08/09/2021

(Anthropocene) People Don’t Know What Climate Experts Are Talking About

Anthropocene Magazine - Sarah DeWeerdt

Simpler language and more context could aid public understanding of climate change
Members of the public have trouble understanding words and phrases that climate scientists often use, according to a new study. The confusion affects both people who accept the reality of climate change and climate change doubters.

If climate change is to be stopped, scientists can’t just communicate amongst themselves. They also need to make their findings understood by policymakers and the general public so that we can collectively take action. This need has led the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other climate-science organizations to step up their efforts at science communication.

To find out if these efforts are hitting the mark, researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 20 members of the U.S. general public about key terms used in climate change communications. The group of study participants was about evenly split between the climate-concerned (those who accept the scientific consensus that climate change is mostly human-caused) and the climate-ambivalent (who hold varying views on the reality of climate change).

Each 30-40 minute interview covered 8 terms drawn from an IPCC report: tipping point, unprecedented transition, carbon neutral, carbon dioxide removal, adaptation, mitigation, sustainable development, and abrupt change.

 Participants were asked to share their interpretation of each term and rate how easy it was to understand, and to do the same with a sentence using the term. They were also invited to make suggestions for improving the language to make it clearer and more comprehensible.

Participants rated the terms mitigation, carbon neutral, and unprecedented transition as hardest to understand, the researchers report in the journal Climatic Change. The terms adaptation and abrupt change were rated easiest.

Still, both climate-concerned and climate-ambivalent participants found many of the terms unfamiliar and too technical.  And the sentences that were meant to clarify the terms were sometimes no help because they were wordy and full of jargon.

LARGE IMAGE
“Words that might be familiar to climate scientists may not be familiar to people who are not in climate science,” says lead author Wändi Bruine de Bruin, Provost Professor of Public Policy, Psychology, and Behavioral Science at the University of Southern California Sol Price School of Public Policy and Dornsife Department of Psychology.

What’s more, a closer look at the interview transcripts revealed subtle misunderstandings of many of the terms. For example, participants knew what adaptation means but not necessarily what it means in the context of climate change.

Even though mitigation was perceived as the hardest term to understand and adaptation one of the easiest, some participants conflated the two (a finding that has popped up in other studies, too).

Some people thought that “unprecedented transition” referred to extreme weather events or climate shifts, when in fact the IPCC uses the phrase to indicate sweeping changes to the economy and society that will be necessary to respond to climate change.

Participants also felt that many of the terms left out crucial details. For example, some didn’t understand how carbon neutrality is achieved, what adaptation was to, or what form of carbon various terms referred to. For carbon dioxide removal, people needed to know what carbon was being removed from and how.

The clear takeaway: “To communicate more clearly, avoid jargon,” says Bruine de Bruin. “As a rule of thumb, words of three syllables or more tend to be less widely understood and more likely to involve jargon. If you must use jargon, try to explain what it means in everyday language.”

Participants suggested that climate scientists should use simpler words when communicating with the general public, clarify the climate change context of various terms, and make the underlying processes explicit. They also made specific suggestions about how to improve or explain various terms (See table.)

Both climate-concerned and climate-ambivalent participants expressed confusion about the terms in the study, as well as being willing to suggest improvements to the language. But while the sample size is large enough to find terms that are misunderstood and how, it wasn’t designed to identify differences between the two groups, Bruine de Bruin says.

“A survey with a large sample would be needed to find out how common these misunderstandings are, and how they are related to climate change concern,” Bruine de Bruin says. Future studies could also examine whether the simpler explanations really do improve public understanding or engagement with climate change.

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News Corp Hasn’t Seen The Light On Climate – They’re Just Updating Their Tactics

RenewEconomy -


Have you heard the good news? One of the key institutions holding back climate action in Australia – Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation – is suddenly on Team Climate Action!

Today, the Sydney Morning Herald revealed that the company’s Australian outlets are set to launch a campaign urging “the world’s leading economies” to embrace a target of net zero emissions by 2050; to be fronted by columnist Joe Hildebrand. The details aren’t out yet, but I contend that we can comfortably predict what it will look like.

It will be a centrist, pro-business approach to climate action. It will make a show of dismissing the “hysterics” of climate activists, while urging governments, including Australia’s, to set distant, meaningless and non-binding climate targets.

