about the natural rhythms of the world. “People like my mother remember six distinct seasons,” says Mahapatra, an environmental writer who now lives in New Delhi. After spring (basanta) and summer (grishma) came the rainy season (barsha). Between autumn (sarata) and winter (sisira) came a dewy period called hemanta. Each season lasted two months and the appearance of each was marked by religious festivals. “She had precise dates for their arrival and taught me how to look for signs of each.”
Damselflies gathered thickly a week before the rains began. Markers of the monsoon, they did not cluster at other times. The open-billed stork alighted on the tamarind tree on Akshaya Trutiya, a festival which usually fell in April or May and traditionally marked the start of the agricultural year. Farmers said that if you forgot the day, the bird would remind you, so predictable was its arrival. In the Mahapatra family’s garden, the nesting of bats in the peepal tree marked the onset of winter; when the tree flowered, it was midsummer.
Lately the heralds of the seasons have become unreliable. Damselflies swarm not only in the rainy season but in winter, the driest time of year. The stork no longer appears just on Akshaya Trutiya, but at other times, too. Villagers hear the song of the oriole in summer and the rainy season, not just spring. And this, Mahapatra says, is because spring is no longer a distinct season. Instead of six periods of equal length, Orissa now has two, a brief rainy season and a burning eight-month summer. Winter is a mild transition between the two, and spring, autumn and hemanta have been relegated to little-noticed interludes of a mere week or so.
“When I return home”, says Mahapatra, “my mother mourns the death of the seasons. Her memories of Orissa’s climate are alien to the generation I belong to. For me, my childhood Orissa is dying. The state now has a new and strange climate that nobody can understand or predict.”
Read more here…
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ddsnet/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted in behavior, climate change science, communication and framing, environmental literacy, nature and culture | No Comments »
Earth Day at 40: A new Gallup poll on the state of environmentalism
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010
Riley Dunlap has an interesting article, At 40, Environmental Movement Endures, With Less Consensus, with new Gallup poll results that’s worth reading.
April 22 marks the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day, an event widely considered to be the birth of the modern environmental movement. Few social movements survive 40 years, so in this sense alone, environmentalism might be considered successful. On the other hand, the movement has had limited success in policy arenas in recent years, leading to allegations of the “death of environmentalism.” In addition, this year’s Gallup Environment poll finds historically low levels of public worry about environmental problems (particularly global warming) and support for environmental protection. Are we witnessing the end of environmentalism as a significant social movement and, in the eyes of many, a major progressive force in the United States?
Read more to find out…
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Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/southernpixel/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted in behavior, climate skeptics deniers and contrarians, communication and framing, environmental ethics, environmental history, environmentalism, nature and culture | No Comments »
More from Shellenberger and Nordhaus on uncoupling energy policy from climate policy
Monday, March 29th, 2010
Their latest piece: Freeing energy policy from the climate change debate.
Excerpts:
Environmental advocates — with help from pollsters, psychologists, and cognitive scientists — have long understood that global warming represented a particularly problematic threat around which to mobilize public opinion. The threat is distant, abstract, and difficult to visualize. Faced with a public that has seemed largely indifferent to the possibility of severe climactic disruptions resulting from global warming, some environmentalists have tried to characterize the threat as more immediate, mostly by suggesting that global warming was already adversely impacting human societies, primarily in the form of increasingly deadly natural disasters.
The result has been an ever-escalating set of demands on climate science, with greens and their allies often attempting to represent climate science as apocalyptic, imminent, and certain, in no small part so that they could characterize all resistance as corrupt, anti-scientific, short-sighted, or ignorant. Greens pushed climate scientists to become outspoken advocates of action to address global warming. Captivated by the notion that their voices and expertise were singularly necessary to save the world, some climate scientists attempted to oblige. The result is that the use, and misuse, of climate science by advocates began to wash back into the science itself.
Not everyone agrees with this assessment, as suggested recently by sociologist Bill Freudenburg and others that climate science errs in being too conservative rather than too apocalyptic.
Nevertheless, S & N want us to consider the extent to which dramatic energy policy can be rolled out in the absence of incentives like carbon taxes or cap and trade if, as they suggest, we are wasting time using science to pursue the latter:
In the end, there is no avoiding the enormous uncertainties inherent to our understanding of climate change. Whether 350 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, or 450 or 550, is the right number in terms of atmospheric stabilization, any prudent strategy to minimize future risks associated with catastrophic climate change involves decarbonizing our economy as rapidly as possible. Stronger evidence of climate change from scientists was never going to drive Americans to demand economically painful limits on carbon emissions or energy use. And uncertainty about climate science will not deter Americans from embracing energy and other policies that they perceive to be in the nation’s economic, national security, and environmental interest. This was the case in 1988 and is still largely the case today.
