John Marshall 3 strategies for effectively talking about climate change TED Countdown
Transcriber:
I often have this strange thought
that aliens come down to Earth
to check us out.
They beam up a hundred scientists
and they ask them,
“What’s going on on your planet?”
And the aliens quickly learn something:
that all of these scientists
have concluded
that pollution from our industrial
activity is irreversibly heating the earth
in a way that will make it very hard
for us to live here safely.
Then they do the same thing,
but this time they beam up
another 100 people,
and they’re not scientists,
they’re regular people like us.
They could count on one hand
how many of those people
would even mention climate change.
Two or three dozen of them
may never have even heard the term.
And among the Americans in the group,
only one in four would be highly
concerned about the issue.
The aliens, I think, would be shocked.
“Why don’t people know
what’s happening or how bad it is?
Someone should tell them!”
The absurdity of the situation
is so clear and so real.
What we have here
is a failure to communicate.
My job is to educate people
about climate change.
So I look at the concepts, the messages,
the images and the terms,
and I test them with millions of people.
I’d like to tell you what I’m learning.
For so many people,
climate change seems abstract,
distant, too big to imagine.
The words we often use to describe it –
emissions, CO2, methane,
net zero, anthropogenic –
are, simply put, confusing.
Not that many people wake up
in the morning and say,
“It’s a great day
for some decarbonisation.”
These words become obstacles
rather than gateways to understanding,
let alone caring.
The way to fix this failure to communicate
is to start not by talking
about the issue,
but to start with people,
to think first about individuals,
the people who have millions
of other things on their mind,
a million worries and challenges
and hopes and aspirations.
Climate change is one of the biggest
threats humanity has ever faced,
and we won’t face it,
not to the degree that’s necessary,
if people don’t care.
The people-first approach
to climate communications
demands three simple things.
The first one is plain,
obvious and universal language.
One thing for sure
people don’t readily get –
carbon emissions, net zero –
are most terms that can be found
in a science book.
And frankly, to the uninitiated,
much of it doesn’t really sound that bad.
“Two degrees warmer in 50 years,”
or it sounds so bad, you can’t even
get your head around it –
“1.2 trillion tons of ice.”
Confusion and hopelessness
are the enemies of understanding.
A good test for language is, what pops
into your head when you hear it.
If you hear a term like “climate change,”
what pops into your head?
Well, for most people,
the answer is “not much.”
The language isn’t vivid.
What we need is vivid language
that everyone gets.
It’s remarkable how many people
actually confuse climate change
with the ozone hole.
More than four in 10 Americans
think the ozone hole
actually causes global warming.
And so many of them remember
and understand
so much about ozone depletion.
Why is that?
Because it’s a hole, it’s a layer.
People can see it,
imagine it, relate to it.
It uses simple metaphor
that’s an instant get.
Here’s a little story
that gets a similar “aha”
for climate change.
Humans have been on Earth
for about 300,000 years,
but we’ve only started polluting like this
in about the last 60.
Our pollution stays in the air
for thousands of years,
creating a thickening blanket
that traps heat in the atmosphere.
That heat causes stronger hurricanes,
bigger fires, more frequent floods
and the extinction
of thousands of species.
But there’s good news.
To stop the pollution blanket,
we just have to stop polluting.
This “pollution blanket” framing
is one of the most effective we’ve tested
at getting people to understand the issue.
It’s visual, it’s vivid,
and when people hear the message,
they become significantly more engaged.
They get it.
There are so many other
regular speak words and concepts
that stick with people.
Instead of “warming,”
try “overheating.”
Instead of “climate,”
talk about “extreme weather.”
When mentioning “clean energy,”
you might say “cheap energy” as well,
as it’s rapidly becoming cheap.
The word “irreversible”
really gets people’s attention,
as the pollution certainly is.
And if you absolutely must talk
about temperature increases
and you live in the US,
heck, use Fahrenheit for goodness sake.
It doubles the severity.
“Nine degrees during your kid’s lifetime”
sounds pretty serious.
“One point five degrees Celsius to meet
the Paris Accord” is pretty ignorable.
This is about going beyond
arcane policy language
into language that we all intuitively get.
That’s the first step: understanding.
But understanding
without relevance is rudderless.
So the second key then
is to make climate feel like something
that matters to you,
to your life, individually and personally.
Nobody has an epiphany
about policy proposals.
Awakenings are personal.
They have local relevance.
They’re about your life and your concerns.
As an example, we presented two messages
to a few thousand people in Florida.
One asked them “to demand that we get
to zero emissions to stop climate change.”
Another simply said, “Stop my flooding.”
The latter message was over four times
more effective in getting their attention.
Local flooding was so much more
relevant than global warming.
What’s needed isn’t better
policy descriptions,
but rather deeper,
more personal connections.
Here’s another example.
We work with a team of remarkable
women climate scientists
to help elevate their voice
as messengers.
They’ve dedicated their careers
to studying the issue,
developing complex computational models
to understand the Arctic processes,
and climbing into planes
to measure nitrogen in wildfire smoke.
They could tell you everything
you need to know about the science,
but what we asked them about
was why they study it.
And they told us about their
daughters and their sons,
about wanting to keep the world
safe and healthy and vibrant
for their children.
And when we shared these personal
stories with other parents,
they started to care far more deeply
about climate change
than they did from staring at charts
of global temperatures.
People see a parent
who’s dedicated their life
to creating a better world
for their child.
Every parent can relate to that.
It matters to me.
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.
Finally, the third key
to the climate communications puzzle
to show that climate change
is an issue for people like me:
Humans are social animals,
and that’s true for how
we form our beliefs, too.
You can present the exact same
message to many people,
but when it comes from someone
with a similar accent or background,
we see double-digit increases
in message effectiveness.
Here’s an unexpected messenger
who really lands the point.
A guy we call Florida man.
He’s a resident of North Florida
who got into a little trouble with the law
after taking an alligator
into a convenience store
when he was on a beer run.
Not exactly the most obvious
climate change messenger
yet when he appeared in an internet ad
describing in his own way
how he’s worried about his way of life,
it significantly increased climate concern
among young conservative men in Florida.
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.
They give people a reason to care.
So the core idea is that instead
of explaining the issue at people,
it’s essential to bring
people into the issue,
so that they say, “I get it.
It matters to me.
It matters to people like me.”
Then and only then
are we primed to take action.
If the intelligent aliens in my story
were also intelligent at communications,
they would say to us,
“Hey, Earthlings, 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.”
We simply have to let our fellow eight
billion inhabitants of our home know
what’s happening.
We have no choice.
And when we do,
we’ll achieve the public will necessary
to take on this colossal
but winnable fight for our future.
Thank you.