Now in video are selected excerpts from my interview with Dr. Moser, the subject of an earlier podcast. Effectively Communicating Climate Change highlights key insights for those who are communicating climate science (regardless of their professional title). To illustrate her points, segments show Al Gore and Martin Luther King. This 11-minute video is organized differently from the original, longer audio podcast, and we think it’s valuable for its highlighting, even if you’ve previously heard Dr. Moser.
Decision Making about Climate Change distills into a visual eight minutes the audio podcast with Dr. Leiserowitz presented earlier. Among topics the director of the Yale Project on Climate Change discusses: How do we make decisions about risks? How do reason and emotion influence our decision making?
This episode presents a different perspective, from a climate communication practitioner, photojournalist Gary Braasch. He discusses his new book, Earth Under Fire, highlighting his reasons for telling the climate story as he has and offering some insights into the reception that the book’s been receiving. Passionate and committed, Braasch is definitely one of those “out on the front lines,” translating and communicating climate science for public audiences. As such, his experience may have particular interest to this Web site’s audience.
Braasch’s own site presents the two photographs that he discusses in the conversation:
Journalists covering climate or topics related to this podcast are invited to contact the producer for referrals to the podcast interviewees who have agreed to be contacted by journalists.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Dr. Leiserowitz discusses insights from the study of public risk perceptions and underscores for communicators the importance of appreciating that decision-making about risk involves more than a rational process. People’s perceptions are also influenced by emotions, images, values, and experiences which they feel to be related. And he highlights just how big a change to the global economy adapting to climate change will bring: “We are talking about changing the energy foundations of modern civilization. Everything that we do, the buildings we live in, the cars we drive, the food we eat, . . the clothes you’re wearing, are all fundamentally infused at some point in their production with fossil fuel use. . . And so, we’re talking about having to re-engineer the entire global economy to a non-carbon future. That is an enormous task. And yet, it presents enormous profitable opportunities. And that’s why some of the world’s largest companies are scrambling and moving very, very fast and investing literally billions of dollars into trying to find those solutions. Because that’s ultimately what we have to do.”
Podcast conversations with social scientists, produced by Joe Cone
