satire essay on climate change

Leave ‘em laughing instead of crying: Climate humor can break down barriers and find common ground

Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Director, Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Colorado Boulder

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Climate change is not inherently funny. Typically, the messengers are serious scientists describing how rising greenhouse gas emissions are harming the planet on land and at sea , or assessing what role it played in the latest wildfire or hurricane .

Society may have reached a saturation point for such somber, gloomy and threatening science-centered discussions. This possibility is what inspires my recent work with colleague Beth Osnes to get messages out about climate change through comedy and humor.

I have studied and practiced climate communication for about 20 years. My new book, “ Creative (Climate) Communications ,” integrates social science and humanities research and practices to connect people more effectively through issues they care about. Rather than “dumbing down” science for the public, this is a “smartening up” approach that has been shown to bring people together around a highly divisive topic.

Why laugh about climate change?

Science is critically important to understanding the enormity of the climate challenge and how it connects with other problems like disasters, food security, local air quality and migration. But stories that emanate from scientific ways of knowing have failed to significantly engage and activate large audiences.

Largely gloomy approaches and interpretations typically stifle audiences rather than inspiring them to take action. For example, novelist Jonathan Franzen recently published an essay in The New Yorker titled “ What If We Stop Pretending? ” in which he asserted:

“The goal (of halting climate change) has been clear for thirty years, and despite earnest efforts we’ve made essentially no progress toward reaching it.”

Social science and humanities research have shown that this kind of framing effectively disempowers readers who could be activated and moved by a smarter approach.

Comics took a different path when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report in 2018 warning that the world only had until about 2030 to take steps that could limit warming to manageable levels. Trevor Noah, host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” observed:

“You know the crazy people you see in the streets shouting that the world is ending? Turns out, they’re all actually climate scientists .”

On ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” Kimmel commented:

“There’s always a silver lining. One planet’s calamity is another planet’s shop-portunity.”

He then cut to a going-out-of-business advertisement for Planet Earth that read:

“Everything must go! 50% of all nocturnal animals, insects, reptiles and amphibians … priced to sell before we live in hell. But you must act fast because planet Earth is over soon. And when it’s gone, it’s gone .”

It’s getting hot in here

Social science and humanities scholars have been examining new, potentially more effective ways to communicate about climate change. Consistently, as I describe in my book, research shows that emotional, tactile, visceral and experiential communication meets people where they are. These methods arouse action and engagement .

Scholars have examined how shows like “ Saturday Night Live ,” “ Last Week Tonight ,” “ Jimmy Kimmel Live ,” “ Full Frontal ” and “ The Daily Show ” use jokes to increase understanding and engagement. In one example, former Vice President Al Gore appeared on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” in 2017 and took turns with Colbert serving up climate change pickup lines over saucy slow-jam background music:

Gore: “Are you climate change? Because when I look at you, the world disappears.”

Colbert: “I’m like 97% of scientists, and I can’t deny … it’s getting hot in here.”

Colbert: “Is that an iceberg the size of Delaware breaking off the Antarctic ice shelf, or are you just happy to see me?”

Gore: “I hope you’re not powered by fossil fuels, because you’ve been running through my mind all day.”

Comedian Sarah Silverman took time during her 2018 Hulu show “ I Love You America ” to address the need for climate action. In her monologue, she focused on how climate change is driven “by the interests of a very small group and absurdly rich and powerful people.” She added:

“The disgusting irony of all of it is that the billionaires who have created this global atrocity are going to be the ones to survive it. They are going to be fine while we all cook to death in a planet-sized hot car.”

Breaching barriers and finding common ground

Research shows that in a time of deep polarization, comedy can lower defenses . It temporarily suspends social rules and connects people with ideas and new ways of thinking or acting.

Comedy exploits cracks in arguments. It wiggles in, pokes, prods and draws attention to the incongruous, hypocritical, false and pretentious. It can make the complex dimensions of climate change seem more accessible and its challenges seem more manageable.

Many disciplines can inform comedy, including theater, performance and media studies. With my colleagues Beth Osnes , Rebecca Safran and Phaedra Pezzullo at the University of Colorado, I co-direct the Inside the Greenhouse initiative, which uses insights from creative fields to develop effective climate communication strategies.

For four years we have directed “Stand Up for Climate Change,” a comedy project. We and our students write sketch comedy routines and perform them in front of live audiences on the Boulder campus. From those experiences, we have studied the content of the performances and how the performers and audience respond. Our work has found that humor provides effective pathways to greater awareness, learning, sharing of feelings, conversations and inspiration for performers and audiences alike.

A comic approach might seem to trivialize climate change, which has life-and-death implications for millions of people, especially the world’s poorest and most vulnerable residents. But a greater risk would be for people to stop talking about the problem entirely, and miss the chance to reimagine and actively engage in their collective futures.

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The Case for Treating Climate Change Like a Joke

Studies have shown that when it comes to relaying scientific messages, satire can be more effective than sincerity.

“We do not care about planet Earth,” four French scientists declared in February in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution . If humans are exhausting the planet’s resources, they wrote, it’s Earth that needs to adapt—not us. The authors issued a warning: “Should planet Earth stick with its hardline ideological stance … we will seek a second planet.”

They were joking, of course. The lead author, Guillaume Chapron, a quantitative ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, works mainly on conserving wolves and other large carnivores. He does care about Earth. In fact, he and his co-authors all signed a paper in BioScience last year called “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice.” It was a dire summary of the world’s dwindling resources, signed by more than 15,000 scientists. But Chapron worried the gesture was useless: “My concern was that [the] paper would be published and nothing would change,” he says. Yes, thousands of scientists agreed things were bad. “And then, so what? So nothing.”

Against this backdrop, Chapron decided to turn to France’s robust literary tradition of using wit, irony, and exaggeration to expose human failings. “We wanted to show that, basically, people are not ready to adjust their way of life to save the planet,” he says. Chapron doubts most other scientists would treat their topics in this way. But maybe more of them should. More than a decade’s worth of research shows that while satire does carry some risks, it can be an effective tool for communication. Satire can capture people’s attention and make complex topics accessible to a wider audience. In some circumstances, it can even sway beliefs. If scientists want to communicate with the public about a serious subject, they might try a joke.

To understand how satire can influence an audience, several researchers have looked at climate change. One of them is Paul Brewer, a communications researcher at the University of Delaware, who got his first faculty job around the time Jon Stewart took over hosting The Daily Show , in 1999. Brewer at first used the show as a teaching tool. Then, because a lot of his students watched it, he realized it might make a good research subject.

Read: How comedy became education’s best critic

Since then, Brewer’s studies of satirical TV news have shown that these programs can affect people’s beliefs. In a 2015 study , Brewer and a graduate student, Jessica McKnight, showed university students a video clip from The Daily Show or The Colbert Report about climate change or a control video on another topic. Stewart used jokes and sarcasm to address the subject, while Stephen Colbert spoke ironically, in his usual character of an over-the-top conservative pundit. After seeing either satirical news clip, subjects reported a greater certainty that global warming is happening.

In 2017, Brewer and McKnight looked at a segment from another satirical news show, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver . Oliver had pitted 97 climate scientists against three climate-change deniers to create a “statistically representative climate-change debate.” The researchers showed either this clip or a control video to 288 participants. Watching the debate clip increased subjects’ confidence in climate change—as well as their perception that scientists agreed on the issue. The effect was strongest among people who had reported less interest in the topic beforehand, Brewer says. “It mattered the most among people who aren’t already engaged with the issue,” he said.

In more recent research that hasn’t been published yet, Brewer has been looking at satirical coverage of other scientific issues, including vaccines, evolution, and GMOs. Based on preliminary results, he thinks satire may be especially effective for communicating messages about vaccines.

Although the late-night-TV hosts have gotten a lot of research attention, Amy Becker of Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore veered away from that format in her study published this summer about “sarcastic content.” She showed university students a video from The Onion , another video by the Weather Channel, or a control video. Both non-control videos were humorous takes on climate change. But the Onion video had a clear point of view, illustrated by its wry title: “Climate Change Researcher Describes Challenge of Pulling Off Worldwide Global Warming Conspiracy.” In contrast, the Weather Channel video poked fun at people who both do and don’t believe in climate change.

Becker found that only the Onion video had an effect. It increased people’s certainty that climate change was happening while also increasing their perception of the magnitude of the problem. As with previous studies, the video only made a difference among people who didn’t already think climate change was an important issue. “It seems that one-sided sarcasm can activate less-interested individuals to engage with the climate change issue,” the authors wrote.

Lauren Feldman, a communications researcher at Rutgers University who studies the media, has some ideas about why satire is effective for delivering messages. For a start, she says, humor gets eyeballs. “One of the chief benefits of satire, and comedy more broadly, is to promote attention in our very crowded, noisy media environment,” she says.

In a 2011 collection of essays on satirical news, Feldman and her colleagues published research that found that people who watched more satirical news were more likely to follow news about science and technology, the environment, and global warming. The effect was strongest for people with the lowest levels of formal education. “Comedy and satire help pull people in and help make those topics more accessible,” she says.

Furthermore, people inclined to disagree with an idea may argue less if it’s presented satirically. “Because people are focused more on understanding the joke and processing the humor, they have fewer resources left over to counterargue any message that they might disagree with,” Feldman says. “That allows some persuasive messages to kind of seep in and penetrate, whereas otherwise they might not.”

So far, research on the subject has mostly assumed that comedians share the values of scientists, Feldman adds. But humor could also manipulate audiences in the opposite direction. “Comedy could just as easily be used to engage people with perspectives that misrepresent or undermine science,” she says.

Another risk: People might not get the joke. A 2009 study found that conservatives were more likely than liberals to think Colbert’s television persona was genuine. Brewer’s study found the same thing—although, Brewer notes, it didn’t make Colbert’s message any less convincing than Stewart’s to the overall study group.

Read: What makes something funny?

Even when people do get the joke, satire can be very polarizing, Feldman says. “It attracts an audience who is already pretty liberal in orientation, and it in many ways preaches to the choir,” she says. This can help mobilize like-minded audiences, but “it can also be really alienating to the other side.” It’s also possible that joking about a subject could make it seem less serious, Feldman says.

Not many scientists are using satire to deliver messages. There was a 2011 Biotropica paper recommending that Greece and Spain be reforested and populated with large animals. “Both countries face economic challenges that could be reduced by the revenues from ecotourism,” the authors wrote. “Lions could be reintroduced to Greece … and gorillas might thrive in Spain.” The authors wanted to show how conservation efforts often ignore the perspective of people who live in an area. Another paper called “Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken” parodied unintelligible scientific writing.

Outside of science, Feldman is now working on a book about how social-justice organizations are using comedy to engage the public. Feldman says that so far, the benefits researchers have found in satire are mostly restricted to laboratory settings. She thinks more research is needed to understand how satire affects audiences in the real world. But for writers who are considering satire to get a point across, she says, “I don’t think there’s any harm in experimentation.”

Guillaume Chapron, the author of the satirical warning to Earth, agrees. “The environmental crisis has reached such a scale that it is no longer justifiable to dispense with some communication tools,” he and his co-authors wrote in a follow-up paper .

Chapron doesn’t think satire should replace the traditional ways that scientists communicate facts and research. But when it comes to messages that are important for policy decisions, he thinks satire has a role. It’s naive of scientists to assume that their data alone are enough to change anything, Chapron says. “Facts do not tell you what you have to do,” he says.

He admits the reaction to his satirical paper wasn’t earth-shattering. William Ripple and the other authors of the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” letter called Chapron’s paper “ humorous, refreshing, and potentially effective .” Chapron has heard about some readers who are still talking about the paper in their labs, he says. He’s heard of others who think his paper shouldn’t have been published in the first place, or that it damages the credibility of academia.

“Of course it makes people uncomfortable,” he says. “But that’s the role of satire.”

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These Satirical Nat Geo Headlines Aren't Too Far Off

McSweeney’s "National Geographic Articles in the Year 2030" actually reminded us of some pretty cool stories.

Just because we’re 129 years old doesn’t mean we here at National Geographic can't laugh at ourselves. So when Bob Vulfov of McSweeney’s mocked up some satirical National Geographic headlines from the year 2030 …well, we’ll admit it. We chuckled.

My personal favorite is “These Striking Photographs Show the Best On-Fire Lakes from Around the World”—it’s a spot-on impression of my own headline about climate change portraits that are, indeed, striking .

Tapping into Americans’ acute and partisan anxieties about climate change , Vulfov imagines 2030 as a dystopian desert wasteland where biker gangs and Trump hotels reign supreme. ( Read up on this running list of ways Trump is changing the environment. )

National Geographic is “proudly non-partisan,” Editor-in-Chief Susan Goldberg wrote in our March issue . But she explains that on climate change (and everything else), we're on the side of facts —the facts being that yes, the world is getting warmer, and yes, it's because of humans .

