so I need to know how many of you have
tried to have a conversation about
climate change maybe with a certain
friend or family member and it didn’t go
that well look around look around you
are not alone you are so not alone we
have been struggling to effectively
communicate climate change for decades I
didn’t even know what climate change was
until I got to grad school and a
professor mentioned it in class and I
was like what timeout
you’re telling me humans are burning
greenhouse gases that are warming the
atmosphere and the surface temperature
of the earth which could lead to ocean
acidification mass extinctions and
cataclysmic tipping points
oh hello why are we not talking about
this why are we not talking about this I
started doing some research going to
conferences presentations I interviewed
professors all over my campus I went
home that Thanksgiving I said to my
family hey guys I’m learning all this
stuff about climate change and they were
like a chill out Chicken Little
chill out no one wants to talk about
this you know maybe they don’t know how
to talk about it so in 2004 I started a
project I wanted to know what research
was out there that explored all the
nuances the social cultural linguistic
aspects of communicating climate change
well in the past 15 years there have
been 1835 studies that spanned dozens of
disciplines datasets perspectives and
from all of this work all across the
board we learn but a lot of stuff
doesn’t work so I’m gonna introduce five
of the worst offenders five things if
you’re doing these please stop now
number one fear appeals and doomsday
prophecies have zero lasting power we
can scare the audience and they might
get freaked out about that cataclysmic
storm that’s coming their way
when they wake up the next morning and
the sky is blue and the Earth’s are
chirping and every
things fine they go back to living their
life the way they always did
second for nearly a hundred years
journalists have been trained to balance
their story you’ve got one side of an
issue you present the support and
evidence for the other side of the issue
when it comes to climate change over 97%
of actively publishing climate
scientists agree that humans have been
altering the Earth’s climate for close
to a century as well but when you look
at the news stories 28 percent reflect
that scientific consensus leaving the
audience to believe that the issue is
way more controversial than it actually
is also related is something many of my
friends and colleagues have said it a
failure to communicate the problem with
climate change is we’re just failing to
communicate let’s inject more
information into the audience and I
would say how could we have a
communication failure if we’re not even
speaking the same language the language
of science is not the language of public
policy politics or of the public one of
my favorite studies from the past 15
years took common words used in
international and national climate
reports and surveyed an average American
audience so words that have a specific
meaning for climate scientists have an
entirely different meaning for the
man-on-the-street
aerosols are their spray spray paint a
theory it’s just a hunch if you’re
uncertain then you must be ignorant in
some way you’ve got a manipulation in
your experiment clearly you’ve tampered
with the data if it is an air even a
margin of error it means that you’ve
done something wrong and consensus you
just share an opinion now it takes a lot
for a scientist to say that something is
likely to happen but for the public it’s
probably not gonna happen
so we’ve got a big language difference
and fourth we have
a philosophical difference the whole
beauty of science is not about proving
things as certain but discovering more
uncertainty so as they start to
communicate their results with
predictions that have lots of nuances or
ambiguous scenarios of how things might
play out it leaves the audience just
more confused and finally please don’t
do this at home
references to people and animals far
away don’t work cue the polar bear on
the ice floe stranded starving sad we
want to save it and then we go back to
our everyday life as usual
so just as I was crossing the polar bear
off my list of persuasive climate change
messengers I had an aha moment and I
don’t know if I can really take credit
for this I think I was just in the right
place at the right time I was working in
Colorado and I was collaborating with
the National Park Service senators John
McCain and mark Udall came for a special
Congressional subcommittee meeting at
Rocky Mountain National Park part of
their meeting included a tour of the
park where Rangers explained all of the
natural resources they were monitoring
in an era of changing climate well the
next morning the headline of The Denver
Post says every citizen in America
should see what’s happening here John
McCain went on to say hey I get a kid
climate change is real and every visit
we make such as we’re making here today
uh argues that we need to take action
take action take action yes taking
action suddenly I knew I had to do a
social experiment could we replicate the
McCain experience couldn’t we take a
group of people to Rocky Mountain give
them the same tour so I did just that
working with a group of colleagues and
what we discovered was there are lots of