It won’t allow any room for emissions reductions in line with the 1.5C goals or the Paris agreement; no short-term meaningful targets or actions such as those highlighted in the IEA’s recent ‘net zero’ report. It won’t argue for a coal phase-out by 2030, or the end of all new coal, gas and oil mines in Australia, or a ban on combustion engine sales by 2030-2035; all vital actions if Australia is to align with any net zero target.

It’ll champion controversial technologies like CCS and fossil hydrogen. It’ll highlight personal responsibility: tree planting, recycling and electric vehicle purchases. It will not propose or argue in favour of any new policies; at least none that might reduce the burning of fossil fuels.

How can we know all this before we’ve seen the actual campaign? It’s easy – let me explain.

Done with denial

Here’s a remarkable statistic for you. In the month of August this year, global media coverage of climate saw its highest volume since the December 2009 Copenhagen climate meetings. That’s partly down to the release of the IPCC’s AR6 Working Group one report into climate change, six years in the making.

That report reiterated something extremely important: every single tonne of carbon dioxide does damage. Actions must be immediate and aggressive to align with the most ambitious pathways. Delay is deadly.

No media coverage records for Australia: coverage of climate change has dropped almost entirely off the radar relative to the high volumes of late 2019 and early 2020 (partly driven by the Black Summer bushfires).

These figures track newspaper coverage of climate change or global warming in 5 Australian newspapers (Sydney Morning Herald, Courier Mail & Sunday Mail, The Australian, Daily Telegraph & Sunday Telegraph, and The Age). Updated through August 2021.
During the Black summer bushfires of 2019-20, I did a few interviews about Australia with baffled and perplexed international reporters. “What is going on over there? Why did the people elect such a climate laggard?”.

A key part of my response was to pin blame on Australia’s media industry. Mostly on News Corp, which dominates the country’s uniquely concentrated media landscape, and which is notorious for its heavily politicised climate views. In fact, a recent study quantified this in historical terms, analysing media coverage within Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia for its climate science accuracy.

By a comfortable margin, News Corp’s Daily Telegraph and the Courier Mail scored the second and fourth worst among every media outlet analysed between 2005 and 2019 (The Australian wasn’t included in the analysis).

Australia has, in general, seen the least accurate climate science coverage from 2013 onwards, despite a general rising trend in scientific accuracy over the past decade. For a decade and a half, News Corp lied about climate science with the blatant aim of protecting the revenue streams of the fossil fuel industry, and protecting its political allies.


This is important as a historical study, but today, it’s increasingly irrelevant. As the study points out, the accuracy of climate science has essentially plateaued in media coverage, with outright denial consigned to the dustbin.

The authors highlights that “the terrain of climate debates has shifted in recent years away from strict denial of the scientific consensus on human causes of climate change toward ‘discourses of delay’ that focus on undermining support for specific policies meant to address climate change”. The fundamental goal is the same – staving off action – but the way it manifests is very different.

Delay is the main game

There are many substantial recent examples of this. A good one was the severe blackouts that spread across Texas in February this year, which were immediately blamed on wind power failures, alongside easily debunked claims that snows and ice were blocking solar panels and freezing up wind turbines in Texas and around the world.

This isn’t climate change denial: it’s “mitigation denial“. That is, a move away from denying the problem exists and towards decrying its solutions as utterly unacceptable. An important part of this performance is pretending to have a moment of having seen the light, but then continuing to commit the same acts of delay as before.

Murdoch’s The Sun, in the UK, did precisely this. In October 2020, The Sun launched a ‘Green Team‘ campaign that focused on ‘individual responsibility’ in the lead-up to COP26, to be held in Glasgow at the end of this year. It wasn’t long until they were celebrating their own victory in freezing fossil fuel taxes. The UK’s Daily Express, another hyper-conservative outlet that ‘saw the light’, continues to publish articles attacking climate activism and, more significantly, framing climate action in an explicitly “eco nationalist” way, as UK writer Sam Knights highlights in this article in Novara media. He says,
“Make no mistake: these newspapers are not your friends. They are not your allies. Their politics are not in any way ecological. They are deeply racist, reactionary, right-wing publications. Their sudden interest in climate change is not to be celebrated – it is a terrifying indication of things to come.”
It’s notable that these examples seem to manifest in the UK, and less so in similar anglophone countries like Canada or the US or New Zealand. Those are led by centre-left parties and politicians, but the UK’s conservative embrace of climate action is surely a model that Australia’s PM Scott Morrison pines to replicate.