Since 1888, we’ve believed in the power of science, exploration, and storytelling to change the world, and we plan to keep going for a good while yet. So while we hope you get a laugh out of these headlines, we’d also love it if you joined us in the effort to share climate science with the world. Maybe— even amongst all the pictures of cute baby animals —together we can make a change.

Here’s a look at some more of those, um, future headlines, and their real-world analogues:

Hey, Remember Forests? I Miss Forests

We really, really like forests too. So does this India man who’s spent the last three decades planting a forest bigger than Central Park , and this teenager who’s on track to plant a trillion trees .

Did Lemurs Have Personalities? If So, Were They Bummed Out When They Became Extinct?

Short answer: yes, lemurs have personalities . And while the IUCN does list several lemur species as endangered , none have yet gone extinct. But last year a small Australian rodent became the world’s first mammalian casualty of climate change . ( Meet the endangered animals of the National Geographic Photo Ark .)

If you liked “ Let’s Check In With the Billionaires Who Escaped to an Underground Bunker Nation As We Descended Into Pandemonium ”…

…then peer inside the lives of the million people who actually do live in underground nuclear bunkers .

95 Degrees Fahrenheit in December — Is This the Coldest Winter in Years?

It’s true 2014 was the hottest year then on record. So was 2015, and 2016. Watch this video to learn how NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies analyzes temperature data to determine warming trends.

Weird and Fascinating Outdoor Hobbies People Used to Have Before Our Lives Became a Never-Ending Sprint from Death

Going to National Parks to play Pokémon Go is not the weirdest outdoor hobby people have ever had—far from it. From finger-wrestling in 1930s Estonia to hurdle-racing in Maori canoes , humans have pretty much always enjoyed alfresco entertainment. (So do your brain a favor, and spend some time in nature. )

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If you laughed at “ Five Ways the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Should Use Its $400 Budget ”…

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This Photojournalist Spent a Week Following the Band of Violent Bikers Who Now Rule Us, But He Was Killed So We Didn’t Receive Any Photos from Him

A week? Please. Try a decade—like Paul Salopek, who’s been documenting his slow walk around the world since 2013 and still has a long way to go. Then we can talk.

Recycling: Get Caught and This Illegal Activity Will Get You Thrown in Jail

A little time in the clink is worth it when recycling just makes so much sense .

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No hotels in sight at any of the world’s 17 most wild and beautiful places . And, since these seven stunning natural wonders are all in Asia , no Trump hotels there either.

Aww! A Robotic Monster Hound Capable of Firing Heat-Seeking Missiles Has Won the Westminster Dog Show — And Our Hearts

This year, the Westminster Dog Show also featured cats —why not robots next?

Help Us Caption This Photo of Underwater New York City

Global sea level would rise 215 feet if all the world's ice melted , meaning New York City would indeed be underwater—as would about 200 million people across the globe.

Jumping Into an Active Volcano Because You’ve Had Enough? Choose from Our List of the World’s Top Volcanoes

We’d recommend Santiaguito, which has erupted nearly every hour for 94 years .

Did Zebras Have Stripes On Their Skin? You Know What, Who Cares, I Ate a Sock for Dinner Tonight

Now you know once and for all—zebras’ skin is actually black under their striped coats , a pattern that may vary by climate . (Unfortunately, we can’t do anything about the sock.)

Watch the Elaborate Courtship of Two Gray Whales Shortly Before They Were Poached for Their Delicious Meat

Rest assured, the three gray whales caught in this elaborate courtship ritual were not poached—though controversial whaling practices remain in Iceland , Norway , and Japan , and even South Korea .

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Column: As far as political satire goes, ‘Don’t Look Up’ fails in more ways than one

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“Don’t Look Up,” Adam McKay’s dark comedy released on Netflix just before Christmas, has gotten an enormous amount of attention, despite the fact most film critics tend to agree it doesn’t hold together too well artistically, even as some welcome it for its propagandistic value.

As you’d expect from the creator of “Step Brothers” and “Talladega Nights,” nothing about the film is subtle. A giant asteroid is barreling toward Earth, and both the media and Washington are incapable of taking the threat seriously. McKay and the story co-creator, David Sirota, have been very clear about what they’re up to. “Clearly,” McKay tells GQ , the movie is an “analogy or an allegory for the climate crisis.”

After the Netflix release, McKay took to Twitter : “Loving all the heated debate about our movie. But if you don’t have at least a small ember of anxiety about the climate collapsing (or the US teetering) I’m not sure Don’t Look Up makes any sense. It’s like a robot viewing a love story. ‘WHy ArE thEir FacEs so cLoSe ToGether?’”

That tweet is probably funnier than any line in the movie. But it’s also ironic, given that the reason the film fails as political satire is that McKay is more like that robot than he realizes. There are three flaws to this allegory. He gets the media, politics and the effect of climate change wrong.

McKay told NPR that he joined with Sirota to write the movie because, “We’re both incredibly frustrated with the lack of coverage of the climate crisis. You know, it’s usually the fourth or fifth story. It’s never the right tone, which should be much more urgent.”

Really? Where do these guys get their news? Many news outlets have full-time reporters dedicated to climate change. Just last year ABC News and CNN created full-time climate change news teams. The Washington Post and the New York Times were already there. In April, Time magazine ran another of many cover stories on climate change showing a burning map of the world under the headline , “Climate Is Everything.” In 1989, Time skipped Person of the Year and made “Endangered Earth” the “Planet of the Year. ”

In McKay’s movie, what is supposed to be the New York Times drops its coverage of the planet-killing asteroid story when it fails to get good web traffic. Do I really need to be the one to defend the New York Times from this idiotic insinuation?

Like a robot watching the news, McKay watches the near-daily coverage of climate change and says, “wHeRE IS tHE cLImATE HySTeria!?!”

Then there’s politics. Meryl Streep’s entertaining take on a female President Trump scores some points, but Trump isn’t president. Joe Biden is, and he calls climate change an “ existential threat ” all the time . And he’s not alone. Sirota wrote speeches for Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2020, and his old boss routinely said that kind of thing , too — as did virtually all the Democratic presidential nominees. And it’s not just rhetoric, we’re spending vast sums of money and reorganizing the missions of many government agencies to deal with the existential threat of climate change.

But here’s the funny thing: Climate change is not an “existential threat” like a planet-killing asteroid, which let’s just admit would make for great TV. Not even according to the United Nations’ IPCC, whose worst-case scenarios for climate change, as terrible as some are, manifest themselves over a century and would not end all life here.

McKay & Co. are free to disagree about the aptness of their analogy. In the movie, the only way to stop the asteroid is to push it off course by aiming nuclear weapons at it. Some argue that in real life, the only way to reduce carbon emissions is to use nuclear power. Sanders and many of his Democratic colleagues oppose that — which is odd if you actually believe we have no time to waste to save the planet.

Finally, it’s worth asking: Is McKay helping? Unlike an incoming asteroid, climate change requires sustained and sustainable intergenerational consensus. Chastising people who agree with him because they fall short of his peak hysteria and demonizing everyone else seem like exactly the kind of self-indulgence that’s made for satire.

@JonahDispatch

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Dec. 11, 2023

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Jonah Goldberg is editor in chief of the Dispatch and has been a Los Angeles Times Opinion columnist since 2005. He holds the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty at the American Enterprise Institute. He was previously senior editor at National Review and lives in Washington, D.C.

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Using humor to engage the public on climate change: the effect of exposure to one-sided vs. two-sided satire on message discounting, elaboration and counterarguing

The research explores the differential impact of exposure to one-sided vs. two-sided satire about climate change on message processing. Analyzing experimental data (N =141) we find that one-sided satire offered by ‘The Onion’ ironically claiming that global warming is a hoax encourages viewers to engage in greater message elaboration and counterarguing. In contrast, two-sided satire offered by ‘The Weather Channel’ that makes jokes about those who believe in vs. reject human involvement in climate change is quickly discounted. We conclude by discussing the strategic value of incorporating one-sided satirical humor in communication efforts focused on climate change engagement.

Engaging citizens on the issue of climate change poses some unique challenges. Historically, much of the news coverage of climate change has presented a balanced approach, pitting the views of scientists who argue that climate change is heavily influenced by human activity against the more conservative political viewpoint that climate change does not exist or that it is natural rather than human activity that is responsible for significant shifts in temperature [Boykoff and Boykoff, 2004 ]. There is a general scientific consensus surrounding human induced climate change [NASA: Global Climate Change, 2019 ] and we have seen a shift toward more science-driven media coverage [Carrington, 2019 ], with journalists adopting a reporting approach that more accurately reflects the widespread scientific agreement on the topic [Hiles and Hinnant, 2014 ]. The conflict between scientists and the conservative opposition, however, still exists as a familiar narrative. In fact, science communication research has consistently showcased a highly politically polarized environment with individuals rejecting information inconsistent with their own personal beliefs about the causes and consequences of climate change [Hart and Nisbet, 2012 ]. Given the unique political environment surrounding climate change, it has been hard for science communicators, climate scientists, and others to cut through the clutter and promote tailored communication messages that encourage a more scientific view of climate change, rather than a view that is driven by social values and prior political orientations. One potential way to engage citizens in a more democratic, less divisive debate is to rely on alternative message types like satire to communicate about climate change [Nisbet and Scheufele, 2009 ].

Borrowing from extant work on the effects of exposure to political comedy on attitudes and behavior [for a review see Becker and Waisanen, 2013 ], recent research has tested the effects of exposure to humorous satirical messages on beliefs in global warming. For example, research by Brewer and McKnight [ 2015 ] and Brewer and McKnight [ 2017 ] found that viewing satirical content on the issue of climate change from sources like The Daily Show ( TDS ), The Colbert Report ( TCR ), and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver ( LWT ) bolsters existing views about climate change and the belief in a scientific consensus toward global warming, particularly among individuals who are less interested in the climate change issue. Recent work by Anderson and Becker [ 2018 ] similarly found that exposure to one-sided ironic humor positively influences belief certainty in and perceived risk of climate change, especially among viewers who are initially less likely to rate the climate change issue as important. In a similar vein, research by Skurka and colleagues [Skurka et al., 2018 ] showed that subjects who were assigned to view a satirical weather report were more likely to indicate an intention to engage in activism directly related to the issue of climate change by participating in a range of behaviors like contacting elected officials or volunteering with a climate advocacy organization. Finally, qualitative work by Bore and Reid [ 2014 ] found that viewing a satirical play about climate change promotes active and positive engagement with the issue debate, encouraging audience members to reflect upon and manage their feelings toward the conflict.

Research on the coverage of climate change on satirical programs like TDS and TCR suggests that these programs tend to affirm the reality of climate change rather than present a balanced approach, frequently targeting climate skeptics as the butt of the joke [Brewer, 2013 ; Feldman, 2013 ]. Viewers of these programs tend to subsequently pay greater attention to stories about climate change and the environment in other news sources [Feldman, Leiserowitz and Maibach, 2011 ].

While research on the effects of exposure to satirical content about climate change ultimately suggests that these comedic messages might be a helpful tool in engendering greater awareness, activism, and a more civil public discourse [Boykoff and Osnes, 2019 ; Feldman, 2017 ], research has yet to explore how these satirical messages are processed by viewers and whether viewers engage differently with humorous content that offers a one-sided perspective on the issue of climate change (as has traditionally been privileged on TDS, TCR , and LWT ) vs. a two-sided perspective, which is more similar to traditional news coverage of the climate change issue. In an effort to enhance our understanding of the net impact of comedic messages about climate change on issue engagement, the present investigation takes a step back to first consider how one-sided vs. two-sided satirical messages about climate change are processed, focusing on three related, yet distinct message processing variables including: (1) message discounting, (2) elaboration, and (3) counterarguing [Nabi, Moyer-Gusé and Byrne, 2007 ].

2 The cognitive processing of politically oriented comedy content

Research on cognitive engagement with political comedy tends to privilege a dual processing approach, relying on theoretical frameworks like the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) [Polk, Young and Holbert, 2009 ]. Collectively, this scholarship suggests that comedy is processed peripherally rather than centrally, with viewers expending most of their cognitive energy on simply getting the joke , or attempting to make sense of the incongruity that is present in the humor [Young, 2008 ]. More specifically, we know that viewers tend to simply discount comedic messages, classifying them as jokes that are not to be taken seriously, yet at the same time engage in more effortful, enhanced message processing [Nabi, Moyer-Gusé and Byrne, 2007 ]. This is particularly true if viewers like the comedic source or lack the ability or motivation to carefully inspect comedic claims [LaMarre and Walther, 2013 ; Nabi, Moyer-Gusé and Byrne, 2007 ].

