Climate Communications Stuck on Repeat
Every year, carbon dioxide levels break records. But there's hope to meaningfully address climate change if we have the courage to take action, including changing how we talk about climate change.
Last week, scientists reported the seasonal peak of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere exceeded 430 parts per million for the first time as recorded at the Mauna Loa Observatory on Hawaii.
“Another year, another record,” said Ralph Keeling, who directs the Scripps CO2 Program. His father, Charles David Keeling, started taking the measurements at the observatory in 1958, documenting the annual fluctuations in what came to be known as the “Keeling Curve.”
In addition to the seasonal fluctuations, Charles David Keeling was also the first to recognize that CO2 levels rose every year. It’s the inconvenient truth that’s still inconvenient. But as each year passes, climate change is becoming less an inconvenience and more a major problem, so much so that there are new calls for geo-engineering — even one yesterday in The Wall Street Journal — a technological step that could solve climate change problems or, possibly, create new, unforeseen disasters. These calls for geo-engineering come because decades of climate change communication have not spurred meaningful, sustainable action in reducing greenhouse gas emissions (witness the U.S. helping forge and join the Paris Agreement, then drop out, then rejoin, then drop out again). So, the advocate-for-geo-engineering thinking goes, because people aren’t changing how they think about climate change, people won’t act to address climate change until there is no other choice. By that point, it could be too late for humanity to do anything about climate change. So best try geo-engineering before it’s too late. The advocate’s way of thinking, however, ignores changes to climate change communications itself. Although the ways many people talk about climate change haven’t changed for decades, research about what works in climate change communications has advanced considerably.
Hurricanes are the traditional poster child of climate change, with many scientific predictions (Science, 2010) that they will increase in intensity (Nature, 2023) as the Earth warms. The decades-long scientific experiments that tried to control or lessen the effects of Earth’s most furious storms were humbling as scientists recognized the power of a hurricane is approximately equivalent to exploding a 10-ton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes.
A year after hurricane Katrina, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth grabbed worldwide attention in 2006 with horrifying coverage from Katrina’s devastation and, simultaneously, provided a solid understanding of the underlying science of global climate change. However, Americans particularly began to discount Gore’s messages on climate change for two reasons: 1) climate change is not an immediate threat in the way a hurricane is, and 2) Gore as messenger himself, citing his energy usage as evidence that he was peddling false information. To psychologist Dan Gilbert—and as Gore himself has said so many times that reporters now use it as an introduction to follow-up questions—what really matters in the U.S. is the policies in place, and so how we vote.
I mean, if you really want to make change, you make change to the system in which people function, rather than asking individuals to please defy their own nature a little bit differently.
Retirement savings is a great example. If we were to just cajole people, convince them, tempt them, amuse them into saving for retirement, no one in America would be doing it, right? Just like they don't floss. We wouldn't do those things. But we've managed to institutionalize retirement savings. So now your employer says to you, 'I will be withholding some of your salary. I will be putting it away for you for retirement because I know you are just too flawed to do it on your own.' And as a result, a lot of Americans now have retirement savings….
I think the same thing is true for climate change. We have to stop saying to people 'It's on you to change your light bulb. That's going to fix the problem.' No, we have to stop using fossil fuels. There are a lot of people who are deeply economically invested in making sure we keep using fossil fuels. You have to vote for a government that will tell them 'no.' Until we do that, everything else is just working around the margins. So I'm sorry to say as a psychologist that I think there's a lot less psychology to fixing this problem then there is just politics.
-- Dan Gilbert, speaking on The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos in an episode titled "Why Our Brains Don't Fear Climate Change Enough" January 1, 2024Few people nowadays say “It’s on you to change your lightbulb—that’s going to fix the problem.” But people’s climate change communications are stuck on repeat with the expected ineffective consequences. Those not following even the basic strategies of effective climate communications can wind up, for example, losing their seat in Congress, as Bob Inglis (R-SC) did. He has since learned to communicate differently. Those who are more effective climate change communicators, such as climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, employ well-known strategies of identifying with people (in her case, identifying with the Christian tradition) or, more recently and more broadly, finding shared values to connect “unique identities to collective action.”
For climate change communication scholars, though, there’s a lot of research that isn’t being translated regularly into action. Why? For one, it’s hard work. Consider these 13 strategies my colleague at American Scientist summarized from the climate change communications scholarship back in 2016:
Establish common ground with the audience first.
Frame the issue in ways that speak to your audience’s concerns.
