The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C” presented the ambitious target of needing to achieve zero net emissions by 2050 in order to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement (IPCC, 2018). This report led some governments and jurisdictions to declare a climate emergency (Climate Emergency Declaration, 2019) and prompted the rise of movements of activism and civil disobedience such as the School Strike for the Climate and Extinction Rebellion. The reach of these civil actions extends beyond those directly involved, potentially increasing wider public awareness of climate change. Here, we examine trends in indicators of this wider public awareness and engagement and compare these with major global movements of civil disobedience focussed on climate, the release of substantive climate reports, and global governmental gatherings on climate change. We show that these global movements may be increasing public awareness of, and stimulating public engagement with, issues of climate change. It is not easy to accurately measure public awareness and engagement with the issue of climate change at a global scale. We use two sources of information as indicators of that engagement. First, we used data on the scaled relative frequency of pertinent terms in Google searches (\"global warming,\" \"climate change,\" \"climate action,\" \"climate emergency,\" \"climate crisis,\" downloaded from Google Trends on October 31, 2019, https ://www.google.com/trends). Second, we used data on mentions of the terms \"climate change\" and \"global warming\" by the global media, assembled by the Media and Climate Change Observatory, MeCCO (Boykoff et al., 2019, downloaded on December 4, 2019). These sources provide monthly data on the attention paid to climate change by anyone searching the internet (from the Google data), and by the newspapers, radio, and television (from the MeCCO data). We focus on 2017 onwards; a period that includes the recent rise in activism and civil disobedience associated with climate change. Although there exists substantial month-to-month variation, both data sources show an overall increase in public engagement with climate change, especially after mid-2018 (Figure 1). The Google search data also suggest an interesting evolution of the language of climate change. While the relative popularity of the search term \"global warming\" has shown little systematic change, public interest in “climate action” has increased greatly since 2018. In addition, \"climate crisis\" and \"climate emergency\" have become popular search terms since early 2019. Peaks in internet searches for these specific terms coincide with the first and second global school strikes, and New York Climate Week (Figure 1a). Searches for “climate emergency” and “climate crisis” were rare before 2019, but the use of these search terms increased 20-fold during that year. Furthermore,

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Civil disobedience movements such as School Strike for the Climate are raising public awareness of the climate change emergency

Researchers and practitioners are searching for alternative ways to communicate climate change and other environmental problems beyond the dominant approach of shock and fear. Using humor is one su...

An Inconvenient Joke? A Review of Humor in Climate Change Communication

A growing body of research has explored whether evoking hope or fear about climate change is more effective at catalyzing attitude and behavior change among the public. Prior studies on this topic have primarily tested responses to text and/or still image manipulations, finding mixed results. Amid the rapidly growing creation and consumption of climate change video content online, it is important that researchers also consider how the public may engage with hope and fear narratives presented in videos. This study aims to help fill this gap by examining how Americans respond to hope and doom and gloom climate change frames portrayed in short online videos. Participants who watched the hope and doom videos reported experiencing the respective emotions the videos sought to elicit (hope and fear). Participants with different political affiliations and with contrasting climate change attitudes across the Six Americas of Global Warming reported significantly different levels of fear, but only participants across the Six Americas reported significantly different levels of hope. However, despite these emotional responses, neither video was associated with significant differences in climate change risk perceptions, likelihood of behavior change, or likelihood of climate activism. These null results suggest that the impacts of a single hope or fear appeal can be overstated and caution against claims that either hopeful or fear-driven climate change communication strategies are necessarily optimal. Open-ended survey responses to the videos also suggest that ideological views about climate change may be associated with how individuals respond to specific video production elements, including music, editing, pacing, and visuals.