At the same time, however, research has suggested that viewers do make an effort to connect humor with what they already know from other media sources or experiences, engaging in the process of message elaboration [Eveland Jr., 2005 ]. For example, Matthes [ 2013 ] found that viewers were more likely to engage in message elaboration when exposed to thematically related humor; this dynamic was particularly true for those who expressed a stronger need for humor (NFH). In contrast, work by Becker and Waisanen [ 2017 ] comparing the effects of exposure to humorous vs. serious presidential speech found that viewers were more likely to engage in message elaboration when viewing the State of the Union than when randomly assigned to view more humorous presentations from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Finally, a study on the differential effects of exposure to straight news vs. satirical comedy interviews with politicians found that the likelihood of engaging in elaborative processing after viewing comedy depended on prior orientations toward comedy (e.g., perceived learning from comedy and an affinity for entertaining news) [Becker, 2018a ].

In a similar vein, research has also shown that viewers are less likely to try to counterargue or disagree with a conflicting message present in politically humorous content [Polk, Young and Holbert, 2009 ]. This lack of counterargumentation is generally attributed to two related yet distinct dynamics. First, after working to understand the joke, viewers have less cognitive energy or ability to counterargue with the humor. Second, after enjoying and being entertained by the humor, viewers lack any subsequent motivation to pick apart any contradictory claims present in the jokes. At the same time, the type of humor may be a key determining factor as to whether viewers work to engage in more effortful message processing, including message discounting, elaboration, or counterarguing.

For example, research has shown that more complicated, ironic humor encourages viewers to engage less with the process of counterarguing. In effect, exposure to ironic humor lowers the ability to engage in argument scrutiny because it requires more cognitive resources to first understand the jokes [Polk, Young and Holbert, 2009 ]. Ironic humor by its nature is inherently complicated, literally presenting the opposite or inverse of its intended meaning [Young et al., 2019 ]. Viewers need a pre-established understanding of the topic or context to make sense of and actually get the ironic humor.

More specifically, engagement with irony is likely conditional on the complexity of the humor; in fact, the relationship between ironic complexity and humor appreciation can be thought of as curvilinear in nature. Simpler ironic messages more naturally promote message enjoyment and mirth, while more complicated messages are increasingly difficult to appreciate and engage with [Burgers, van Mulken and Schellens, 2011 ]. For many, these more complicated ironic missives are taken literally at face value rather than appreciated as humorous, contradictory content [LaMarre, Landreville and Beam, 2009 ]. At the same time, research suggests that more complex humorous messages like those that rely on irony can motivate viewers to engage with a message more deeply, engaging in more — if not ultimately better — counterargumentation [Polk, Young and Holbert, 2009 ]. As Polk, Young and Holbert [ 2009 ] ultimately suggest, while complicated ironic messages reduce the ability to engage in effective counterarguing, they also encourage viewers to try and expend more effort to unpack contradictory claims.

More playful humor, often defined as horatian satire [Becker, 2012 ; Holbert et al., 2011 ], has been shown to encourage message discounting since the content is more often classified as a joke designed to make us laugh rather than content that is trying to persuade us to take a critical stance on an issue or topic. At the same time, more critical humor, or juvenalian satire, has been linked with decreased argument scrutiny in part because viewers are expending more cognitive resources to first understand and parse the more aggressive and judgmental content [LaMarre, Landreville, Young et al., 2014 ].

Overall, it is clear that not all humor types are processed equally. While research has explored the differential processing of irony vs. sarcasm and horatian vs. juvenalian satire [Becker, 2012 ; LaMarre, Landreville, Young et al., 2014 ; Polk, Young and Holbert, 2009 ], scholars have yet to consider the differential message processing that might result from exposure to one-sided vs. two-sided satire and its potential impact on engagement with climate change.

3 Objective: the differential effect of exposure to one-sided vs. two-sided climate change humor

As Feldman [ 2017 ] notes, the vast majority of satirical content focused on climate change presents a one-sided perspective. Shows like TDS , TCR and even LWT use humor to make fun of climate skeptics, promoting combative sketches that echo the one-sided scientific perspective that climate change is real and caused by human activity. To these comedians, anyone who holds a contrary or more politically conservative viewpoint is worthy of intense mockery. This orientation towards the climate change issue stands in direct contrast with traditional news content that has focused on a two-sided, heavily framed perspective of climate change that presents both the view that climate change is happening and human caused (the scientific consensus) and the idea that it is not happening, or is naturally caused if it is happening [Boykoff and Boykoff, 2004 ]. In fact, as Feldman [ 2017 ] argues, viewers have come to expect one-sided, pro-science content from cable comedy, but a more balanced or two-sided perspective from network and cable news.

Traditionally, research on message sidedness and persuasion has suggested that one-sided messages are inferior from a credibility standpoint and are quickly discounted by viewers [Allen, 1991 ]. Two-sided messages, on the other hand, are seen as rhetorically superior in that they reflect both sides of the story by presenting a central narrative and an opposing and carefully constructed counterargument or competitive frame [O’Keefe, 1999 ]. These two-sided messages, particularly ones that directly refute the original claim, encourage greater argument scrutiny among viewers [O’Keefe, 1999 ]. Non-refutational or less confrontational two-sided messages are ultimately less persuasive and impactful in part because of their more benign nature [Hale, Mongeau and Thomas, 1991 ].

Importantly, two-sided messages are often connected with the concept of inoculation in that messages that present contrasting points of view provide viewers with the necessary information to inoculate themselves (or prevent themselves, much like a vaccine) from being persuaded by contradictory or less than credible information [Compton, 2013 ; Compton and Pfau, 2005 ]. Viewing the second or alternate frame of the argument has a neutralizing effect, rendering the original message ineffective from a persuasion standpoint [Niederdeppe, Gollust and Barry, 2014 ; Pfau, 1992 ]. Often applied to the context of strategic political communication, two-sided messages can encourage viewers to simply discount the content being presented [Pfau and Burgoon, 1988 ]. This dynamic has proven true with respect to political attack ads and more recently with respect to political comedy in a case that focuses on Donald Trump’s two-sided engagement with Saturday Night Live via Twitter [Becker, 2017 ; Pfau, Park et al., 2001 ]. In sum, two-sided messages present a counter narrative that ultimately distracts viewers from processing the original content, making it a less persuasive message overall [Becker, 2018b ].

Without question, research suggests that message sidedness is an important element of persuasion and is certainly worthy of consideration when trying to analyze the impact of satirical humor that addresses a wide range of political issues, including climate change. As such, the present research considers the differential effect of exposure to two-sided playful satire from The Weather Channel (hereafter, TWC ) vs. one-sided heavily ironic satire from The Onion on message discounting, message elaboration, and counterarguing. In examining message sidedness, we are also simultaneously examining the differences in complexity (highly ironic content from The Onion vs. more sarcastic content from TWC ) and tone (e.g., more critical satire from The Onion vs. more playful humor from TWC ) of the humor.

Given our understanding of the present state of satire focusing on climate change [Feldman, 2013 ], we anticipate that viewers will expect a one-sided satirical presentation, making connections between the ironic comedy content from The Onion and what they already know or have seen through other media sources. Their familiarity with this presentation will allow them to quickly counterargue the humorous content, as they try to find flaws in the speaker’s argument. This process allows them to understand whether they agree with the messages being presented. In contrast, viewers should quickly discount any two-sided messaging in part because it deviates from the normal satirical discourse surrounding climate change, but mostly because it is playful and non-confrontational in orientation — it’s simply funny.

Moreover, we expect that the tone of the humor will play an important role in message processing, with viewers attempting to engage more with the highly ironic, one-sided humor of The Onion even if they lack the motivation or ability to fully break down and process the message’s content. In contrast, we expect the more playful, non-refutational two-sided humor presented by TWC to be quickly discounted by viewers as humor, who will then subsequently be less likely to engage in message elaboration or counterarguing in response to this type of two-sided, playful content. Put more formally:

H1: Viewers will be more likely to discount the two-sided humor of TWC as opposed to the one-sided satire from The Onion .

H2: Viewers will be more likely to engage in message elaboration when exposed to the one-sided satire of The Onion as opposed to two-sided content from TWC .

H3: Viewers will be more likely to counterargue the one-sided satire of The Onion rather than the two-sided satire of TWC .

4 Issue importance and climate change: a question of moderation?

Before proceeding with the analysis, it is important to note the potential moderating role of interest in and perceived importance of the climate change issue on message processing. As previous research on message-sidedness has shown, audience favorability toward the topic is an important moderator of a message’s effectiveness [O’Keefe, 1999 ]. The more interested a viewer is in the issue being discussed, the more likely they are to pay attention to humorous media content, particularly if that content aligns with their prior disposition or viewpoint toward the issue [Becker, 2014 ; Boukes et al., 2015 ].

Research on political comedy effects has highlighted the potential for comedy to engage viewers across a range of complicated political issues including net neutrality and climate change [Becker and Bode, 2018 ; Bode and Becker, 2018 ; Brewer and McKnight, 2015 ; Brewer and McKnight, 2017 ]. While this research generally suggests that comedy is more impactful in engaging less politically interested individuals via the gateway effect [Feldman, 2017 ], we know less about the potential moderating role of issue importance on comedic message processing. While recent work has suggested that exposure to satire reinforces global warming belief certainty and risk perceptions among those who view the climate change issue as less important [Anderson and Becker, 2018 ], more work is still needed to tease out the differential effect of issue importance on message processing. More specifically, for the purposes of this study, it is important to consider whether there is any potential interaction between issue importance and differential exposure to one-sided vs. two-sided satirical messages on message processing. We therefore pose a research question to consider this potentially important moderating relationship:

RQ1: Does perceived importance of the climate change issue moderate the effect of exposure to humor on message processing?

A three-group experiment was created using Qualtrics. Undergraduates ( N = 141) were recruited from a large public university in the U.S. West and a private college in the East. 1 Students completed the online study between October 23–November 9, 2017 in exchange for extra credit.

After a pretest questionnaire measuring political interest and issue importance, subjects were randomly assigned to watch one of two experimental video clips or a control.

Subjects in the first experimental condition ( n = 47) watched an April 2017 two-minute video entitled, “WARNING: We’re saving small talk,” produced by TWC about rising temperatures and the impact of climate change on casual small talk about the weather. The playful short clip was two-sided in orientation in that it showcased satirical behavior and conversation among everyday individuals who were both happy and uncomfortable with unseasonably warm temperatures and potential connections with climate change. At one point, the female reporter notes, “But today, confusion about changing climate has made weather too hot to talk about.” The clip then cuts to an altercation between two surfers — one is complaining about the cold weather while the other gets in his face about “melting all the glaciers.” The video then shifts to a stand-up comedian who is heckled by the crowd for making jokes about the weather “being nuts.” A respected source of weather news and information in the United States, TWC is generally perceived as a straightforward media source, yet has worked as an outlet to diversify their media content to include other material including satirical humor.

Subjects in the second experimental condition ( n = 48) watched a September 2017 two-minute video produced by The Onion entitled, “Climate Change Researcher Describes Challenge of Pulling Off Worldwide Global Warming Conspiracy.” In the video, a fake climate scientist presents a one-sided, highly critical satirical argument about a conspiracy among scientists, politicians, and celebrities to persuade the public that global warming is a hoax. He begins by ironically stating, “People don’t realize how much work goes into convincing the public that climate change is real. Studies, conferences, documentaries, it’s all a tireless effort by the global scientific community to pull the wool over the eyes of the general public. Getting every single scientist in the entire world to propagate the lie that human activity causes global warming is a colossal undertaking.” The video continues to ironically claim that the public and the media have accepted the conspiracy that climate change is manufactured. Well-known for its satirical take on news, sports, politics, science, and more, The Onion has been a familiar source for comedy in the United States for more than three decades.

Subjects in the control ( n = 47) viewed a September 2017 two-minute video news report from Good Morning America about a worker falling from a broken Ferris wheel in North Carolina as he tries to help two boys.

All of the videos were captured via YouTube and edited to remove comments, ads, or related video suggestions. A validation mechanism was set so that subjects had to remain on the video screen for at least two minutes and could not scroll forward through sections of the video clip before advancing to the survey. A series of manipulation checks followed to confirm that subjects rated the videos correctly across a series of attributes (e.g., whether the video was entertaining, funny, negative, amusing, humorous, serious, or sarcastic; 1 = “not at all entertaining,” to 7 = “extremely entertaining”). 2 A posttest questionnaire then measured key concepts like message processing, message elaboration, counterarguing, and demographics.

Measures used in the analyses are outlined below.

5.1 Dependent variables

Message discounting ( M = 2.88, SD = 0.76) was based on agreement (1 = “strongly disagree,” to 5 = “strongly agree”) with four related statements (Cronbach’s α = .76) adapted from prior research [Nabi, Moyer-Gusé and Byrne, 2007 ] including: (1) “The speaker in the video was just joking,” (2) “The video was intended more to entertain than persuade,” (3) “The speaker was serious about advancing his views in the video,” (reverse coded), and (4) “It would be easy to dismiss this video as simply a joke.”