Now is the time to free energy policy from climate science. In recent years, bipartisan agreement has grown on the need to decarbonize our energy supply through the expansion of renewables, nuclear power, and natural gas, as well as increased funding of research and development of new energy technologies. Carbon caps may remain as aspirational targets, but the primary role for carbon pricing, whether through auctioning pollution permits or a carbon tax, should be to fund low-carbon energy research, development, and deployment.
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Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasmic/ / CC BY-ND 2.0
Tags: Shellenberger and Nordhaus
Posted in communication and framing, energy, solutions | No Comments »
A message about communicating climate science
Thursday, March 18th, 2010
Matt Nisbet has an interesting piece, Chill Out: Climate scientists are getting a little too angry for their own good, at Slate today that adds another view to the ongoing discussion about environmental literacy and communication.
Posted in behavior, climate change science, communication and framing | No Comments »
Stavins: “What’s the Proper Role of Individuals and Institutions in Addressing Climate Change?”
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
That’s the question asked by Robert Stavins at Harvard. This piece is worth reading. He wrestles with many of the same questions that many of us in higher education have thought a lot about (here, here, here, and here):
My view of a university’s responsibilities in the environmental realm is similar. Our direct impact on the natural environment — such as in terms of CO2 emissions from our heating plants — is absolutely trivial compared with the impacts on the environment (including climate change) of our products: knowledge produced through research, informed students produced through our teaching, and outreach to the policy world carried out by faculty.
So, I suggested to the students that if they were really concerned with how the university affects climate change, then their greatest attention should be given to priorities and performance in the realms of teaching, research, and outreach.
Of course, it is also true that work on the “greening of the university” can in some cases play a relevant role in research and teaching. And, more broadly — and more importantly — the university’s actions in regard to its “carbon footprint” can have symbolic value. And symbolic actions — even when they mean little in terms of real, direct impacts — can have effects in the larger political world. This is particularly true in the case of a prominent university, such as my own.
But, overall, my institution’s greatest opportunity — indeed, its greatest responsibility — with regard to addressing global climate change is and will be through its research, teaching, and outreach to the policy community.
Although I applaud the call for more emphasis on environmental teaching and the addition of environmental courses, several impediments exist in higher education and beyond which make it difficult to translate these actions into a more environmentally literate society:
- Disciplines, departments, and majors have long been divided into separate silos. We reward specialization and expertise over the kinds of interdisciplinarity that is needed to conceive of and deal with global change problems. As we have seen in previous posts, it’s time for higher education to consider adding problem-centered approaches to the general curriculum.
- As a result, training students about the environment is often the responsibility of environmental studies and science (ESS) programs. This is a problem because it absolves most departments and faculty from having to engage the environment as a serious issue. Many programs at a typical university operate as if humans have little or no connection to the natural world. Until human systems are properly embedded in natural systems and students are encouraged/required to explore these linkages, there is little reason for students to associate the human experience with impacts on the natural world.
- These kinds of structures are problematic. At best, it means that most students in higher education receive little substantive training in how their lives connect with the natural world. At worst, students are trained to perpetuate disciplinary tradition that (1) ignores the relationship between human societies and the environment and (2) values high achievement in a world that is ecologically unsustainable and socially unjust as a measure of success.
- There can be limits to a “more knowledge” approach. Namely, as we have seen with climate communication, cultural values shape the perception/reception of information. Just as scientific facts seldom speak for themselves, we can’t expect a push for more education to always solve environmental challenges either. The way messages are framed is important. And the cultural context of the target audience is also critical. Most people in the world have a very different cultural background than Harvard undergraduates.
Posted in behavior, communication and framing, higher education, nature and culture, sustainability | No Comments »
How much is a ton of CO2?
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
One of the challenges of climate literacy is helping folks visualize fossil fuel emissions and their impacts.
Last year, Bowdoin College completed its emissions inventory and climate action plan. We discovered that the campus emits a total of 24,000 tons of CO2 equivalents each year. So how much is that really?
One student decided to help illustrate this by creating an art installation, cordoning off a 27-ft x 27-ft x 27-ft cube in the student center with red ribbon.
Now imagine 24,000 of these cubes emanating from a college campus each year. That helps show the magnitude of the challenge.