Sure, the UK certainly is miles ahead of Australia in terms of climate action – but there remains a very significant gap between Boris Johnson’s climate policies and where the country actually needs to be to align with the carbon budget that its independent climate advisor body has laid out.

A technocratic, rich white country with a government more concerned with optics than doing what needs to be done to protect people from being hurt by fossil fuels. Morrison’s obviously inspired by the UK, but Australia’s conservative media outlets are increasingly inspired, too.

Net zero by sometime after I retire, please

This is all coming to a head at COP26. George Brandis, Australia’s attorney general, who once declared that “coal is very good for humanity indeed”, is now High Commissioner for Australia to the UK, and has significantly ramped up the broader greenwashing exercise that the government has been enacting over the latter half of last year and most of this one.

As I wrote in RenewEconomy, that means creative accounting, dodgy charts and deceptive framing, all designed to paper over Australia’s significant failure to reign in emissions.

Morrison will almost certainly set a net zero by 2050 target before COP26, but it’ll be packaged with a collection of loop holes that allow for rising emissions in the short term. It is dawning on the government just as it is dawning on News Corp: the best way to protect the fossil fuel industry today is not to deny the science, but to pretend to accept it. This is not the end of climate denial. It’s evolution from a common ancestor.

That this effort will be lead by Joe Hildebrand is telling enough. His previous work on climate change does exactly what a centre-right campaign like this would be best at – decrying both sides as ‘hysterical’ while failing to propose anything meaningful or substantial. We can also see hints of what a conservative climate message looks like in a previous editorial from the more progressive News Corp outlet, NT News, which – of course – continues to host syndicated climate denial from the Sky News Australia channel. Ditto for News dot com. What might reasonably seem like a surprising change of heart in News Corp’s stance on climate is actually a long-term tactical shift that has been occurring for at least a few years. Whatever policies they failed to destroy through their earlier campaigns, they will try and reframe through racist, nationalistic, technocratic and pro-business frames.

Whatever policies they can delay or destroy, they’ll simply keep running scare campaigns about, insisting that ‘the balance isn’t right’, and that the threat of climate action is greater than the threat of climate change, as they always have (in Australia, News Corp’s partnerships with Google and Facebook mean these campaigns to destabilise climate action are growing more powerful and more harmful every day).

When the next federal election comes around, the “COSTS OF NET ZERO” scare campaigns will ramp up in Australia as they are in the UK, and News Corp will be at the forefront, pleading that acting too fast will cause catastrophe. Absolutely mark my damn words: this is what will happen.

Net zero by 2050 isn’t enough. We’ll know that the denialism has truly ended when organisations like News Corp treat the IPCC’s latest report like it’s real. That is, when they acknowledge that every additional unit of greenhouse gases causes harm to life on Earth, and that actions to stop their release must be as fast as possible.

That climate change is an emergency that requires rapid action to wind down the fossil fuel industry in a just and equitable way, and that its replacement must be grown to full size with just as much passion and urgency.

This campaign won’t look anything like that. We know what it will look like – and it won’t be anything surprising at all.

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(AU Crikey) News Corp’s Net Zero By 2050 Push Is What Climate Change Denial Looks Like In 2021

Crikey -

It sounds so very environmentally caring and sharing. But the truth is the Murdoch media's campaign is a cynical, and useless, move.

News Corp's Sky News Australia CEO Paul Whittaker appearing at a Senate hearing into media diversity

Less than a month ago, the world’s leading climate scientists issued a stark warning: the world is hurtling towards a future where increasingly common and severe fires, droughts and floods threaten our existence.

Our only option to reverse the trajectory, the IPCC sixth assessment report’s authors wrote, was to take drastic climate action.

Viewed through that lens, News Corp’s promise to briefly campaign for an unambitious target of net zero emissions by 2050 is a commitment to lock the world into 1.5 degrees of warming and all the horrors that would entail.

Far from being a shift from the company’s traditional opposition to climate action, this campaign is further proof that Rupert Murdoch’s empire doesn’t believe the science about the world’s transformation — or doesn’t care.

On Monday morning, Nine papers reported that News Corp’s metro papers and news channel Sky News Australia would launch a “company-wide campaign promoting the benefits of a carbon-neutral economy as world leaders prepare for a critical climate summit in Glasgow later this year”.