Message elaboration ( M = 2.98, SD = .92) was based on agreement (1 = “strongly disagree,” to 5 = “strongly agree”) with four related statements (Cronbach’s α = .86) featured in previous research [Matthes, 2013 ] including: (1) “During the video, I intensively thought about what the speaker said,” (2) “I concentrated on the arguments of the speaker,” (3) “During the video, I critically reflected on what the speaker said,” and (4) “I didn’t really think about the message of the speech,” (reverse coded).

Counterarguing ( M = 2.60, SD = 0.89) was based on agreement (1 = “strongly disagree,” to 5 = “strongly agree”) with four related statements (Cronbach’s α = .76) adapted from prior research [Nabi, Moyer-Gusé and Byrne, 2007 ] including: (1) “I found myself actively agreeing with the speaker’s points,” (reverse coded), (2) “I found myself actively disagreeing with the speaker,” (3) “I was looking for flaws in the speaker’s arguments,” and (4) “It was easy to agree with the arguments made in the message,” (reverse coded).

5.2 Independent variables

Experimental Condition . Random assignment to viewing either the one-sided satire of The Onion ( n = 48), the two-sided satire from TWC ( n = 48), or the control ( n = 47) was included in the analysis.

Demographics. Controls for gender [the sample was 61.3% female (coded as 1)], age ( M = 19.51, SD = 2.15), identifying as a Democrat or Independent [(each variable independently dummy coded as 1); 41.5% of the sample were Democrats; 26.1% Independent/something else; 23.2% Republican]; and conservative political ideology ( M = 3.54, SD = 1.57; 1 = “very liberal,” to 7 = “very conservative”) were included in the analysis.

Predispositions. A measure of political interest ( M = 3.55, SD = 1.07) was based on a response to the question: “Some people follow what’s going on in government and public affairs most of the time, even when there’s not an election. Others aren’t that interested. Would you say that you follow what’s going on in politics and government … (1 = “never,” 2 = “hardly at all,” 3 = “only now and then,” 4 = some of the time,” and 5 = “most of the time”). Participants were also asked to indicate how important a series of issues, including climate change , were to them personally ( M = 7.59, SD = 2.17; 1 = “not at all important,” to 10 = “very important”).

Media Evaluations . Participants were asked to evaluate the media organization sponsoring the video across four attributes (1 = “untrustworthy,” to 7 = “trustworthy,” 1 = “unreliable,” to 7 = “reliable,” 1 = “dishonest,” to 7 = “honest,” and 1 = “not credible,” to 7 = “credible”). A media evaluation index ( M = 4.66, SD = 1.54; overall Cronbach’s α =.96) was based on the combined mean score for these four attributes per organization. The mean scores for The Onion ( M = 4.23; SD = 1.67) and TWC ( M = 4.12; SD = 1.46) were comparable and there were no significant differences between the media organizations across individual attributes. 3

5.3 Analytical Plan

One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was employed initially to assess whether there was significant variation in the dependent variables of interest across conditions. A set of independent samples t-tests followed, evaluating whether there were significant mean differences in message discounting, elaboration, and counterarguing for those assigned to view the one-sided ironic, highly critical satire presented by The Onion vs. the two-sided playfully sarcastic satire from TWC . Finally, hierarchical ordinary least squares regression (OLS) was used to more fully explore significant predictors of variation in the key dependent variables of interest and whether perceived importance of the climate change issue moderated the differential impact of exposure to one-sided vs. two-sided humor on message processing.

We turn first to the ANOVA analyses which confirm that there was significant variation across conditions for the three dependent variables of interest: message discounting F (2, 132) = 22.53, p < .001, η 2 = .25; message elaboration F (2, 132) = 8.15, p < .001, η 2 = .11; and counterarguing F (2, 132) = 9.40, p < .001, η 2 = .13.

Next, we review the results of the independent samples t-tests comparing mean differences in message processing variables for those assigned to view the one-sided, ironic satire put forth by The Onion vs. those assigned to view the playfully sarcastic two-sided satire put forth by TWC . As the results show, subjects who were exposed to TWC were somewhat more likely to engage in message discounting, t (87) = 1.82, p = 0.073; M = 3.38 for TWC vs. M = 3.04 for The Onion . Since the results of this first t-test approach but do not achieve significance, H1 is not fully supported by the research. The independent samples t-tests were significant for both message elaboration and counterarguing. Specifically, subjects assigned to view The Onion were significantly more likely to engage in message elaboration, t (87) = 3.54, p < 0.001; M = 3.42 for The Onion vs. M = 2.75 for TWC , and counterarguing t (87) = 2.17, p < 0.05; M = 3.01 for The Onion vs. M = 2.60 for TWC . H2 and H3 were supported. 4

Next, hierarchical regression was used to further tease out any significant factors that might help to better explain variation in message discounting, elaboration, or counterarguing, and consider the potential moderating role of perceived importance of the climate change issue. Only the analysis of message elaboration is reported here, as the models for discounting and counterarguing failed to yield significant predictors beyond random assignment to the experimental conditions.

Table 1 displays the results of the hierarchical linear regression model explaining variation in message elaboration. As Table 1 shows, demographic variables were entered as block 1, followed by predispositions in block 2, and evaluation of the media outlets in block 3. Block 4 features dummy variables for viewing The Onion or TWC , while block 5 includes a set of interaction terms combining importance of the climate change issue with assignment to the humorous conditions.

As the data in Table 1 show, females ( β = .18, p < .05) and Democrats ( β = .34, p < .05) were significantly more likely to engage in message elaboration (block 1 incremental R 2 = 9.8%). While not significant initially, evaluation of the media sources was significant in the final model ( β = .23, p < .10; block 3 incremental R 2 = 1.3%). Onion viewers were significantly more likely to engage in message elaboration ( β = .34, p < .001; block 4 incremental R 2 = 9.9%). In addition to this significant direct effect for exposure to The Onion , the interaction between climate change importance and viewing The Onion was significant ( β = .23, p < .01; incremental R 2 = 5.3%).

Displayed graphically in Figure 1 , the results suggest that exposure to The Onion resulted in greater message elaboration among those who already rate the issue of climate change as personally important ( M = 3.73) vs. those who feel the issue of climate change is important but were assigned to view TWC ( M = 3.02). Exposure to The Onion also resulted in greater message elaboration among those for whom the issue of climate change is less important ( M = 2.85 vs. M = 2.49 for those who feel the issue is less important and were assigned to view TWC ). Simply put, viewing the ironic one-sided satire of The Onion encouraged those who already care about climate change to further connect the comedy with what they already know from experience or related media content and also had a modest impact on those who view climate change as less important. This finding offers interesting insight with respect to RQ1 , suggesting that one-sided satire is particularly relevant for those who already see climate change as a personally important issue and even impactful for those who rate it as less salient. The final regression model explained 29.4% of the variance in message elaboration, telling us a great deal about the various factors that influence the differential processing of one-sided vs. two-sided humor.

7 Discussion and conclusions

Engaging citizens with the politicized issue of climate change has been a challenge for communication researchers and policymakers alike in our crowded media environment. Recent research has started to consider whether humorous message types like satire can help engender greater participation, knowledge, and activism on the issue of climate change [Anderson and Becker, 2018 ; Bore and Reid, 2014 ; Brewer and McKnight, 2015 ; Brewer and McKnight, 2017 ; Skurka et al., 2018 ]. An important precursor to this satire effects research is understanding how viewers process different types of humorous messages. By exploring the differential impact of exposure to the one-sided ironic satire of The Onion vs. the more playfully sarcastic two-sided satire of TWC on message discounting, elaboration, and counterarguing, the present study places message processing at the forefront. The results ultimately suggest that more playfully sarcastic two-sided content from sources like TWC may be more likely to be quickly discounted, while ironic, highly critical, one-sided commentary offered by The Onion and other outlets encourages greater message elaboration and counterarguing. In our particular case, those who already rate the issue of climate change as important are also more likely to engage in message elaboration after exposure to The Onion ’s highly critical and ironic one-sided satire. At the same time, The Onion is also impactful for those who do not rate climate change as a personally important issue. Building on what research by Anderson and Becker [ 2018 ] has recently shown, it seems that one-sided, ironic satire may be more useful as a tool for climate change engagement than more playful content that sarcastically presents both sides of the issue debate.

Research on the effectiveness of climate change communication more broadly is interested in understanding how bringing one closer to the issue may persuade them into greater concerns about, more belief in, or greater likelihood of taking action on the topic [Lyons, Hasell and Stroud, 2018 ]. Similar to a local weather event or an immediate health impact, humor is thought to be another means through which we can remove the psychological distance from the abstract and complex issue of climate change [Bore and Reid, 2014 ]. Importantly, our study adds to the growing literature that demonstrates the effectiveness of one-sided messages from sources like The Onion in reaching both those who are already highly engaged with the climate change issue and even those who are less interested from the outset. At the same time, our study suggests that two-sided humor present in mediated content popular across social media outlets is not a panacea for reaching various audiences on such a divided topic. It may be that a face-to-face setting for such humor (e.g., stand-up comedy, a theatrical presentation) is better suited to such engagement, while viral video content is simply associated with the often vitriolic nature of online discussions surrounding the climate change debate [Bore and Reid, 2014 ; Boykoff and Osnes, 2019 ].

Overall, our findings confirm that message sidedness, complexity, and the tone of the satire being presented are important factors worthy of careful study. One reason why the one-sided, highly critical ironic satire presented by The Onion results in greater message elaboration and counterarguing than the more playfully sarcastic two-sided satire offered by TWC may simply be that The Onion ’s presentation aligns with existing highly critical, one-sided satirical humor focusing on the issue of climate change that has appeared on cable television (on TDS , TCR , and LWT ). The Onion gives viewers yet another example of the familiar and targets a common enemy — climate skeptics. At the same time, it may be the ironic nature of the content driving engagement, since viewers need to deeply engage with the comic text to understand that the fake climate scientist in the video doesn’t really believe that global warming is a hoax. By twisting the common scientific consensus on climate change and presenting the ironic inverse of most scientists’ testimony on the issue, The Onion gets viewers to pay attention in an attempt to make sense of the comic incongruity. In doing so, they think more intensively about the message (e.g., message elaboration) and at the same time, endeavor to pick apart the scientists’ ironic claims (e.g., counterarguing). In contrast, the two-sided more playfully sarcastic satire presented by TWC is quickly discounted.

Before concluding, it is important to point out some of the limitations of our study. First, we rely on a small student sample ( N = 141; with just under n = 50 assigned to each experimental stimulus group). While our results our robust and these younger individuals are at the heart of the climate change debate and the core of the political comedy audience we recognize that relying on a convenience sample of this kind limits the generalizability of our results; future research should work to feature, larger, more representative samples. Second, our measure of message elaboration is based on self-reported behavior rather than a thought-listing type exercise that forces subjects to engage in real-time elaborative processing. Third, while we rely on a well-established, highly reliable measure of counterarguing, we recognize that some of the individual rating scales may map better onto evaluating one-sided vs. two-sided content. Nevertheless, multiple studies have used these constructs when examining cognitive responses to two-sided content [for an example, see Nisbet, Cooper and Garrett, 2015 ]. Lastly, we fully recognize that subjects were exposed to one short burst of video content. While we feel that incorporating additional stimuli content would have introduced unnecessary noise into our experimental design, we recognize that our findings are limited to this particular case study.

Importantly, the stimuli content is drawn from established media outlets and represents real video content subjects could easily encounter on YouTube or in their social media feeds. Privileging real world content over fake, newly produced content allows us to achieve greater ecological validity. At the same time, it is clear that the humorous stimuli we chose feature three varied elements, apart from being from different media sources: (1) the sidedness of the message (e.g. the one-sided content from The Onion vs. the two-sided presentation from TWC ), (2) the tone of the humor (e.g., the critical juvenalian satire of The Onion vs. the more playful, horatian satire of TWC ), and (3) the humor’s complexity (e.g., the highly ironic Onion vs. the more sarcastic TWC ). While we therefore cannot explicitly say whether it is the one-sidedness of the message or the tone or the complexity of the humor that leads to greater message elaboration and counterarguing after exposure to The Onion , we can suggest that at least in this experimental case, all three factors may be important and worthy of future study, especially as we seek out new ways to cut through the communication clutter and further engage citizens on the climate change issue. On the whole, messages that present a clear point-of-view and do so in a critical and ironic fashion have greater potential to engage viewers with the climate change debate than playful messages that sarcastically present two sides of the story.