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Photo courtesy of Bowdoin College
Posted in behavior, campus sustainability, climate change science, communication and framing, energy, higher education | 1 Comment »
Climate communication: Is fear + collective action a winning strategy?
Saturday, March 6th, 2010
In a previous post from my series on why people don’t engage climate change, I described my interpretations of work by Susanne Moser and Lisa Dilling1, which suggested that the use of fear can be a poor way to motivate behavioral changes to deal with climate warming:
Challenge 6: Fear can change perception but not willingness to take action and can lead to counterintuitive behaviors (like the “SUV effect”)
2006 was a watershed year in public opinion on climate change. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and Time Magazine’s famous polar bear cover had the world scared to death about climate change. They grabbed people’s attention and raised awareness, but they didn’t do much to galvanize widespread action against climate warming. As we’ll see in the next post, 82% of Americans have not engaged the issue of climate change personally.
Even worse, if people become fearful of climate change, it could encourage counterintuitive behaviors. For example, people might think, if it really does get stormier or icier in my area, I will need the SUV because it has 4-wheel drive. The irony is not lost, given that large vehicles and their greenhouse gas emissions are part of the reason why we have climate warming in the first place.
When I first saw the Time cover, I thought that mainstream media is finally getting climate change and that people would start demanding action. Now I’m not so sure fear is an effective tactic for driving change.
I also noted in that post that when people are fearful but don’t know what to do in the face of complex problems like climate warming, there can be a tendency to do nothing.
New research by Martijn van Zomeren and colleagues in the Journal of Environmental Psychology2 is beginning to challenge these views (emphasis added):
An inconvenient truth, the book and documentary by Nobel-prize laureate and former US Vice-President Al Gore, is a real-life example of the presumed power of psychology to increase pro-environmental behavior by telling individuals what they could do, and by telling them what to fear if they fail to do this. Although many applauded Gore’s efforts to raise environmental awareness and action, there was a danger that the fear invoked by his message could be counter-productive. Raising fear about the consequences of smoking and safe sex, for example, is thought to undermine health behavior if individuals do not have a sufficient sense of efficacy to transform their fear into action. Without such a sense of self-efficacy, fear is thought to lead individuals to protect themselves against their fear (rather than to take action to reduce the cause for fear). A key aim of this paper is to challenge this pessimistic conclusion.
Although we believe concern for the counter-productive effects of fear appeals is warranted, we think that self-protective responses are most likely in the context of individual problems such as individual health behavior. When individuals perceive a problem as an individual problem, their individual action should be best predicted by their self-efficacy beliefs. Unlike smoking and safer sex, however, one can perceive the climate crisis as a collective problem that requires collective action. Collective action is aimed at promoting collective interests, even if it is pursued by individuals. When individuals perceive a problem as collective, their collective action should be best predicted by their group efficacy beliefs – the belief that group goals can be achieved through joint effort.
This team is arguing that fear of climate warming impacts needs to be coupled with a clear message that
- climate warming is a collective-action problem;
- people can work together effectively to deal with climate warming.
In a series of experiments with university students in the Netherlands, the researchers manipulated climate fear (fear vs. no fear) and collective action efficacy (group action can be effective vs. no information about group action) through the use of different sets of readings.
After completing the different sets of readings, the students ranked in the following order (highest to lowest) in terms of their intentions to take actions on climate warming:
- fear + group action can be effective
- no fear + group action can be effective
- fear + no information on group action
- no fear + no information on group action
What’s interesting about this is the apparent importance on providing information on how collective action can be important. Their results suggested that even students who were not given fearful messages about climate warming were still willing to take action on warming if shown how to do so.
This brings us back to one of my points in the earlier post.
Challenge 3: Specific warming impacts and solutions are seldom conveyed clearly
Rather than just telling people that warming will be bad and we should all be afraid, warming advocates should state examples of how the impacts will be experienced by people in a specific region and specific steps that people can take to help adapt to or mitigate them. Empower people to become part of the solutions process rather than letting them sit on the sidelines. Climate warming is not a spectator sport.
To paraphrase FDR: The only thing we have to fear is fear (when used by) itself.
It’s an interesting idea, although I’m not yet convinced for several reasons:
- I’d like to see how well this resonates with working-class America rather than students from a country like the Netherlands where people are much more likely to be socially conditioned to take action on climate warming. Put another way, in certain cultural contexts, fear + solutions may work. In others, fear + anything may turn people off.
- As I mentioned above, research suggests that 82% of Americans have not engaged the issue of climate change personally. Is there really a lack of information on what we can do collectively to deal with climate warming, or is there a lack of interest in taking collective action? I think it’s both. So long as climate warming solutions are framed in terms of national or international policy (cap and trade or C taxes) or matters of renewable energy innovation and investment, people will feel like they have little leverage to engage either of these approaches—either individually or collectively.