The target, even if taken up, would leave the federal government lagging behind the US and UK and drag it in line with many banks, insurers and other companies.

News Corp stays silent on James Murdoch’s climate denialism claims. Read More
This report comes as a Senate inquiry into media diversity holds a hearing on Sky News Australia’s suspension from YouTube.

The details of the campaign show it is even smaller than it first appears.

News Corp papers and Sky will campaign for two weeks in October. The Australian will be excluded from the campaign, and “dissenting voices” — a euphemism for the staunchest climate change denialists who inhabit many of its top perches — will be expected to “reframe” their arguments.

(It remains to be seen how figures such as Rowan Dean will reframe their complete denial of man-made climate change.)

Sky’s participation will be limited to a documentary exploring the idea of net zero carbon emissions.

The choice of Joe Hildebrand as the face of the campaign provides some insight into the direction of the campaign, says writer and consultant Ketan Joshi.

“His previous work on climate change does exactly what a centre-right campaign like this would be best at: decrying both sides as ‘hysterical’ while failing to propose anything meaningful or substantial,” he wrote in RenewEconomy.

During the bushfires of December 2019, the News Corp columnist warned against discussing climate change in the midst of a climate emergency.

While Australians were fleeing for their lives, Hildebrand argued that they shouldn’t have to concede much to battle climate change: “We need to find an economic path for Australia that can give working people the same quality of life — or just the capacity to survive day to day — that our abundance of fossil fuels currently offers.”

The announcement also makes clear that when it comes to climate change News Corp continues to act as more of a player than an impartial observer.

Nine’s Zoe Samios and Rob Harris report that its management briefed the government about the campaign, much like how a government would usually brief a publication about its campaign. In the inquiry hearing on Monday morning, Sky News’ CEO Paul Whittaker defiantly claimed that News Corp accepts the science: “We don’t deny climate change. The question is what is the solution, and what is the cost?”

The world’s top experts say the solution is immediate action — and the cost is less than the cost of inaction. Anything less — like News Corp’s campaign — is denying the science of how our climate is changing for the worse.

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More Than 200 Medical Journals Call For Urgent Action On Climate Change

France 24 - AFP

The authors say better air quality alone would benefit health so much that the global costs of emissions reductions would easily be offset. © Arun Sankar, AFP/File 
Global warming is already affecting people's health so much that emergency action on climate change cannot be put on hold while the world deals with the Covid-19 pandemic, medical journals across the globe warned on Monday.

"Health is already being harmed by global temperature increases and the destruction of the natural world," read an editorial published in more than 220 leading journals ahead of the Cop26 climate summit in November.

Since the pre-industrial era, temperatures have risen around 1.1 degrees Celsius (34 degrees Fahrenheit).

The editorial, written by the editors-in-chief of over a dozen journals including the Lancet, the East African Medical Journal, Brazil's Revista de Saude Publica and the International Nursing Review, said this had caused a plethora of health problems.

"In the past 20 years, heat-related mortality among people older than 65 years has increased by more than 50 percent," it read.

"Higher temperatures have brought increased dehydration and renal function loss, dermatological malignancies, tropical infections, adverse mental health outcomes, pregnancy complications, allergies, and cardiovascular and pulmonary morbidity and mortality."

It also pointed to the decline in agricultural production, "hampering efforts to reduce undernutrition."

These effects, which hit those most vulnerable like minorities, children and poorer communities hardest, are just the beginning, it warned.

As things stand, global warming could reach +1.5C on pre-industrial levels around 2030, according to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

And that, along with the continued loss of biodiversity, "risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse," the editorial warned.

"Despite the world's necessary preoccupation with Covid-19, we cannot wait for the pandemic to pass to rapidly reduce emissions."

In a statement ahead of the publication of the editorial, World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said: "The risks posed by climate change could dwarf those of any single disease."

"The Covid-19 pandemic will end, but there is no vaccine for the climate crisis.

"Every action taken to limit emissions and warming brings us closer to a healthier and safer future."

The editorial pointed out that many governments met the threat of Covid-19 with "unprecedented funding" and called for "a similar emergency response" to the environmental crisis, highlighting the benefits.

"Better air quality alone would realise health benefits that easily offset the global costs of emissions reductions," it read.

The authors also said "governments must make fundamental changes to how our societies and economies are organised and how we live."

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