In sum, our research suggests that highly ironic, one-sided satirical messages may serve as a useful tool for climate change engagement. Humorous messaging from The Onion and other sources may be particularly useful for individuals who already care about the issue of climate change, giving them another bit of shareable social media content to post on their news feeds and circulate among friends who might be less interested in climate change but easier to persuade given shared political outlooks. Given the highly contentious and politicized nature of the climate change debate, humorous messages may indeed serve as a useful tool to cut through the communication clutter, reducing the issue’s psychological distance among like-minded communities [Bore and Reid, 2014 ]. Our research suggests, however, that attempts to engage individuals on the topic using two-sided messages may be less persuasive. As such, humor is not necessarily always the answer to reducing politically polarized divides on the issue of climate change. It may be more that the type of humor matters more than relying on humor in and of itself to foster engagement. Moving forward, future research should consider the intervening role of key predispositions like open-mindedness on the differential processing of one-sided vs. two-sided humor on the topic of climate change [Nisbet, Hart et al., 2013 ].

In conclusion, our study examines the differential processing of one-sided vs. two-sided humorous messages in an attempt to complement existing research on comedy’s effect on engagement with the climate change debate. We look forward to future research that continues to connect political comedy with the issue of climate change and accounts for variations in message-sidedness, tone, and humor complexity. As our research shows, we see great promise in comedy’s ability to enhance the debate over climate change, promoting a more deliberative and democratic public discourse in our increasingly complex digital communications environment.

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Amy B. Becker is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore, MD. Her research examines public opinion toward controversial issues, the implications of new media technologies, and the political effects of exposure and attention to political entertainment including late night comedy. E-mail: [email protected] .

Ashley A. Anderson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Communication at Colorado State University. Her research interests include public opinion and public engagement around issues of science and emerging technology, particularly in the online communication environment. E-mail: [email protected] .

1 A review of the data confirmed that there were no significant differences in the dependent variables of interest between college campuses.

2 The manipulation checks confirmed that subjects found both satire clips comparably entertaining, funny, amusing, humorous, sarcastic, and not serious; there were no significant differences between The Onion and TWC on these evaluation items. As expected, subjects found the one-sided satire of The Onion ( M = 4.31, SD = 1.45) to be significantly more negative than the two-sided playful satire presented by TWC ( M = 3.04, SD = 1.29); t (93) = 4.52, p < .001.

3 While there were slight differences in the attribute ratings for the two media organizations, none of these differences were significant. Subjects rated each organization similarly for the attributes of: trustworthy ( Onion M = 4.23, SD = 1.66; TWC M = 3.89, SD = 1.64); reliable ( Onion M = 4.12, SD = 1.67; TWC M = 3.98, SD = 1.61); honest ( Onion M = 4.40, SD = 1.71; TWC M = 4.54, SD = 1.44); and credible ( Onion M = 4.19, SD = 1.89; TWC M = 4.07, SD = 1.71).

4 As expected, the three dependent variables are related, yet distinct components of message processing. According to the data, message discounting is correlated with message elaboration ( r = .23, p < .01) and counterarguing ( r = .32, p < .001). Only the correlation between message elaboration and counterarguing is insignificant ( r = .04, p = .62).

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April 12, 2012

The Funny Side of Climate Change

In her latest comic book, graphic novelist Kate Evans helps readers understand carbon trading schemes and their shortcomings

By Mark Fischetti

Kate Evans majored in English during college in 1990s Britain while she perfected the art of getting arrested for trying to prevent the U.K. government and industry from cutting down too many trees. A fan of science, she gradually turned her artistic talents and environmental passions to crafting comics about climate change. In 2006 she published a fully referenced graphic novel based on peer-reviewed science, Funny Weather: Everything You Didn’t Want to Know about Climate Change but Should Probably Find Out . And she has just released a 16-page comic, The Carbon Supermarket , about carbon-offset markets as folly, which she has allowed Scientific American to reproduce in full (below). I talked with Evans by phone to find out why she thinks cartoons can help the world tackle climate issues.

[ An edited transcript of the interview follows. ]

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The Carbon Supermarket appears courtesy of Kate Evans . If you have problems viewing the PDF, please download the cartoon .

Why are comics a good way to teach difficult science? My friend Rosie says, "If you make someone laugh, then you're halfway to changing their mind." People are having fun. They're reading something pleasurable. When you create that, it's very easy to get the message across. And something that combines words with pictures is very powerful. That's why the advertising industry uses words and pictures in combination.

Your online bio explains your interest in cartooning, but why did you take on climate change? Well it's the elephant in the room, isn't it? You can't be a sentient person in the beginning of the 21st century and not want to address climate change. If you do not, you must be in denial. I'm just so cross right now, too. I just saw a BBC documentary about the weirding of weather, and they never mentioned the words "greenhouse gases" or "carbon dioxide." And they kept saying, "scientists believe" this, "scientists believe" that. No, scientists have proved it. They're not some kind of church. There is scientific consensus. I feel very strongly about that.

What prompted you to write The Carbon Supermarket , about carbon offset markets? Any time you see capitalism getting excited about climate change you have to look at that very carefully. A carbon market is really about privatizing the atmosphere, and handing shares in it to the people who are polluting it. That's not a sensible solution! Come now! A sensible solution is a global commitment to meaningful carbon-reduction targets. Once we have that, then capitalism will be forced to follow, because at that point it starts to become profitable to invest in industries and technologies that reduce emissions.

So policy has to precede capitalism? Oh, yeah. Someone described carbon offsetting as moving your food around your plate to pretend that you've eaten it. If someone says, "Oh, it's great: We gave some African women some low-energy wood-burning stoves; that means we can build another coal-fired power station." No, it doesn't. You don't build the coal-fired power station. You stick the wind farms up and you give the women the low-energy wood-fired stoves—if there are easy and cheap gains to be made in carbon reductions. We also need to be reducing consumption, meaningfully, in Western cultures.

What aspect of climate change are people most confused about? I think most people are confused about what to do next. [The documentary film] An Inconvenient Truth is clear about what's happening, but it doesn't address: Okay, what do we actually do about this? I'm trying to get people to stop ignoring what's happening.

The people who are in positions of power have a vested interest in the status quo; that's one of the problems. The other problem is that we're talking about a timescale of more than 40 years, between when your action today even starts to translate into climatic change. That time lag is difficult for people to embrace. We work on a very short timescale. Politicians, you know, get elected every four years. I have a cartoon of a goldfish, and it says, "Vote Goldfish"—the politicians only have a four-year memory. We don't have a political process that takes into account seven generations into the future. So the question is: "What are you going to do about climate change?" And I pose that question in Funny Weather .

What's your ultimate goal? Reaching the maximum number of people. I would also like people to appreciate that comics can be about serious subjects. I get a lot of "Oh, it's nice for children." No no no no no. I think my comics should be in the House of Representatives. Anywhere in the [bathroom]—you know, so people will read it; in the [bathrooms] of rich and powerful places.

You released The Carbon Supermarket for free, under a Creative Commons license. Thank you for that! You also wrote the graphic novel, Funny Weather— for sale. Both publications are comics that explain scientific ideas clearly and concisely, yet they include a lot of text. How do you find the right balance between images and words? First, I read the peer-reviewed science; I don't use the popular media as a source. The science is really important to me. I'm not trying to construct an artistic ideal; it has to be grounded in truth.

Then I try to distill it down to the fewest possible words and get that across in the most engaging way. I'll draft and redraft and get rid of everything that doesn't need to be there. Then it's about the characters. In Funny Weather , I use a conversation between three main characters: the scientists, the guy in the position of power—the capitalist—and the enquirer, who I've created as a child. I've used a child to represent a kind of innocence, but also a kind of uncompromising stance—a purity of inquiry. I use these three types of characters to bring out the tension inherent in the subject. And there's comedy in that, and drama.

It's also important to realize that these three characters are actually all aspects of our own selves. We're all partly the scientist eagerly interested in it, all partly the kid outraged and inquiring, and we're also all in denial—we're all in a position of power. We need to be thinking about our own inner capitalist as well.

What's coming next from Kate Evans? My next book is about breast-feeding and birth—you know, to help people come to terms with the fact that they're mammals. It's about women's experiences, which tend to get side-stepped. One major newspaper reporter who talked to me recently said "Oh, breast-feeding, that's niche." I said, "Niche? Were you not a baby?"

I'm harnessing the power of images and the poetry of words to encourage women to connect with the process of labor in a positive way, instead of fearing it. And yet I'm doing a really detailed cartoon about Cesarean section, so people don't feel like they've failed if that happens. This is all nonjudgmental, women-supporting literature about pregnancy and birth that's got a lot of information in it. You don't control birth, you experience it. It's a subtle physiological and philosophical message to get across.

When can we see the book? That should be out at the end of this summer. The working title is You and Your New Life . Watch my space at cartoonkate.co.uk After that I'm taking up global finance—the Occupy movement, the 1 percent and 99 percent. I'm really inspired by that.

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Home > Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports > 1022

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

“you don’t need people’s opinions on a fact”: satirical comedy corrects climate change disinformation.

Shelly A. Galliah , Michigan Technological University Follow

Date of Award

Document type.

Open Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric, Theory and Culture (PhD)

Administrative Home Department

Department of Humanities

Sue Collins

Committee Member 1

Andrew Fiss

Committee Member 2

Patricia Sotirin

Committee Member 3

Joseph Reagle

Satirical comedy has often been recognized as a corrective to, if not alternative for, commercial news as well as a source of accurate science information (Brewer & McKnight, 2015). In this dissertation, I analyze how satirical comedy debunks climate change myths, delivers accurate information, and promotes scientific expertise. Five interconnected assumptions guide the context and methodology of this interdisciplinary study: 1) that various actors have transformed climate change into a “manufactured scientific controversy” (Ceccarelli, 2011); 2) that satire, as a method, both assails targets and aggregates people (Hutcheon,1994); 3) that celebrity activism is impactful but problematic (Collins, 2007; Boykoff & Goodman, 2009); 4) that the YouTube comment board represents an audience study (Lange, 2008); and 5) that online comment is worthy of analysis (Reagle, 2015). This project analyzes two case studies, each consisting of two examples of satirical climate change comedy from John Oliver (his Statistically Representative Climate Change Debate and his Paris Agreement monologues) and from Jimmy Kimmel (his Scientists on Climate Change and Hey Donald Trump -- Climate Change Affects You Too segments). A three-tiered, mixed-methods approach is adopted to investigate the context, construction, circulation, and online reception of these satirical comedy videos.

My project finds that the discursive integration (Baym, 2005) of satirical climate change comedy is potentially persuasive, but also risky and polarizing. Though centrist and left-of-center voices appreciate Oliver’s and Kimmel’s satirical interventions, conservative and right-of-center voices mark strict boundaries between comedy, celebrity, and climate change. It was also discovered that satirical comedy, which is accessible and viral, may intervene on YouTube’s climate change denial problem, correcting climate change falsehoods, and potentially drawing audiences away from their echo chambers and towards meaningful communication about the climate crisis. That is, many commenters use these videos as entry points to debate the causes of American climate change denial, correct climate change disinformation, and offer anecdotal evidence about the effects of climate change. At the same time, YouTube comments from the most resistant skeptics and repeat commenters provide insight into the persistence of circulating climate change myths and conflict frames. This study finally concludes that the analysis of comments on satirical climate change comedy exposes strategies for avoiding confirmation bias and the backfire effect along with techniques for creating more effective climate change communication.

Recommended Citation

Galliah, Shelly A., "“YOU DON’T NEED PEOPLE’S OPINIONS ON A FACT!”: SATIRICAL COMEDY CORRECTS CLIMATE CHANGE DISINFORMATION", Open Access Dissertation, Michigan Technological University, 2020.

https://doi.org/10.37099/mtu.dc.etdr/1022

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Science News

Climate change disinformation is evolving. so are efforts to fight back.

Researchers are testing games and other ways to help people recognize climate change denial

Protesters in New York City fought against climate change denial in 2017. As evidence of humans' impact on the climate grows, disinformation tactics have shifted.

Pacific Press Media Production Corp./Alamy Stock Photo

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By Carolyn Gramling

May 18, 2021 at 9:00 am

Over the last four decades, a highly organized, well-funded campaign powered by the fossil fuel industry has sought to discredit the science that links global climate change to human emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. These disinformation efforts have sown confusion over data, questioned the integrity of climate scientists and denied the scientific consensus on the role of humans.

Such disinformation efforts are outlined in internal documents from fossil fuel giants such as Shell and Exxon. As early as the 1980s, oil companies knew that burning fossil fuels was altering the climate, according to industry documents reviewed at a 2019 U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing. Yet these companies, aided by some scientists , set out to mislead the public, deny well-established science and forestall efforts to regulate emissions.

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But the effects of climate change on extreme events such as wildfires, heat waves and hurricanes have become hard to downplay ( SN: 12/19/20 & SN: 1/2/21, p. 37 ). Not coincidentally, climate disinformation tactics have shifted from outright denial to distraction and delay ( SN: 1/16/21, p. 28 ).

