Stop buying SUVs: climate change alarm leads to opposite effect of adding to problem
An interesting and important finding from a study conducted on how climate change and the requsite cultural and behaioural changes required of us is being communicated. See review article by Simon Retallick (excerpted below) here, and the original report ‘Warm Words: How are we telling the climate story and can we tell it better?’
Retallick notes:
Every country is different and will require its own approach. But a starting point must be an understanding of how global warming is already being communicated and whether this is helping or hindering efforts to achieve behaviour change.
Research just published by Britain’s leading progressive think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, into how the U.K. media, environmental organisations and government agencies communicate on global warming, reaches similar conclusions to the FrameWorks Institute’s 2001 analysis of climate communications in the United States.
From the perspective of achieving behaviour change, both sets of research conclude that existing approaches to discussing global warming may be counterproductive, leaving the public feeling disempowered and uncompelled to act.
The research by IPPR found that global warming is most commonly constructed in the U.K. through the “alarmist” repertoire—as awesome, terrible, immense and beyond human control. It is typified by an inflated or extreme lexicon, employs a quasi-religious register of death and doom, and uses language of acceleration and irreversibility.
The difficulty with this approach is that the scale of the problem as it is shown excludes the possibility of real action by the reader or viewer. It contains an implicit counsel of despair—“the problem is just too big for us to take on.” Its connection with the unreality of Hollywood films is also likely to distance people from the issue. As the IPPR report says, “In this awesome form, alarmism might even become secretly thrilling – effectively a form of ‘climate porn’.”
The FrameWorks Institute went a step further and tested its conclusions about U.S. global warming coverage with the public. It found that the more people are bombarded with words or images of devastating, quasi-Biblical effects of global warming, the more likely they are to tune out and switch instead into “adaptationist” mode, focusing on protecting themselves and their families, such as by buying large SUVs to secure their safety.
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