The unofficial heat records come after months of unusually hot conditions due to climate change and a strong El Nino event. The entire planet sweltered for the two unofficial hottest days in human recordkeeping Monday and Tuesday, according to University of Maine scientists at the Climate Reanalyzer project. Love may not be as popular a metaphor in the fight against climate change as war is, but it's picking up speed.Visitors wear sun hats and carry umbrellas as they leave the Forbidden City on a hot day in Beijing, Thursday, June 29, 2023. Those stories that really matter to people… is about the heart." The stories that people want to hear and climate change have got to connect. "What matters to people is good relationships with family, friends, place, and it does get ignored. (Image of Nazi Luftwaffe, circa 1939 - General Photographic Agency/Getty Images ) Make images of love, not warĪccording to some communications experts, one under-used metaphor to motivate people is "love."Ĭhris Shaw, a researcher for Climate Outreach in Seaford, East Sussex, U.K., says advocates for climate action must remember that people are motivated by more than fear or anger. It was a great evil that was rising… it required a full mobilization and sacrifices on the part of the entire nation and the entire alliance to destroy that evil,' says Stephen Flusberg. 'World War II is really that archetype of a war. When would we say, 'OK, we've done it, we've won?'" "It's unclear how we win or lose that war. ![]() But over time, it's been an absolute abject failure. "For example, the war on drugs in the United States, kicked off by Richard Nixon, at first really did mobilize law enforcement and the public to start to view drug problems as a serious issue to tackle. ![]() When you promise a war, you're setting people up for disappointment, says Flusberg. The fight against climate change will be long, and there probably won't be a single, clear moment when we've won the war for good. And so that when whenever politicians or journalists or pundits are trying to get attention to an issue, it helps to use language that activates strong emotions - and wars do that."īut there's a danger in relying on war metaphors. "Wars convey a sense of urgency and risk. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made the comparison in her proposal for a Green New Deal, legislation intended to fight climate change, in which she called for "a new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II."įlusberg says war metaphors can be useful in getting people interested in a cause, at least in the short term. In a cover story for the New Republic magazine, American environmentalist and author Bill McKibben wrote: 'We’re under attack from climate change - and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII.' (New Republic Magazine, September 2016 issue) Scientists have known the facts of climate change for a long time, but the facts on their own don't seem to resonate with people.įor example, this 1958 TV broadcast on climate change uses an approach called the information deficit model - one that clearly hasn't worked yet. And it's not really the best way to go about communicating," says Atkinson. If people just knew more about the issue, then they would do something.' We call that the information deficit model. "It can be a pitfall in that we tend to think, 'Oh, it's a problem of knowledge, it's a problem of information. Facts don't sink inĪccording to Lucy Atkinson, an associate professor in communication at the University of Texas, relying on factual information alone is just not good enough. When it comes to climate change, communications strategists have struggled for years to find the right metaphor to get people motivated to address the problem. ![]() Metaphors are, to use a metaphor, baked into language." "Metaphors are central to how we talk and think about a lot of aspects of our world… Metaphors are not just something extra like a rhetorical flourish. Metaphors are a crucial part of communicating climate change, says Stephen Flusberg, an associate professor of psychology at the State University of New York.
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