{Guest Author: Aaron Krol, Climate Communications Coordinator, MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative}
Climate communicators have better information than ever before on what the public knows about climate change. Rigorous surveys, tracked over time, have revealed a swift change in public attitudes over the past decade, showing us that today, healthy majorities of both Americans and Canadians understand that climate change is happening and view it as a threat.
We have much less information about what the public wants to know about climate change. (Although the Yale Program on Climate Communication did publish one helpful survey along these lines earlier this year.) It’s a hard question to poll: what options do you give respondents? Will your prompting push them to give an answer they really weren’t that interested in before?
But for communicators, this information is vital. The easiest person to reach with useful, actionable climate information is the one who’s already trying to learn more.
At the MIT Climate Change Engagement Program, we’ve been answering climate questions for the past five years, through our short-form podcast series, our quick, easy-to-understand explainers, and most directly through the Q&A series Ask MIT Climate, in which MIT experts help us answer reader questions from around the world. Through the terms that bring people to our site from online search engines, the questions readers send us by phone and email on a daily basis, and our research into frequently-used search terms on the web, we have a finger on the pulse of the climate questions people are most motivated to ask.
And we’ve noticed some trends that we think can help all climate communicators reach people where they are, with information and perspectives that will help us on the road to a decarbonized society.
Climate solutions are looming larger in people’s lives
Much has been made of climate disasters becoming part of our weekly news cycle. We are, unfortunately, seeing more of the intense wildfires, floods and heatwaves climate scientists have long predicted. As climate impacts grow more visible, researchers have tried to pin down whether experiencing extreme weather makes people more accepting of climate science and more willing to act (with somewhat mixed results).
But climate disasters aren’t the only change we can see around us. The technologies and public works that seek to put an end to our climate-warming emissions are also more present in our lives than ever before.
In our work at MIT, we encounter far more questions about solar panels and tree-planting than we do about hurricanes and droughts. And perhaps that’s not surprising: if a wind farm is rising in your area, or your city is taking out car lanes to make room for buses and bicycles, that’s a change you can expect to live with for years to come. You might well have questions—and many thousands of people are asking them online.
Change is worrying—even when it’s positive change
Most questions people have about these solutions are cautious, if not outright skeptical. Some are worried they will do more harm than good. (Will underground carbon storage cause earthquakes? Will electrifying everything leave us more vulnerable to blackouts?) Some are skeptical that they’re really solutions at all: by far the single biggest driver of traffic to our website is people asking if the batteries in electric vehicles mean they’re just as bad for the climate as gas-powered cars.
But remember: people’s curiosity about these solutions, even if it comes from a place of concern, is really an opportunity.
We recommend taking on concerns honestly and forthrightly. After all, most of them are not made up out of whole cloth. One of the most popular pieces on our site is “Do wind turbines kill birds?”, and the fact is that they do. If people don’t hear that from us, or from other climate communicators, they’ll get their information from sources whose only interest in wind energy is bird collisions—or worse, those who want to cynically use this as a wedge to drive opposition to renewable energy.
But in answering honestly, we can also provide the context needed to see these concerns clearly. People naturally tend to view new things as risky, and the status quo as fine. But if you’re genuinely concerned about bird deaths, it’s very helpful to know that wind turbines cause far, far fewer of them than tall buildings or house cats—and that the power sources wind turbines replace, like coal plants, also kill birds.
And the picture is similar for other climate solutions. If people are worried about accidents in CO2 pipelines, they should know about the far larger network of oil and gas pipelines we already have. If people are worried about waste from lithium mines, they should understand that today’s fossil fuel economy demands a vastly larger amount of extraction for coal and oil, and those produce waste too.
People want to go deeper on the science (and it’s not about persuasion)
If questions about climate solutions are the most popular, the second biggest category we’ve noticed could be summarized as, “I accept the science, but I really want to understand it.”
What does it really mean to say greenhouse gases “trap heat”? What’s actually being measured when we say the Earth’s temperature is rising? Why is today’s warming different from the warming that brought humans out of the last ice age? These questions are well worth our time to engage with—not just because they demonstrate a real curiosity about what’s happening to our planet, but also because they’re a chance to explain the aspects of climate change that are most often misunderstood.
We know a majority of the public accepts that climate change is happening, and increasingly that humans are the cause. But majorities also believe that it’s mostly a problem for future generations, or that it shouldn’t be a top priority. So consider whether your audience is ready to go beyond the basics of “greenhouse gases trap heat,” or rehashing once again how strong the scientific consensus is. When we explain in more detail how greenhouse gases interact with solar radiation, that’s also an opportunity to point out how long CO2 lasts in the atmosphere—and that the changes we’re making to the climate now will be locked in for thousands of years. When we talk about the Earth’s past climates, that’s a chance to underscore that all recorded human history has taken place in a uniquely stable period for our planet—and that our cities, food systems and basic infrastructure all rely on that stability.
Curiosity is an opportunity
And that pivot—from responding to people’s curiosity, to gently reminding them that climate change is an urgent challenge—is possible with almost every climate question.
Think about a few key messages you want everyone to understand about the big picture of climate change. For us at MIT, our messages include:
- Now is a uniquely important time to act! The long-lasting nature of carbon dioxide means we cannot take back the changes we’re making to our climate.
- Even our best clean technologies, like ultra-cheap solar and wind, have their advantages and drawbacks. We’ll need a large toolkit of different options to fully decarbonize.
- Incentives matter. If we expect people to make different choices about how they travel and power their homes, then we also need policy and design choices that make the cleanest options the easiest ones.
- A decarbonized world has benefits beyond stopping climate change. Acting now can give us all cleaner air and water, more fair and reliable access to transportation and energy, and much more.
- It’s never too late to confront climate change. Every tenth of a degree of warming we prevent will save lives.
Yours may be different; there’s room for many different messages and messengers in the world of climate communications. But it would be a shame if we didn’t see every person sincerely reaching out to learn more as beginning a journey to being a better climate citizen. With honest answers and the right perspective, they may go on to take new actions in their community, their workplace, their local government.
Let’s take advantage of this moment when climate solutions are newly visible, and welcome the tough questions.