influences on climate change that the
park is monitoring one thing that really
changed the conversation was talking
about the mountain pine beetle now pine
beetles have lived in the ponderosa pine
lodgepole pines twenty-seven other
varieties of pines for hundreds of years
and their population has been well
managed by cold winters essentially
midsummer an adult finds a tree it
burrows in a hole it lays a bajillion
eggs under the surface of the bark and
then we get about ten degrees below
freezing and it kills off most of that
larvae so in the spring a few hat should
move on and the cycle repeats well what
we’re seeing in Rocky Mountain National
Park and other parts of the West is that
pine beetles are having not just one
lifecycle in a year but now two and
sometimes three and a tree can’t fight
off that many beetles so within nine
months their needles turn red then brown
and drop to the ground now if you know
anything about managing public lands you
can’t have dead timber where park
visitors are stopping standing or
sleeping
this is Glacier Basin campground in the
heart of Rocky Mountain National Park it
used to look like this before 2009 as
our guide was telling us about the
management decision to clear-cut this
campground I feel a hand on my shoulder
and I turn and it’s Tamra and she’s I’m
gonna be generous early 50s professional
from Florida who joined our tour and I
can immediately tell her face is red
her eyes are glassy almost watery I’m
like oh wait a minute we’re at altitude
this has got to be altitude sickness
maybe a bee sting maybe she’s dehydrated
and just without thinking we motion and
we sit down at a picnic table and before
I can say anything she looks me in the
eye and she says I wish I’d brought my
parents okay she’s in her mid 50s her
parents really but I soon get it I get
it she goes on to tell me that they had
family reunions here every other summer
rode her bikes with her cousins made
sandwiches went on hikes
and her parents they’re getting older
they’re strong conservationists they
have a deep respect for public lands but
they also don’t get climate change and
they certainly don’t believe that humans
are altering the surface temperature of
the earth and this led to this really
rich conversation about family science
how to manage public lands in an era of
rapidly changing climate and from that
moment my research changed I spent the
next half dozen years go into a couple
dozen parks from the Everglades in
Florida to the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska
from the Puget Sound in Washington State
to the monuments of Washington DC
talking with visitors doing this having
this conversation in fact I was in
Alaska talking about climate change and
I finished my talk and I am folding down
my laptop and one of the audience
members walks up to me a big guy just
picture Paul Bunyan flannel and all you
guys know who I’m talking about
seven feet tall and he gets low and
looks at me and he says Jess you ruined
it
ruined it ruined what did I ruin
he says you ruined a glacier Basin
campground for me now I can’t go back
there
he had just finished digitizing all of
his father’s photos and here’s one from
the early 1960s he went on to tell me
that those family camping trips at
Glacier Basin campground in Rocky
Mountain National Park was the reason
that he spent 40 years of his career
devoted to serving the National Park
Service so it’s possible we can change
the way we talk about climate change it
doesn’t have to be buried in doom and
gloom messages or scientific jargon I
want to leave you with four tips for
things you can do today to change the
way you talk about climate change this
happens to be the oldest rule in the
communication playbook you got to know
who you’re talking to what do they care
about the way we see ourselves
our values our attitudes our behaviors
shape the way we respond to messages so
know who you’re talking to and where
they sit which gets me to number two
which is to connect what they could care
about with climate change climate change
can be related to everything from public
health agriculture energy independence
the economy beer hops production wine
coffee I mean pick a thing there’s a
climate impact connected so figure out
what your audience cares about and make
the link for them them I’m saying them I
don’t mean a generic them I really mean
them we are social animals we vote how
our parents did we shop where our
friends do we are heavily influenced by
those around us so how can you use the
power of the social connections we have
to change the conversation finally tip
number four and I hate to end this way
but you guys know it the climate change
story it’s a downer this stuff is
depressing you can only take so much
right so don’t lead with the climate
science don’t lead with the political
impasses empower your audience research
shows that Americans feel like this is
bigger than them they are helpless don’t
let them be helpless there are hundreds
of decisions that we make on a daily
basis things we can do from planting a
veggie garden to building a solar garden
we can make choices in our goods
consumption and our energy consumption
so that we can leave this beautiful
resilient planet for the next generation
and hopefully for their children so they
have a shot at a healthy happy life here
– thank you very much you
