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Engaging across blogging divides on climate

Last week, an anthropology PhD student in New Zealand wrote a summary and response to a paper I gave at the Association for Journalism Education annual conference, in September this year. I though her commentary was a thoughtful piece with a fair set of conclusions: that bloggers self-select their networks based on beliefs. And that my beliefs were as rigid as any “climate sceptic”.

One thing Picking Up Sticks noted in the piece was the lack of engagement across the networks; “deniers” and “believers” rarely talk. This is a currently recognised theme online, and not just around climate change: take the U.S. election, for example. The TV producer Adam Curtis described blogging self-selection in an interview with The Register last year: More »

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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 »

Tags: climate change, controversy, global warming, hockey stick, MBH, McIntyre, media coverage, science