As disinformation tactics evolve, researchers continue to test new ways to combat them. Debunking by fact-checking untrue statements is one way to combat climate disinformation. Another way, increasingly adopted by social media platforms, is to add warning labels flagging messages as possible disinformation, such as the labels Twitter and Facebook (which also owns Instagram) began adding in 2020 regarding the U.S. presidential election and the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the same time, Facebook was sharply criticized for a change to its fact-checking policies that critics say enables the spread of climate disinformation. In 2019, the social media giant decided to exempt posts that it determines to be opinion or satire from fact-checking , creating a potentially large disinformation loophole.

In response to mounting criticism, Facebook unveiled a pilot project in February for its users in the United Kingdom, with labels pointing out myths about climate change. The labels also point users to Facebook’s climate science information center .

For this project, Facebook consulted several climate communication experts. Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge, and cognitive scientist John Cook of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., helped the company develop a new “myth-busting” unit that debunks common climate change myths — such as that scientists don’t agree that global warming is happening.

Researchers John Cook and Sander van der Linden hope to inoculate people against climate change denial messages.

Cook and van der Linden have also been testing ways to get out in front of disinformation, an approach known as prebunking, or inoculation theory. By helping people recognize common rhetorical techniques used to spread climate disinformation — such as logical fallacies, relying on fake “experts” and cherry-picking only the data that support one view — the two hope to build resilience against these tactics.

This new line of defense may come with a bonus, van der Linden says. Training people in these techniques could build a more general resilience to disinformation, whether related to climate, vaccines or COVID-19.

Science News asked Cook and van der Linden about debunking conspiracies, collaborating with Facebook and how prebunking is (and isn’t) like getting vaccinated. The conversations, held separately, have been edited for brevity and clarity.

We’ve seen both misinformation and disinformation used in the climate change denial discussion. What’s the difference?

van der Linden: Misinformation is any information that’s incorrect, whether due to error or fake news. Disinformation is deliberately intended to deceive. Then there’s propaganda: disinformation with a political agenda. But in practice, it’s difficult to disentangle them. Often, people use misinformation because it’s the broadest category.

Has there been a change in the nature of climate change denialism in the last few decades?

Cook: It is shifting. For example, we fed 21 years of [climate change] denial blog posts from the U.K. into a machine learning program. We found that the science denialism misinformation is gradually going down — and solution misinformation [targeting climate policy and renewable energy] is on the rise [as reported online in early March at SocArXiv.org].

As the science becomes more apparent, it becomes more untenable to attack it. We see spikes in policy misinformation just before the government brings in new science policy, such as a carbon pricing bill. And there was a huge spike before the [2015] Paris climate agreement . That’s what we will see more of over time.

How do you hope Facebook’s new climate change misinformation project will help?

Cook: We need tech solutions, like flagging and tagging misinformation, as well as social media platforms downplaying it, so [the misinformation] doesn’t get put on as many people’s feeds. We can’t depend on social media. A look behind the curtain at Facebook showed me the challenge of getting corporations to adequately respond. There are a lot of internal tensions.

van der Linden: I’ve worked with WhatsApp and Google, and it’s always the same story. They want to do the right thing, but don’t follow through because it hurts engagement on the platform.

But going from not taking a stance on climate change to taking a stance, that’s a huge win. What Facebook has done is a step forward. They listened to our designs and suggestions and comments on their [pilot] test.

We wanted more than a neutral [label directing people to Facebook’s information page on climate change], but they wanted to test the neutral post first. That’s all good. It’ll be a few months at least for the testing in the U.K. phase to roll out, but we don’t yet know how many other countries they will roll it out to and when. We all came on board with the idea that they’re going to do more, and more aggressively. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if it rolls out globally. That’s my criteria for success.

Scientists have been countering climate change misinformation for years, through fact-checking and debunking. It’s a bit like whack-a-mole. You advocate for “inoculating” people against the techniques that help misinformation spread through communities. How can that help?

van der Linden: Fact-checking and debunking is useful if you do it right. But there’s the issue of ideology, of resistance to fact-checking when it’s not in line with ideology. Wouldn’t life be so much easier if we could prevent [disinformation] in the first place? That’s the whole point of prebunking or inoculation. It’s a multilayer defense system. If you can get there first, that’s great. But that won’t always be possible, so you still have real-time fact-checking. This multilayer firewall is going to be the most useful thing.

You’ve both developed online interactive tools, games really, to test the idea of inoculating people against disinformation tactics. Sander, you created an online interactive game called Bad News , in which players can invent conspiracies and act as fake news producers. A study of 15,000 participants reported in 2019 in Palgrave Communications showed that by playing at creating misinformation, people got better at recognizing it . But how long does this “inoculation” last?

van der Linden: That’s an important difference in the viral analogy. Biological vaccines give more or less lifelong immunity, at least for some kinds of viruses. That’s not the case for a psychological vaccine. It wears off over time.

In one study, we followed up with people [repeatedly] for about three months , during which time they didn’t replay the game. We found no decay of the inoculation effect, which was quite surprising. The inoculation remained stable for about two months. In [a shorter study focused on] climate change misinformation, the inoculation effect also remained stable , for at least one week.

John, what about your game Cranky Uncle ? At first, it focused on climate change denial, but you’ve expanded it to include other types of misinformation, on topics such as COVID-19, flat-earthism and vaccine misinformation. How well do techniques to inoculate against climate change denialism translate to other types of misinformation?

Cook: The techniques used in climate denial are seen in all forms of misinformation. Working on deconstructing [that] misinformation introduced me to parallel argumentation, which is basically using analogies to combat flawed logic. That’s what late night comedians do: Make what is obviously a ridiculous argument. The other night, for example, Seth Meyers talked about how Texas blaming its [February] power outage on renewable energy was like New Jersey blaming its problems on Boston [clam chowder].

My main tip is to arm yourself with awareness of misleading techniques. Think of it like a virus spreading: You don’t want to be a superspreader. Make sure that you’re wearing a mask, for starters. And when you see misinformation, call it out. That observational correction — it matters. It makes a difference.

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• The Inventory

Using humor to talk about climate change makes it easier to take action

Climate change is not inherently funny. Typically, the messengers are serious scientists describing how rising greenhouse gas emissions are harming the planet on land and at sea , or assessing what role it played in the latest wildfire or hurricane .

Society may have reached a saturation point for such somber, gloomy, and threatening science-centered discussions. This possibility is what inspires my recent work with colleague Beth Osnes to get messages out about climate change through comedy and humor.

I have studied and practiced climate communication for about 20 years. My new book, Creative (Climate) Communications , integrates social science and humanities research and practices to connect people more effectively through issues they care about. Rather than “dumbing down” science for the public, this is a “smartening up” approach that has been shown to bring people together around a highly divisive topic.

Why laugh about climate change?

Science is critically important to understanding the enormity of the climate challenge and how it connects with other problems like disasters, food security, local air quality, and migration. But stories that emanate from scientific ways of knowing have failed to significantly engage and activate large audiences.

Largely gloomy approaches and interpretations typically stifle audiences rather than inspiring them to take action. For example, novelist Jonathan Franzen recently published an essay in The New Yorker titled “ What If We Stop Pretending? ” in which he asserted:

“The goal (of halting climate change) has been clear for thirty years, and despite earnest efforts we’ve made essentially no progress toward reaching it.”

Social science and humanities research have shown that this kind of framing effectively disempowers readers who could be activated and moved by a smarter approach.

Comics took a different path when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report in 2018 warning that the world only had until about 2030 to take steps that could limit warming to manageable levels. Trevor Noah, host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show , observed:

“You know the crazy people you see in the streets shouting that the world is ending? Turns out, they’re all actually climate scientists .”

On ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live , Kimmel commented:

“There’s always a silver lining. One planet’s calamity is another planet’s shop-portunity.”

He then cut to a going-out-of-business advertisement for Planet Earth that read:

“Everything must go! 50% of all nocturnal animals, insects, reptiles, and amphibians … priced to sell before we live in hell. But you must act fast because planet Earth is over soon. And when it’s gone, it’s gone .”

It’s getting hot in here

Social science and humanities scholars have been examining new, potentially more effective ways to communicate about climate change. Consistently, as I describe in my book, research shows that emotional, tactile, visceral, and experiential communication meets people where they are. These methods arouse action and engagement .

Scholars have examined how shows like Saturday Night Live , Last Week Tonight , Jimmy Kimmel Live , Full Frontal , and The Daily Show use jokes to increase understanding and engagement. In one example, former Vice President Al Gore appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2017 and took turns with Colbert serving up climate change pickup lines over saucy slow-jam background music:

Gore: “Are you climate change? Because when I look at you, the world disappears.”

Colbert: “I’m like 97% of scientists, and I can’t deny … it’s getting hot in here.”

Colbert: “Is that an iceberg the size of Delaware breaking off the Antarctic ice shelf, or are you just happy to see me?”

Gore: “I hope you’re not powered by fossil fuels, because you’ve been running through my mind all day.”

Comedian Sarah Silverman took time during her 2018 Hulu show I Love You America  to address the need for climate action. In her monologue, she focused on how climate change is driven “by the interests of a very small group and absurdly rich and powerful people.” She added:

“The disgusting irony of all of it is that the billionaires who have created this global atrocity are going to be the ones to survive it. They are going to be fine while we all cook to death in a planet-sized hot car.”

Breaching barriers and finding common ground

Research shows that in a time of deep polarization, comedy can lower defenses . It temporarily suspends social rules and connects people with ideas and new ways of thinking or acting.

Comedy exploits cracks in arguments. It wiggles in, pokes, prods, and draws attention to the incongruous, hypocritical, false and pretentious. It can make the complex dimensions of climate change seem more accessible and its challenges seem more manageable.

For four years we have directed “Stand Up for Climate Change,” a comedy project. We and our students write sketch comedy routines and perform them in front of live audiences on the Boulder campus. From those experiences, we have studied the content of the performances and how the performers and audience respond. Our work has found that humor provides effective pathways to greater awareness, learning, sharing of feelings, conversations, and inspiration for performers and audiences alike.Many disciplines can inform comedy, including theater, performance, and media studies. With my colleagues Beth Osnes , Rebecca Safran, and Phaedra Pezzullo at the University of Colorado, I co-direct the Inside the Greenhouse initiative, which uses insights from creative fields to develop effective climate communication strategies.

A comic approach might seem to trivialize climate change, which has life-and-death implications for millions of people, especially the world’s poorest and most vulnerable residents. But a greater risk would be for people to stop talking about the problem entirely, and miss the chance to reimagine and actively engage in their collective futures.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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Home / The Science of Satire: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as Sources of Public Attention to Science and the Environment

Peer-Reviewed Article · May 15, 2011

The science of satire: the daily show and the colbert report as sources of public attention to science and the environment, filed under: messaging.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report have attracted much interest in recent years from popular audiences as well as scholars in various disciplines. Both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have been named on Time magazine’s list of the most influential people in the world. The ten essays in this interdisciplinary collection explore the issues engendered by the popularity of entertainment news, including the role of satire in politics, the declining level of trust in traditional sources of media, the shows’ cathartic or informational function, and the ways in which these shows influence public opinion.

Feldman, L., Leiserowitz, A., and Maibach, E. (2011) The science of satire: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as sources of public attention to science and the environment, in Amarasingam, A. (Ed.), The Stewart / Colbert Effect: Essays on the Real Impacts of Fake News. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company.

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Why apocalyptic claims about climate change are wrong.

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Climate scientists are speaking out against grossly exaggerated claims about global warming.

Environmental journalists and advocates have in recent weeks made a number of apocalyptic predictions about the impact of climate change. Bill McKibben suggested climate-driven fires in Australia had made koalas “functionally extinct.” Extinction Rebellion said “Billions will die” and “Life on Earth is dying.” Vice claimed the “collapse of civilization may have already begun.” 

Few have underscored the threat more than student climate activist Greta Thunberg and Green New Deal sponsor Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The latter said , “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change.” Says Thunberg in her new book, “Around 2030 we will be in a position to set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will lead to the end of our civilization as we know it.” 

Sometimes, scientists themselves make apocalyptic claims. “It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that,” if Earth warms four degrees, said one earlier this year. “The potential for multi-breadbasket failure is increasing,” said another. If sea levels rise as much as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts, another scientist said , “It will be an unmanageable problem.” 

Apocalyptic statements like these have real-world impacts. In September, a group of British psychologists said children are increasingly suffering from anxiety from the frightening discourse around climate change. In October, an activist with Extinction Rebellion (”XR”) — an environmental group founded in 2018 to commit civil disobedience to draw awareness to the threat its founders and supporters say climate change poses to human existence — and a videographer, were kicked and beaten in a London Tube station by angry commuters. And last week, an XR co-founder said a genocide like the Holocaust was “happening again, on a far greater scale, and in plain sight” from climate change.