tried to have a conversation about
climate change maybe with a certain
friend or family member and it didn’t go
that well look around look around you
are not alone you are so not alone we
have been struggling to effectively
communicate climate change for decades I
didn’t even know what climate change was
until I got to grad school and a
professor mentioned it in class and I
was like what timeout
you’re telling me humans are burning
greenhouse gases that are warming the
atmosphere and the surface temperature
of the earth which could lead to ocean
acidification mass extinctions and
cataclysmic tipping points
oh hello why are we not talking about
this why are we not talking about this I
started doing some research going to
conferences presentations I interviewed
professors all over my campus I went
home that Thanksgiving I said to my
family hey guys I’m learning all this
stuff about climate change and they were
like a chill out Chicken Little
chill out no one wants to talk about
this you know maybe they don’t know how
to talk about it so in 2004 I started a
project I wanted to know what research
was out there that explored all the
nuances the social cultural linguistic
aspects of communicating climate change
well in the past 15 years there have
been 1835 studies that spanned dozens of
disciplines datasets perspectives and
from all of this work all across the
board we learn but a lot of stuff
doesn’t work so I’m gonna introduce five
of the worst offenders five things if
you’re doing these please stop now
number one fear appeals and doomsday
prophecies have zero lasting power we
can scare the audience and they might
get freaked out about that cataclysmic
storm that’s coming their way
when they wake up the next morning and
the sky is blue and the Earth’s are
chirping and every
things fine they go back to living their
life the way they always did
second for nearly a hundred years
journalists have been trained to balance
their story you’ve got one side of an
issue you present the support and
evidence for the other side of the issue
when it comes to climate change over 97%
of actively publishing climate
scientists agree that humans have been
altering the Earth’s climate for close
to a century as well but when you look
at the news stories 28 percent reflect
that scientific consensus leaving the
audience to believe that the issue is
way more controversial than it actually
is also related is something many of my
friends and colleagues have said it a
failure to communicate the problem with
climate change is we’re just failing to
communicate let’s inject more
information into the audience and I
would say how could we have a
communication failure if we’re not even
speaking the same language the language
of science is not the language of public
policy politics or of the public one of
my favorite studies from the past 15
years took common words used in
international and national climate
reports and surveyed an average American
audience so words that have a specific
meaning for climate scientists have an
entirely different meaning for the
man-on-the-street
aerosols are their spray spray paint a
theory it’s just a hunch if you’re
uncertain then you must be ignorant in
some way you’ve got a manipulation in
your experiment clearly you’ve tampered
with the data if it is an air even a
margin of error it means that you’ve
done something wrong and consensus you
just share an opinion now it takes a lot
for a scientist to say that something is
likely to happen but for the public it’s
probably not gonna happen
so we’ve got a big language difference
and fourth we have
a philosophical difference the whole
beauty of science is not about proving
things as certain but discovering more
uncertainty so as they start to
communicate their results with
predictions that have lots of nuances or
ambiguous scenarios of how things might
play out it leaves the audience just
more confused and finally please don’t
do this at home
references to people and animals far
away don’t work cue the polar bear on
the ice floe stranded starving sad we
want to save it and then we go back to
our everyday life as usual
so just as I was crossing the polar bear
off my list of persuasive climate change
messengers I had an aha moment and I
don’t know if I can really take credit
for this I think I was just in the right
place at the right time I was working in
Colorado and I was collaborating with
the National Park Service senators John
McCain and mark Udall came for a special
Congressional subcommittee meeting at
Rocky Mountain National Park part of
their meeting included a tour of the
park where Rangers explained all of the
natural resources they were monitoring
in an era of changing climate well the
next morning the headline of The Denver
Post says every citizen in America
should see what’s happening here John
McCain went on to say hey I get a kid
climate change is real and every visit
we make such as we’re making here today
uh argues that we need to take action
take action take action yes taking
action suddenly I knew I had to do a
social experiment could we replicate the
McCain experience couldn’t we take a
group of people to Rocky Mountain give
them the same tour so I did just that
working with a group of colleagues and
what we discovered was there are lots of
influences on climate change that the
park is monitoring one thing that really
