Some of you may recall a recent public awareness campaign by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that began this way: There are all kinds of emergencies out there that we can prepare for. Take a zombie apocalypse for example. That’s right, I said z-o-m-b-i-e a-p-o-c-a-l-y-p-s-e. You may laugh now, but when it…Continue Reading…
This climate conversation at the Wilson Center covers a lot of interesting ground and is well worth watching. For a taste, here’s one exchange between the host John Milewski and Edward Maibech, director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication. Milewski: One theory I’ve heard, one reason I’ve heard that people respond almost with…Continue Reading…
Earlier this week, an informal email group I belong to generated a burst of fascinating exchanges after I listed my post on the Yale Cultural Cognition paper. This group consists of journalists, climate scientists, and social science scholars, among others. At the end of the back-and-forth, David Ropeik, a former journalist turned risk expert, posed a…Continue Reading…
If there is anyone out there who still believes that a lack of knowledge of climate science (e.g., the deficit model) prevents people from grasping the consequences of global warming, raise your hand. Now read this passage from the abstract of a recent study: The conventional explanation for controversy over climate change emphasizes impediments to public…Continue Reading…
The climate debate is so politicized that rational dialogue is virtually impossible between warring sides. A complicating factor is that there are also hostile camps within the same factions. The climate blogosphere, in particular, is like the island in Lost, where the plane-wrecked survivors had to constantly determine who was on which side. (I loved…Continue Reading…
An editorial in Nature says that Matthew Nisbet’s Climate shift report “dismantles three of the most common reasons given by those who have tried, and failed, to garner widespread support for policies to restrict greenhouse gases.” I guess they didn’t get the memo from the climate capo or the reprint over at the watchdog site. The Nature…Continue Reading…
I’m poaching this comment from yesterday’s Dot Earth post on Randy Olson. What’s striking to me is that it comes from a graduate student enrolled in a sustainability program at a top university: I love the ‘woe is me’ and ‘shame on you’ summation. It perfectly characterizes the scope of most environmental communication. The hysterical…Continue Reading…
Some of the dead-enders in the climate change & communication debate don’t seem capable of recognizing their own bunk, even after it’s pointed out to them ad nauseum. So here we go again: we are looking at a bunk tsunami, and the press seems absolutely obsessed with finding little bugs on the other side (a…Continue Reading…