Climate change is an issue I care passionately about and have dedicated a significant portion of my life to addressing. I have been politically active on the issue for over 20 years and have researched and written about it for 17 years. Over the last four years, my organization, Environmental Progress, has worked with some of the world’s leading climate scientists to prevent carbon emissions from rising. So far, we’ve helped prevent emissions increasing the equivalent of adding 24 million cars to the road. 

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I also care about getting the facts and science right and have in recent months corrected inaccurate and apocalyptic news media coverage of fires in the Amazon and fires in California , both of which have been improperly presented as resulting primarily from climate change. 

Journalists and activists alike have an obligation to describe environmental problems honestly and accurately, even if they fear doing so will reduce their news value or salience with the public. There is good evidence that the catastrophist framing of climate change is self-defeating because it alienates and polarizes many people. And exaggerating climate change risks distracting us from other important issues including ones we might have more near-term control over.

I feel the need to say this up-front because I want the issues I’m about to raise to be taken seriously and not dismissed by those who label as “climate deniers” or “climate delayers” anyone who pushes back against exaggeration.

With that out of the way, let’s look whether the science supports what’s being said.

First, no credible scientific body has ever said climate change threatens the collapse of civilization much less the extinction of the human species. “‘Our children are going to die in the next 10 to 20 years.’ What’s the scientific basis for these claims?” BBC’s Andrew Neil asked a visibly uncomfortable XR spokesperson last month.

“These claims have been disputed, admittedly,” she said. “There are some scientists who are agreeing and some who are saying it’s not true. But the overall issue is that these deaths are going to happen.”

“But most scientists don’t agree with this,” said Neil. “I looked through IPCC reports and see no reference to billions of people going to die, or children in 20 years. How would they die?”

“Mass migration around the world already taking place due to prolonged drought in countries, particularly in South Asia. There are wildfires in Indonesia, the Amazon rainforest, Siberia, the Arctic,” she said.

But in saying so, the XR spokesperson had grossly misrepresented the science. “There is robust evidence of disasters displacing people worldwide,” notes IPCC, “but limited evidence that climate change or sea-level rise is the direct cause” 

What about “mass migration”? “The majority of resultant population movements tend to occur within the borders of affected countries," says IPCC.

It’s not like climate doesn’t matter. It’s that climate change is outweighed by other factors. Earlier this year, researchers found that climate “has affected organized armed conflict within countries. However, other drivers, such as low socioeconomic development and low capabilities of the state, are judged to be substantially more influential.”

Last January, after climate scientists criticized Rep. Ocasio-Cortez for saying the world would end in 12 years, her spokesperson said "We can quibble about the phraseology, whether it's existential or cataclysmic.” He added, “We're seeing lots of [climate change-related] problems that are already impacting lives."

That last part may be true, but it’s also true that economic development has made us less vulnerable, which is why there was a 99.7% decline in the death toll from natural disasters since its peak in 1931. 

In 1931, 3.7 million people died from natural disasters. In 2018, just 11,000 did.  And that decline occurred over a period when the global population quadrupled .

What about sea level rise? IPCC estimates sea level could rise two feet (0.6 meters) by 2100. Does that sound apocalyptic or even “unmanageable”?

Consider that one-third of the Netherlands is below sea level, and some areas are seven meters below sea level. You might object that Netherlands is rich while Bangladesh is poor. But the Netherlands adapted to living below sea level 400 years ago. Technology has improved a bit since then.

What about claims of crop failure, famine, and mass death? That’s science fiction, not science. Humans today produce enough food for 10 billion people, or 25% more than we need, and scientific bodies predict increases in that share, not declines. 

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) forecasts crop yields increasing 30% by 2050. And the poorest parts of the world, like sub-Saharan Africa, are expected to see increases of 80 to 90%.

Nobody is suggesting climate change won’t negatively impact crop yields. It could. But such declines should be put in perspective. Wheat yields increased 100 to 300% around the world since the 1960s, while a study of 30 models found that yields would decline by 6% for every one degree Celsius increase in temperature.

Rates of future yield growth depend far more on whether poor nations get access to tractors, irrigation, and fertilizer than on climate change, says FAO.

All of this helps explain why IPCC anticipates climate change will have a modest impact on economic growth. By 2100, IPCC projects the global economy will be 300 to 500% larger than it is today. Both IPCC and the Nobel-winning Yale economist, William Nordhaus, predict that warming of 2.5°C and 4°C would reduce gross domestic product (GDP) by 2% and 5% over that same period.

Does this mean we shouldn’t worry about climate change? Not at all. 

One of the reasons I work on climate change is because I worry about the impact it could have on endangered species. Climate change may threaten one million species globally and half of all mammals, reptiles, and amphibians in diverse places like the Albertine Rift in central Africa, home to the endangered mountain gorilla.

But it’s not the case that “we’re putting our own survival in danger” through extinctions, as Elizabeth Kolbert claimed in her book, Sixth Extinction . As tragic as animal extinctions are, they do not threaten human civilization. If we want to save endangered species, we need to do so because we care about wildlife for spiritual, ethical, or aesthetic reasons, not survival ones.  

And exaggerating the risk, and suggesting climate change is more important than things like habitat destruction, are counterproductive.

For example, Australia’s fires are not driving koalas extinct, as Bill McKibben suggested. The main scientific body that tracks the species, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, labels the koala “vulnerable,” which is one level less threatened than “endangered,” two levels less than “critically endangered,” and three less than “extinct” in the wild. 

Should we worry about koalas? Absolutely! They are amazing animals and their numbers have declined to around 300,000. But they face far bigger threats such as the destruction of habitat, disease, bushfires, and invasive species. 

Think of it this way. The climate could change dramatically — and we could still save koalas. Conversely, the climate could change only modestly — and koalas could still go extinct. 

The monomaniacal focus on climate distracts our attention from other threats to koalas and opportunities for protecting them, like protecting and expanding their habitat.

As for fire, one of Australia’s leading scientists on the issue says , “Bushfire losses can be explained by the increasing exposure of dwellings to fire-prone bushlands. No other influences need be invoked. So even if climate change had played some small role in modulating recent bushfires, and we cannot rule this out, any such effects on risk to property are clearly swamped by the changes in exposure.”

Nor are the fires solely due to drought, which is common in Australia, and exceptional this year. “Climate change is playing its role here,” said Richard Thornton of the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre in Australia, “but it's not the cause of these fires."

The same is true for fires in the United States. In 2017, scientists modeled 37 different regions and found “humans may not only influence fire regimes but their presence can actually override, or swamp out, the effects of climate.” Of the 10 variables that influence fire, “none were as significant… as the anthropogenic variables,” such as building homes near, and managing fires and wood fuel growth within, forests.

Climate scientists are starting to push back against exaggerations by activists, journalists, and other scientists. 

“While many species are threatened with extinction,” said Stanford’s Ken Caldeira, “climate change does not threaten human extinction... I would not like to see us motivating people to do the right thing by making them believe something that is false.”

I asked the Australian climate scientist Tom Wigley what he thought of the claim that climate change threatens civilization. “It really does bother me because it’s wrong,” he said. “All these young people have been misinformed. And partly it’s Greta Thunberg’s fault. Not deliberately. But she’s wrong.”

But don’t scientists and activists need to exaggerate in order to get the public’s attention?

“I’m reminded of what [late Stanford University climate scientist] Steve Schneider used to say,” Wigley replied. “He used to say that as a scientist, we shouldn’t really be concerned about the way we slant things in communicating with people out on the street who might need a little push in a certain direction to realize that this is a serious problem. Steve didn’t have any qualms about speaking in that biased way. I don’t quite agree with that.”

Wigley started working on climate science full-time in 1975 and created one of the first climate models (MAGICC) in 1987. It remains one of the main climate models in use today.

“When I talk to the general public,” he said, “I point out some of the things that might make projections of warming less and the things that might make them more. I always try to present both sides.”

Part of what bothers me about the apocalyptic rhetoric by climate activists is that it is often accompanied by demands that poor nations be denied the cheap sources of energy they need to develop. I have found that many scientists share my concerns.

“If you want to minimize carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2070  you might want to accelerate the burning of coal in India today,” MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel said. 

“It doesn’t sound like it makes sense. Coal is terrible for carbon. But it’s by burning a lot of coal that they make themselves wealthier, and by making themselves wealthier they have fewer children, and you don’t have as many people burning carbon, you might be better off in 2070.” 

Emanuel and Wigley say the extreme rhetoric is making political agreement on climate change harder. 

“You’ve got to come up with some kind of middle ground where you do reasonable things to mitigate the risk and try at the same time to lift people out of poverty and make them more resilient,” said Emanuel. “We shouldn’t be forced to choose between lifting people out of poverty and doing something for the climate.”

Happily, there is a plenty of middle ground between climate apocalypse and climate denial.

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When will climate change turn life in the U.S. upside down?

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The words of explorer John Wesley Powell on the eve of his departure into the unexplored depths of the Grand Canyon in 1869 best describe how I see our path ahead as we brave the unknown rapids of climate change:

We are now ready to start our way down the Great Unknown. We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Ah, well! We may conjecture many things. The men talk as cheerfully as ever; jests are bandied about freely this morning; but to me the cheer is somber and the jests are ghastly.

Powell’s expedition made it through the canyon, but the explorers endured great hardship, suffering near-drownings, the destruction of two of their four boats, and the loss of much of their supplies. In the end, only six of the nine men survived.

Likewise, we find ourselves in an ever-deepening chasm of climate change impacts, forced to run a perilous course through dangerous rapids of unknown ferocity. Our path will be fraught with great peril, and there will be tremendous suffering, great loss of life, and the destruction of much that is precious.

It is inevitable that climate change will stop being a hazy future concern and will someday turn everyday life upside down. Very hard times are coming. At the risk of causing counterproductive climate anxiety and doomism, I offer here some observations and speculations on how the planetary crisis may play out, using my 45 years of experience as a meteorologist, including four years of flying with the Hurricane Hunters and 20 years blogging about extreme weather and climate change. The scenarios that I depict as the most likely are much harsher than what other experts might choose, but I’ve seen repeatedly that uncertainty is not our friend when it comes to climate change. This will be a long and intense ride, but if you stick through the end, I promise there will be a rainbow.

By late this century, I am optimistic that we will have successfully ridden the rapids of the climate crisis, emerging into a new era of non-polluting energy with a stabilizing climate. There are too many talented and dedicated people who understand the problem and are working hard on solutions for us to fail.

Jump to a section of this essay

What is a dangerous level of climate change, climate change’s impacts will be highly asymmetric, an immediate u.s. climate change threat: an insurance crisis, a second potential immediate u.s. climate change threat: a global food shock, “black swan” and “gray swan” extreme weather events, a “new normal” of extreme weather has not yet arrived, longer-range concerns: global catastrophic risk events, devastating impacts from climate change are accelerating, paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology, hope for the future via ‘cathedral thinking’.

Although there is a major climate change hurricane approaching, we’re busy throwing a hurricane party , charging up our planetary credit card to pay for the expenses, with little regard to the approaching storm that is already cutting off our escape routes. This great storm will fundamentally rip at the fabric of society, creating chaos and a crisis likely to last for many decades.

The intensifying climate change storm will soon reach a threshold I think of as a category 1 hurricane for humanity — when long-term global warming surpasses 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures, a value increasingly characterized over the last decade as “dangerous” climate change .

For humanity as a whole, this amount of warming is risky, but not devastating. Global warming is currently at about 1.2-1.3 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures and is likely to cross the 1.5-degree threshold in the late 2020s or early 2030s .

Assuming that we don’t work exceptionally hard to reduce emissions in the next 10 years, the world is expected to reach 2 degrees Celsius of warming between 2045 and 2051. In my estimation, that will be akin to a major category 3 hurricane for humanity — devastating, but not catastrophic.

Allowing global warming to exceed 2.5 degrees Celsius will cause category 4-level damage to civilization — approaching the catastrophic level. And warming in excess of 3 degrees Celsius will likely be a catastrophic category 5-level superstorm of destruction that will crash civilization.

We must take strong action rapidly to rein in our emissions of heat-trapping gases to avoid that outcome — and build great resilience to the extreme climate of the 21st century that we have so foolishly brought upon ourselves.

According to the Carbon Action Tracker (see tweet below), we are on track for 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming; if the nations of the world meet their targets for reducing heat-trapping climate pollution, warming will be limited to 2.1 degrees. There’s a big difference between being hit by a Cat 4 versus a Cat 3, and every tenth of a degree of warming that we prevent will be critical.

Two years on from Glasgow and our warming estimates for government action have barely moved. Governments appear oblivious to the extreme events of the past year, somehow thinking treading water will deal with the flood of impacts? https://t.co/fbM4xY9OJe pic.twitter.com/MekGIeU1Z3 — ClimateActionTracker (@climateactiontr) December 5, 2023

As climate scientist Michael Mann explains in his latest book, “ Our Fragile Moment ,” great climate science communicator Stephen Schneider once said, “The ‘end of the world’ or ‘good for you’ are the two least likely among the spectrum of potential [climate] outcomes.” So forget sci-fi depictions of planetary apocalypse. That will not be our long-term climate change fate.