- One might argue that collective action can be promulgated as political action at local, state, and federal levels. However, the deep cynicism about the efficacy of federal institutions may dissuade people from investing the effort. And when the world continues to struggle with the recession and unemployment, jobs will usually trump collective action on climate.
- It’s a complex story with multiple layers of cultural and economic confounding factors. Just as scientific evidence seldom speaks for itself, clear pathways for collective action may not translate to greater action either.
1Susanne Moser and Lisa Dilling (2004) Making Climate Hot: Communicating the Urgency and Challenge of Global Climate Change. Environment
2Martijn van Zomeren, Russell Spears, Colin Wayne Leach (2010). Experimental evidence for a dual pathway model analysis of coping with the climate crisis Journal of Environmental Psychology : 10.1016/j.jenvp.2010.02.006
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Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lunadirimmel/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted in behavior, communication and framing, solutions | 3 Comments »
Al Gore weighs in on the state of climate change
Saturday, February 27th, 2010
…in an op-ed piece in today’s NY Times.
Excerpts (links his):
[T]he scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.
Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.
Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.
The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States. Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.
….The political paralysis that is now so painfully evident in Washington has thus far prevented action by the Senate — not only on climate and energy legislation, but also on health care reform, financial regulatory reform and a host of other pressing issues.
….Some analysts attribute the failure to an inherent flaw in the design of the chosen solution — arguing that a cap-and-trade approach is too unwieldy and difficult to put in place. Moreover, these critics add, the financial crisis that began in 2008 shook the world’s confidence in the use of any market-based solution.
But there are two big problems with this critique: First, there is no readily apparent alternative that would be any easier politically….Second, we should have no illusions about the difficulty and the time needed to convince the rest of the world to adopt a completely new approach.
Updates: There is a wide range of opinion on the IPCC these days:
- Union of Concerned Scientists weighs in on climate warming and the criticism of the IPCC.
- Roger Pielke, Jr. has been writing a lot about the IPCC recently (here, here, here)
- Joe Romm at Climate Progress
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adc/ / CC BY 2.0
Tags: Al Gore
Posted in climate change science, climate economics, climate skeptics deniers and contrarians, communication and framing, energy, policy, sustainability | No Comments »
The humanities are key to environmental messaging
Friday, February 12th, 2010
It’s been an incredibly busy week, which explains the dearth of posts. But good things are happening, which I look forward to sharing.
As most of you know, there’s an energetic, ongoing debate about environmental messaging. With polls showing waning interest in climate warming as a serious issue, there’s a sense that the battle is being lost.
I mentioned in an earlier post that it’s often assumed that climate change science speaks for itself. All we have to do is publish good science and show the public a bunch of data, and this will lead to a collective consciousness demanding action on climate warming.
It hasn’t worked out that way.
One main problem is the failure to connect with people on a personal level. Thinking about the environment is not just about climate or wild nature; it’s about human nature, human experience, the intersection of nature and culture, how we interact with one another—things squarely in the domain of the social sciences and humanities. In order for society to connect with contemporary environmental issues, it’s critical that these voices become part of this conversation.
Yesterday, we brought back to campus Bowdoin alum Paul Miller (a.k.a., DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid) to perform his major work, Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica.
Paul’s work is a beautiful illustration of how one artist has been able to put a human touch on climate warming. His show was packed with a hyped-up audience that cut across a wide swath of young and old.
Try doing that with a science seminar.
Amanda Little reminds us that there are no silver bullets for solving climate warming, only silver buckshot. Paul’s work (and the work of other popular artists like him) is a great example of one of those buckshot.
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Photo Credit: Tiffany Gerdes, Bowdoin Orient
Posted in behavior, communication and framing, nature and culture, polar ice, solutions | 2 Comments »
Where might farmers turn for help with climate change?
Saturday, December 12th, 2009
In the Online First edition of Climatic Change, Tyler Tarnoczi and Fikret Berkes assess1,2 the sources and availability of information about climate adaptation to farmers in the Canadian provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta.
Farmers rely on several information sources for agricultural practices, which will likely be vital in helping food producers learn how to adapt to climate warming:
- social networks/experiential learning
- government
- industry (e.g., seed, machinery)
- producer and conservation organizations
- media
Here’s what they found…
Posted in climate adaptation, communication and framing, food and agriculture, nature and culture, policy | No Comments »
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