Climate Change Metaphors: How to Talk About Climate Change to make people care
Effective Climate Communication
As the writer of this blog, I’ve often thought about how my language choices can affect my message. I know I’ve been guilty of assuming that people know what the greenhouse gas effect means and using large numbers to describe the impact of plastics on our environment. The terms we use to describe climate change often include a lot of jargon and stats that are too big to comprehend or too small to care about. As people who care about the environment and about limiting climate change to protect future generations, it’s on us to communicate that message clearly and simply to get other people to care, as well. The only way to prevent climate catastrophe is to bring people into the fold, which is why today my blog is about how to reframe the climate change narrative so it’s more inclusive and easy to understand.
John Marshall helped found the Potential Energy Coalition to fix a big problem in climate change - marketing. Their goal is to help people to understand climate change, to understand the urgency and how it will affect them personally so that more people will care enough to prioritize it. He recently gave a TED Countdown Talk to spread the insights that the Potential Energy Coalition has gained about what works when it comes to climate communications.
Words that we often use to describe climate change, like emissions, CO2, net-zero, can be confusing and don’t encourage understanding in a way that drives action. This is why climate scientists and laypeople that care about climate change need to think before we speak. We need to think about our audience and about how to convey the urgency of climate change in a way that they understand, that overcomes the millions of other worries and challenges that are on their minds. Climate change is not a single issue, it’s a collective action issue that affects almost every other realm of our lives. While most people do care, they often focus on areas that are of immediate concern like job security, crime, education, and the economy, not recognizing that climate change intersects with each one of these issues.
The Potential Energy Coalition came up with a people-first approach to climate communications. This approach has three important guiding principles:
1) Plain, obvious, and universal language
Scientific language and numbers can muddle people’s understanding of the issue, so it’s important to come up with a simple metaphor that conveys the message and the urgency. A good test is thinking about what pops up in your head when you hear certain terms like climate change or net-zero. The answer for a lot of people is probably going to be not much. The Potential Energy Coalition has created a useful video that describes climate change using a “pollution blanket” metaphor. Check it out and see if you can incorporate the metaphor the next time you’re talking about why climate change is important to you!
John also gives a few examples of good alternatives to common climate communications. For example, “instead of warming use overheating, instead of climate use extreme weather,” here in the US instead of Celsius use Fahrenheit - the numbers sound much scarier in Fahrenheit. Most people don’t think climate change will ever harm them in their lifetimes, and they may be right, but it will definitely impact their children and their grandchildren, so emphasize that.
If you’re like me and can’t multiply decimals off the top of your head, an easy Celsius to Fahrenheit conversion is to multiply the °C by 2 and add 30. This won’t give you the exact °F, but it will get you pretty close. For example, converting 15°C to Fahrenheit using this method gets you to 60°F, while the true conversion is 59°F - pretty close!
And if you just want to know off the top of your head the °F for common climate change temperature rise predictions, here’s a quick guide:
Best Case Scenario - 1.5°C = 2.7°F
Next Best - 2°C = 3.6°F
Paris Agreement by 2100 - 3°C = 5.4°F
Business as Usual by 2100 - 4.4°C = 8°F
2) Make climate something that matters to your audience and to their lives, personally.
Instead of asking people to demand actions by their local government that will limit their community’s contributions to climate change, think about what environmental impacts are affecting or will affect the community. For example, here in East Tennessee, flooding is a huge issue and is expected to increase here. John and his team have found marketing strategies like “stop my flooding!” to be much more effective than using slogans about climate change more broadly.
Science Moms is a non-profit organization that was founded to demystify climate science so that all moms know the impact that climate change will have on their and their children’s futures and to motivate urgent action by giving them tools to help in the fight. Organizations with messages like this make climate change relatable and personal.
“The right messages are those that connect climate change to personal identity. Our life -- not future lives, not the world -- our community, not necessarily environmentalism -- our values, and not just children -- our child.”
John Marshall
3) Show that climate change is an issue for everyone across social groups.
Instead of explaining the issue at people, bring people into the issue. When John Marshall and his team relayed their climate change message to a target group of people using someone from that group, they saw double-digit increases in message effectiveness, compared to when they relayed the same message using a random person. “Most people don't see themselves as ‘environmentalists’ per se, and they see climate change as an ‘environmentalist issue.’ But messages that break away from those narrow identity markers make the issue relatable.”
So to sum up, to communicate effectively about climate change across all populations and different groups, we need to learn how to speak in plain, obvious language, make climate change something that matters to our audience personally, and target our message to different groups utilizing the people and resources within that group. Or, for a quick and simple sum up from John "hey... pay attention, you're building up a massive blanket of pollution that's overheating your home. And it's going to hurt the people and the things that you love. You did this and you can fix it."
More Resources for Talking to People about Climate Change
Now that we’ve covered the most effective way to communicate about the climate, I wanted to share some resources that I’ve found helpful for talking to the people in our lives who may have different backgrounds and opinions on the matter.
How to talk to friends and family about climate change.
How to talk to kids about climate change.
How to talk to a climate change skeptic.
Creative Climate Communications
You can take a look at this in depth guide to climate communications by Maxwell Boykoff to compliment the Potential Energy Coalition’s method. You can read a synopsis of the book, here.