Climate of hope or doom and gloom? Testing the climate change hope vs. fear communications debate through online videos

Rising COVID-19 cases in Canada in early 2021, coupled with pervasive mis- and disinformation, demonstrate the critical relationship between effective crisis communication, trust, and risk protective measure adherence by the public. Trust in crisis communication is affected by the communication's characteristics including transparency, timeliness, empathy, and clarity, as well as the source and communication channels used. Crisis communication occurs in a rhetorical arena where various actors, including public health, news media, and the public, are co-producing and responding to messages. Rhetorical arenas must be monitored to assess the acceptance of messaging. The quality and content of Canadian public health and news media crisis communication on Facebook were evaluated to understand the use of key guiding principles of effective crisis communication, the focus of the communication, and subsequent public emotional response to included posts. Four hundred and thirty-eight posts and 26,774 anonymized comments were collected and analyzed. Overall, the guiding principles for effective crisis communication were inconsistently applied and combined. A limited combination of guiding principles, especially those that demonstrate trustworthiness, was likely driving the negative sentiment uncovered in the comments. Public health and news media should use the guiding principles consistently to increase positive sentiment and build trust among followers.

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Examining Social Media Crisis Communication during Early COVID-19 from Public Health and News Media for Quality, Content, and Corresponding Public Sentiment.

Abstract Misinformation about climate change is a consequential societal issue, causing polarization and reduced support for climate action. However, the seriousness of the problem does not preclude non-serious solutions. There are numerous potential benefits to humor as a strategy to counter misinformation, such as attracting attention and engaging disengaged audiences. This paper describes a humorous serious game—“Cranky Uncle”—developed in the U.S. to inoculate players against climate misinformation. The game combines psychological research into active inoculation, critical-thinking work on misleading rhetorical techniques, communication research into cartoon debunking, and gamification. The game’s cartoon humor and the creative potential of active inoculation lends it to classroom applications; educators have thus used classroom activities to complement the game in order to improve students’ climate literacy and critical-thinking abilities. We present several qualitative U.S.-based case studies, in formal English-speaking tertiary classrooms and informal public education settings, to illustrate the utility of a humorous, game-based approach to building resilience against climate misinformation. The approaches adopted in our case studies are offered as a model for other educators looking to use interactive games to teach critical thinking.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13504622.2022.2085671?needAccess=true

The cranky uncle game—combining humor and gamification to build student resilience against climate misinformation

COVID-19 media coverage decreasing despite deepening crisis.

This report explores the use of good-natured comedy to diversify the modes of comedy that can be used in climate communication beyond satire to others modes that are possibly more supportiv...

Good-natured comedy to enrich climate communication

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac14eb/pdf

Balance as bias, resolute on the retreat? Updates & analyses of newspaper coverage in the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia and Canada over the past 15 years

Creative Climate Communications


 We interrogate fast fashion in the 21st century in the context of a changing climate, assessing emergent trends in sustainable fashion as an alternative consumption pathway through the annual ‘Trash the Runway’ event in Boulder, Colorado. In this research, we interviewed and surveyed designers and analyzed workshop activities that led up to their annual fashion show. We also interviewed and surveyed students at the University of Colorado who worked with designers to produce short films about them and their work. The project centers on decolonial practice by providing —who are often marginalized in decision-making processes—a stage to articulate policy and behavior changes to address climate change and sustainability. We found designers expressed reticence before the workshops and events to speak about climate change in everyday life, yet their design work creatively spoke powerfully for them, and they expressed less discomfort after the experience, while they advanced their skillset as climate communicators. Moreover, we found both designers and student partners reported that they think climate change will impact people greatly in the future. Also, while comparatively fewer respondents reported that climate change impacts them personally, our findings showed those noting personal impacts nearly doubled after participation in the sustainable fashion project. Although engagement with sustainable fashion helps to defetishize production processes and link consumption habits with awareness of climate and environmental change, more creative work should be done through fast- and sustainable-fashion endeavors to draw out spatial and temporal considerations of climate change threats here and now.

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Patrick Chandler

Papers

COVID-19 media coverage decreasing despite deepening crisis.

Good-natured comedy to enrich climate communication

Balance as bias, resolute on the retreat? Updates & analyses of newspaper coverage in the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia and Canada over the past 15 years

Creative Climate Communications

Examining climate change and sustainable/fast fashion in the 21st century: ‘Trash the Runway’