Point out personal experiences of the effects of climate change.
Avoid using the terms climate change and global warming up front, or avoid them completely if it’s possible.
Avoid an “us versus them” frame that will brand your message as that of an outsider.
Do not stoop to the level of the worst communications—and call out peers who are not protecting the forum for civil discourse.
Focus on the local scale, not just the national, and take notes from successful bipartisan collaborations.
Emphasize positive social norms.
Make your message entertaining and widely available.
Use sources and venues trusted by your audience.
Ignore the loud but small fringe groups.
Make it clear how small the group of climate deniers is.
Affirm the intelligence of your audience and whenever possible give them what they really want—to be heard.
Now, with all those strategies (see the full article for a more complete explanation of each one), consider also people’s wide diversity of attributes and situations, including “age, culture, gender identity, nationality, mental and physical abilities, language, religion, education, work experience, political views, income, and so on.” Yes, it’s challenging to communicate effectively about climate change.
None of the above strategies, though, are the “deficit model” of science communication—a one-way flow of information from experts to the general public—because of the idea that the presumed purpose of science communication is to fill in people’s knowledge gaps. That model is ineffective and “out of date.”
If we move, say, from the deficit model to the dialogue model, ideally I’d be having a conversation with you about all this. That’s because in the dialogue model “non‐scientific forms of knowledge, such as cultural and experiential knowledge, are considered to have equal value as scientific knowledge” and so I’d be listening and learning from you, too (I would be pleased for a dialogue in the comments, which I try to stimulate with a question at the end of most every post on SustainLab).This week NPR has been engaged in a kind of deficit-model science reporting with a series called Climate Solutions Week that highlights “stories about climate change solutions for living and building on a hotter planet.” That’s even though climate scientists—including the aforementioned Katharine Hayhoe—have been saying for years that “If we continue with business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions, there is no adaptation that is possible. You just can’t.”
So perhaps it is a sign of desperation that some scientists are considering and reconsidering geo-engineering — these ideas of changing the Earth itself to offset the increasing amounts of carbon dioxide we emit into the atmosphere.
Suggesting another way forward, climate change communications researchers recently reported (April, 2025) the extent to which understanding what they call “the six key truths about climate change” predict public support and political advocacy for government action on climate change. Those truths are:
It’s real — climate change is happening
It’s us — human activity is causing climate change
Experts agree — there is a scientific consensus about human-caused climate change
It’s bad — climate change harms people
Others care — a majority of people are concerned about climate change and support climate action
There’s hope — actions can be taken to limit the harm
The researchers write, “support for climate policy was predicted by five of the six key truths: human causation (‘it’s us’), expert consensus (‘experts agree’), risk perceptions (‘it’s bad’), injunctive norms (‘others care’), as well as perceived future opportunity (‘there’s hope’) and collective efficacy (‘there’s hope’).”
So focusing on “it’s real” doesn’t move the proverbial needle. Indeed, over 10 years ago—even back then—around 97% of Republicans in the U.S. Congress considered climate change real. (So I’ve just employed #12, above “Make it clear how small the group of climate deniers is.”) So NASA, take note of your website. Environmental Defense Fund, you too.
Although the researchers focused on the extent to which understanding the six climate truths predict people’s “climate policy support, information seeking and sharing, and political advocacy,” they did not prescribe what climate change messages should be. Rightly so according to the aforementioned 13 strategies. Instead, the researchers write that their results indicate “that emphasizing different key truths could be a way of tailoring strategic communications to specific attitudinal and behavioral outcomes.” In other words, for climate change communications that effectively lead to public support and political advocacy for government action on climate change, there’s still doing the hard work of crafting messages so that people—in all their diversity—understand it’s us, experts agree, it’s bad, others care, and there’s hope.
“It’s sad,” Ralph Keeling said about the new record-breaking levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. His sadness reflects a deeper societal malaise: Each year’s new record of CO2 levels is both a scientific data point and a symbol of collective inaction. But, by fostering informed, inclusive, action-oriented dialogues with others — because no, you don’t have to be a climate scientist to talk with others about climate change — together we can build the public will necessary to confront climate change effectively and so a sustainable future.
The first step to any good communications strategy is understanding those you’re talking with. Do you know how the people in your habitat think about climate change? If not, what, if anything, prevents you from finding out? How might you craft an open-ended question to learn their thoughts?
My lifelong experience as an educator has shown me that deficit-model communication does not work. Focusing on the positive and what individuals can do to improve gets results.