Hockey Stick: the first climate change metaphor
In his Public Understanding of Science 2000 article ‘Knowledge, Ignorance and Popular Culture’, University of Toronto Professor Sheldon Ungar suggests the reason that public understanding and concern could coalesce around the ozone hole, where it has failed to do so for climate change, was in part due to two things: first, that the ozone hole argument found bridging metaphors from popular culture that were easily understood; and second, it engendered a ‘hot crisis’.
As Ungar suggests, these bridging metaphors for the ozone hole were simple and powerful:
The signal advantage of the ozone hole is that is can be encapsulated in a simple and widely familiar “penetration” metaphor. Stated succinctly, the hole leads to increased bombardment of the earth by lethal rays. The idea of rays penetrating a damaged ’shield’ meshes nicely with abiding and resonant cultural motifs, including Hollywood ‘affinities’, ranging from the Starship Enterprise to Star Wars.
Importantly, as Ungar notes, these metaphors are ‘pre-scientific’. That is, they’re kept simple, before they get into the scientific detail of the ways in which ‘ozone eater’ chemicals destroy the earth’s atmospheric protection.
In fact, these metaphors were so powerful, that both Ungar (2000) and Hargreaves, Lewis and Speers (2003) found that many people simply considered climate change to be a sub-set problem of/caused by the ozone hole problem. In a saturated media, people hold onto the main themes and frameworks of science stories, and not much more, with which to take educated guesses at what’s going on in the world (Hargreaves et al, 2003). More »