changed the conversation was talking
about the mountain pine beetle now pine
beetles have lived in the ponderosa pine
lodgepole pines twenty-seven other
varieties of pines for hundreds of years
and their population has been well
managed by cold winters essentially
midsummer an adult finds a tree it
burrows in a hole it lays a bajillion
eggs under the surface of the bark and
then we get about ten degrees below
freezing and it kills off most of that
larvae so in the spring a few hat should
move on and the cycle repeats well what
we’re seeing in Rocky Mountain National
Park and other parts of the West is that
pine beetles are having not just one
lifecycle in a year but now two and
sometimes three and a tree can’t fight
off that many beetles so within nine
months their needles turn red then brown
and drop to the ground now if you know
anything about managing public lands you
can’t have dead timber where park
visitors are stopping standing or
sleeping
this is Glacier Basin campground in the
heart of Rocky Mountain National Park it
used to look like this before 2009 as
our guide was telling us about the
management decision to clear-cut this
campground I feel a hand on my shoulder
and I turn and it’s Tamra and she’s I’m
gonna be generous early 50s professional
from Florida who joined our tour and I
can immediately tell her face is red
her eyes are glassy almost watery I’m
like oh wait a minute we’re at altitude
this has got to be altitude sickness
maybe a bee sting maybe she’s dehydrated
and just without thinking we motion and
we sit down at a picnic table and before
I can say anything she looks me in the
eye and she says I wish I’d brought my
parents okay she’s in her mid 50s her
parents really but I soon get it I get
it she goes on to tell me that they had
family reunions here every other summer
rode her bikes with her cousins made
sandwiches went on hikes
and her parents they’re getting older
they’re strong conservationists they
have a deep respect for public lands but
they also don’t get climate change and
they certainly don’t believe that humans
are altering the surface temperature of
the earth and this led to this really
rich conversation about family science
how to manage public lands in an era of
rapidly changing climate and from that
moment my research changed I spent the
next half dozen years go into a couple
dozen parks from the Everglades in
Florida to the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska
from the Puget Sound in Washington State
to the monuments of Washington DC
talking with visitors doing this having
this conversation in fact I was in
Alaska talking about climate change and
I finished my talk and I am folding down
my laptop and one of the audience
members walks up to me a big guy just
picture Paul Bunyan flannel and all you
guys know who I’m talking about
seven feet tall and he gets low and
looks at me and he says Jess you ruined
it
ruined it ruined what did I ruin
he says you ruined a glacier Basin
campground for me now I can’t go back
there
he had just finished digitizing all of
his father’s photos and here’s one from
the early 1960s he went on to tell me
that those family camping trips at
Glacier Basin campground in Rocky
Mountain National Park was the reason
that he spent 40 years of his career
devoted to serving the National Park
Service so it’s possible we can change
the way we talk about climate change it
doesn’t have to be buried in doom and
gloom messages or scientific jargon I
want to leave you with four tips for
things you can do today to change the
way you talk about climate change this
happens to be the oldest rule in the
communication playbook you got to know
who you’re talking to what do they care
about the way we see ourselves
our values our attitudes our behaviors
shape the way we respond to messages so
know who you’re talking to and where
they sit which gets me to number two
which is to connect what they could care
about with climate change climate change
can be related to everything from public
health agriculture energy independence
the economy beer hops production wine
coffee I mean pick a thing there’s a
climate impact connected so figure out
what your audience cares about and make
the link for them them I’m saying them I
don’t mean a generic them I really mean
them we are social animals we vote how
our parents did we shop where our
friends do we are heavily influenced by
those around us so how can you use the
power of the social connections we have
to change the conversation finally tip
number four and I hate to end this way
but you guys know it the climate change
story it’s a downer this stuff is
depressing you can only take so much
right so don’t lead with the climate
science don’t lead with the political
impasses empower your audience research
shows that Americans feel like this is
bigger than them they are helpless don’t
let them be helpless there are hundreds
of decisions that we make on a daily
basis things we can do from planting a
veggie garden to building a solar garden
we can make choices in our goods
consumption and our energy consumption
so that we can leave this beautiful
resilient planet for the next generation
and hopefully for their children so they
have a shot at a healthy happy life here
– thank you very much you
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