Search And Browse Posts From Our Users

Search and explore the latest posts from verified users in one convenient location. Use the search bar to refine your results and find the posts you're looking for

Johnydon :TheCDN3: he/him boosted
Kent Pitman
@[email protected]

@breadandcircuses

This is an important message, but messages of this kind need to say the part about the survival, or lack thereof in EVERY sentence that mentions big or rapid past change.

Syntactically, for people who are barely reading, which is most people, with the eyes glazed over, you are not shocking people but confirming the disinformation, which says this has happened many times before. What makes the message different for people who ARE reading carefull (by which I mean the people who already know climate is a severe threat), is the part about survival rates.

Even the graphs need to make sure to have a little dotted line of human livability so the spikes can be seen crossing them. Again, blurring things out, a graph with a bunch of jagged lurches looks to deniers pretty much like "we've been through ice ages before", or "hey this is cyclic, get used to it".

We wouldn't be having to message as hard as we are if people were actually hearing what was being said, so we need to be applying as much thought/science to why people are avoiding the message as we're applying to the original science. Good intentions are fine and soothing, but the message is not getting through.

I know there's a temptation to read back through the text of such articles and say "but I said that". I'm really encouraging a pedantic reporting hygiene in which no single sentence can be taken out of context (without lopping off half of it) and miss the part about how humans weren't and most animals didn't survive. It's not enough to have said truth, you have to set truth in a way that will reach people who are not listening for it.

e.g., the headline in the article says "...uncovered a history of wild temperature shifts...". Out of context, this would falsely seem to confirm common misinformation. We need to encourage reporters to, and we who repeat these things need to be careful to, harden the individual sentences to say things like "...a history of deadly temperature swings..." etc. Or "unsurvivable" or "species-ending". The information is definitely in the article, just not in every sentence

Think of it like writing and performing a song where the main message is in a refrain that is repeated regularly and intended to be the part that the whole audience memorizes and sings along.

Headlines are perhaps the hardest because they're often written by an editor rather than the writer who spent a lot of time understanding it.

Just a hunch on my part, I suppose. Maybe this isn't where we're losing people, or maybe there's a better way, but right now it's my best guess for a simple thing we could do to improve messaging.

Think of it like that game where if you change one letter or one word in a movie title, it turns it into a completely different movie. And then imagine a bunch of paid professionals out there doing that every single climate story. And a bunch of amateurs doing it by accident to themselves when they glance at a headline for too little time.

And I probably don't do enough of this either. But maybe it's easier to see in what other people write. Especially important for people who seem to be saying good things, yet then not being heard. Make your messages count. Don't just echo good science, package it in a way that is harder to misunderstand or misquote.

#climate #ClimateCommunication

0 1 0