But the impacts of climate change will be apocalyptic for many nations and people — particularly those that are not rich and White. People and communities with the least resources tend to be the first and hardest hit by climate change , not only because poorer people and communities are inherently more vulnerable to the impacts of any disaster, but also because the extremes induced by climate change tend to be worse in the tropics and subtropics, home to many poor nations.

In the U.S., climate change has already turned life upside down for numerous communities. For example, in North Carolina, the financially strapped, Black-majority towns of Fair Bluff and Princeville are in danger of abandonment from hurricane-related flooding (from Hurricane Floyd in 1999, Matthew in 2016, and Florence in 2018). Seven Springs, North Carolina (population 207 in 1960, now just 55) is largely abandoned.

Climate change was a key contributor to these floods; a 2021 study found that about one-third of the cost of major U.S. flood events since 1988, totaling $79 billion, could be attributed to climate change. And for the town of Paradise, California — utterly destroyed by the devastating Camp Fire of 2018, which killed 85 and caused over $16 billion in damage — climate change has been apocalyptic.

In the U.S., the most likely major economic disruption from climate change over the next few years might well be a collapse of the housing market in flood-prone and wildfire-prone states. Billion-dollar weather disasters — which cause about 76% of all weather-related damages — have steadily increased in number and expense in recent years and would be even worse were it not for improved weather forecasts and better building codes. The recent increase in weather-disaster losses has brought on an insurance crisis — especially in Florida , Louisiana , California , and Texas — which threatens one of the bedrocks of the U.S. economy, the housing and real estate market.

In California, the insurer of last resort, the FAIR plan, had only about $250 million in cash on hand as of March 2024.

“One major fire near Lake Arrowhead, where the Plan holds $8 billion in policies, would plunge the whole scheme into insolvency,” observed Harvard’s Susan Crawford, author of “Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm.”

It is widely acknowledged that higher weather disaster losses result primarily from an increase in exposure : more people with more stuff moving into vulnerable places, including those at risk of floods. Martin Bertogg, Swiss Re’s head of catastrophic peril, said in a 2022 AP interview that two-thirds, perhaps more, of the recent rise in weather-related disaster losses is the result of more people and things in harm’s way.

But this balance will likely shift in the coming decades. Increased exposure will continue to drive increased weather disaster losses, but the fractional contribution of climate change to disaster losses — at least for wildfire, hurricane, and flood disasters — is likely to increase rapidly, making the insurance crisis accelerate.

A 2023 study (Fig. 2) drew attention to a massive real estate bubble in the U.S.: the vast number of properties whose purported value doesn’t account for the true costs of floods. The study estimated that across the U.S., residential properties are overvalued by a total of $121-$237 billion under current flood risks. This bubble will likely continue to grow as sea levels rise, storms dump heavier rains, and unwise risky development continues.

Likewise, U.S. properties at risk of wildfires are collectively overvalued by about $317 billion, according to David Burt , a financial guru who foresaw the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Insurers are already pulling out of the areas most at risk, threatening to make property ownership too expensive for millions and posing a serious threat to the economically critical real estate industry.

Climate futurist Alex Steffen has described the climate change-worsened real estate bubble this way:

As awareness of risk grows, the financial value of risky places drops. Where meeting that risk is more expensive than decision-makers think a place is worth, it simply won’t be defended. It will be unofficially abandoned. That will then create more problems. Bonds for big projects, loans, and mortgages, business investment, insurance, talented workers — all will grow more scarce. Then, value will crash, a phenomenon I call the Brittleness Bubble .

Something brittle is prone to a sudden, catastrophic failure and cannot easily be repaired once broken. The popping of the real estate Brittleness Bubble will potentially trigger panic selling and a housing market collapse like a miniature version of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 but focused on the 20% of American homes in wildfire and flood risk zones. In his 2023 Congressional testimony , Burt estimated that a wildfire and flood-induced repricing of risk of the U.S. housing market could have a quarter to half the impact of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis.

However, the 2008 crisis was relatively short-lived, as fixes to the financial system and a massive federal bailout led to a rebound in property values after a few years. A climate change-induced housing crisis will likely be resistant to a similar fix because the underlying cause will worsen: Sea levels will continue to rise, flooding heavy rains will intensify, and wildfires will grow more severe, increasing risk.

Science writer Eugene Linden wrote in 2023, “as we saw in 2008, a housing crisis can quickly morph into a systemic financial crisis because banks own most of the value, and thus the risk, in housing and commercial real estate.”

Crawford of Harvard recently wrote : “Because insurance can help communities and households recover more quickly from disasters, and because so much of the U.S. economy is driven by spending on housing, the inaccessibility and unaffordability of insurance poses a threat to the stability of the entire economy.”

As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse , a Democrat from Rhode Island, said earlier this year, “The thing about economic crises is that they come on slowly, until they come on fast.”

How the insurance crisis may play out: the “Wholly irrational and completely ad-hoc pirate capitalism” solution

In his blunt 2023 essay, “ Insurance Politics at the End of the World ,” journalist Hamilton Nolan offers these thoughts on the potential ways this climate change-induced insurance crisis could be addressed:

The rational capitalism solution here is: We accurately price your risk and that risk becomes unaffordable and people move away from areas that are stupid to live in and therefore climate adaptation is achieved. The rational socialism solution is: We collectively embrace the idea that we need to adapt to climate change and the federal government creates long-term programs that incentivize moving away from areas that are stupid to live in and disincentivize “build as much crap in South Florida flood zones as you can now to take advantage of the real estate bubble” and generally cushion the economic blow for all the people whose lives will have to change. The path we are on today, though — the path that our current political system makes likely — is the path of Wholly Irrational and Completely Ad-Hoc Pirate Capitalism: Increasing climate change-induced disasters cause panic among homeowners as a class; politicians rush to grab dollars to enable everyone to live the same as they are now for as long as possible; and eventually the whole thing crashes into the wall of reality in a way that causes uncontainable, national pain rather than just the specific, regional, temporary pain of the smarter solutions.

When will the Brittleness Bubble pop?

When might this “crash into the wall of reality” happen and the Brittleness Bubble pop? Politicians are working extremely hard to keep their jobs by delaying this day of reckoning, artificially limiting insurance rate rises and offering state-run insurance plans of last resort. This approach — the equivalent of giving a blood transfusion to the injured, without stopping the bleeding — does not fix the underlying problem and all but guarantees that the pain of the eventual national reckoning will be much larger. Insurance is designed to transfer risk, but risk is rising everywhere.

As the hurricane season is set to begin soon and wildfire risk gradually increasing, private insurers in some states are fleeing areas considered at high risk. It's leaving so-called "residual," or last resort plans, to pick up the tab. https://t.co/3sxv9m0FOS pic.twitter.com/YTkZ9OlJE3 — Axios (@axios) May 10, 2024

Crawford addressed the issue in a 2024 essay, “ Who ends up holding the bag when risky real estate markets collapse? ” Citing financial guru Burt, she concluded: “2025 or 2026 is when things give way and it becomes very difficult to offload houses and buildings in risky places where mortgages are suddenly hard to get, much less insurance.” When asked in an interview with Marketplace if the market is due for another correction, as homeowners in places with growing risk of flooding and wildfire have to pay more for insurance, Burt said:

This is actually happening right now and is probably going to happen over the next three to five years, like a full reckoning of these new costs for 15 or 20% of the homes in the U.S. … If all their equity is already gone [because of lowered property values], their costs are going up a ton, they can barely afford it, that’s when people walk away.

In the same Marketplace story, though, Ben Keys, a professor of real estate and finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, said, “The idea that we would expect there to be a huge wave of defaults or delinquencies feels relatively unlikely.”

But like Burt, climate change futurist Steffen predicts the real estate Brittleness Bubble will pop within five years (10 at the most).

I suspect we're less than 5 years away from a prolonged surge of value loss in real estate assets based on risk, insurability, economic brittleness and local capacities to ruggedize (or not). That kind of devaluation will echo through the whole economy. https://t.co/Qs0zyMS38g — Alex Steffen (@AlexSteffen) May 21, 2024

This reckoning could come sooner for Florida if another $100-billion hurricane hits. The Florida insurance and coastal property market did manage to withstand the $117-billion cost of Category 4 Hurricane Ian of 2022, but another blow like that might well cause a severe downward spiral in the Florida real estate market from which it might never fully recover. This vulnerability was underscored by Florida Gov. DeSantis during a 2023 radio interview with a Boston host, when DeSantis suggested homeowners should “ knock on wood ” and hope the state didn’t get hit by a hurricane in 2024.

But “knocking on wood” is not an effective climate adaptation strategy for Florida. Because of climate change, Mother Nature is now able to whip heavier bowling balls with more devastating impact down Hurricane Alley. It’s only a matter of time before she hurls a strike into a major Florida city, causing an intensified coastal real estate and insurance crisis. And the odds of such a strike are higher than average in 2024 because of record-warm ocean temperatures in the tropical Atlantic, combined with a developing La Niña event.

Watch out for increased coastal flooding in the mid-2030s

We may manage to avoid a coastal real estate market crash in the next 10 years if we get lucky with hurricanes and if our politicians continue to pump huge amounts of money to bail out the failing system.

But it will become increasingly difficult to keep the coastal property market propped up beginning in the mid-2030s, because of accelerating sea level rise combined with an 18.6-year wobble in the moon’s orbit. Thus, I expect that the longest we might stave off the popping of the coastal real estate Brittleness Bubble is 15 years.

As I wrote in my 2023 post, 30 great tools to determine your flood risk in the U.S. , beginning in 2033, the moon will be in a position favorable for bringing higher tides to locations where one high tide and low tide per day dominate. This will bring a rapid increase in high tide flooding to the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico, the Southeast, the West Coast, and Hawaii. This expected acceleration in the mid-2030s is obvious for St. Petersburg (Fig. 3), plotted using NASA’s Flooding Analysis Tool and Flooding Days Projection Tool . The rapid acceleration in coastal flooding simultaneously along a huge swathe of heavily developed U.S. coast in the mid-2030s will be sure to significantly stress the coastal housing market. And according to the Coastal Flood Resilience Project , the nation is flying blind on the possible impacts: There are no national assessments of the potential loss of major, critical infrastructure assets to coastal storms and rising seas.

Another immediate danger: a series of global extreme weather events affecting agriculture, causing global economic turmoil.

In my 2024 post, “ What are the odds that extreme weather will lead to a global food shock? ” I reviewed a 2023 report by insurance giant Lloyd’s, which modeled the odds of a globally disruptive extreme food shock event bringing simultaneous droughts in key global food-growing breadbaskets. The authors estimated that a “major” food shock scenario costing $3 trillion globally over a five-year period had a 2.3% chance of happening per year (Fig. 4). Over a 30-year period, those odds equate to about a 50% probability of occurrence — assuming the risks are not increasing each year, which, in fact, they are.

Yet another concern for the U.S. is the risk of wholly unanticipated “black swan” extreme weather events that scientists didn’t see coming. As Harvard climate scientists Paul Epstein and James McCarthy wrote in a 2004 paper, “Assessing Climate Instability”: “We are already observing signs of instability within the climate system. There is no assurance that the rate of greenhouse gas buildup will not force the system to oscillate erratically and yield significant and punishing surprises.”

One example of such a punishing surprise was Superstorm Sandy of 2012, that unholy hybrid spawn of a Caribbean hurricane/extratropical storm that became the largest hurricane ever observed and one of the most damaging, costing $88 billion. And who anticipated that a siege of climate-change-intensified wildfires in western North America beginning in 2017, causing multiple summers of horrific air quality that would significantly degrade the quality of life in the West? Or the jet stream experiencing a sudden increase in unusually extreme configurations over the past 20 years, leading to prolonged periods of intense extreme weather over multiple portions of the globe simultaneously? As the late climate scientist Wally Broecker once said, “Climate is an angry beast, and we are poking at it with sticks.”

Just as concerning might be future “gray swan” events — extreme weather events that climate models anticipate could happen but exceed anything in the historical record. (“Gray swan” is an expression first coined by hurricane scientist Kerry Emanuel in his 2016 paper, “ Grey swan tropical cyclones .”) Several potential gray swan events I have written about include a $1 trillion California “ARkStorm” flood , the potential failure of the Old River Control Structure during an extreme flood that allows the Mississippi River to change course, or a storm like 2015’s Hurricane Patricia , with winds over 200 mph, hitting Miami, Galveston/Houston, Tampa, or New Orleans. The risk of gray swan events is steadily increasing.

I’m often asked if the absurdly extreme weather events we’ve been experiencing recently are the new normal. “No!” I reply. “Heat is energy, so the energy to fuel more intense extreme weather events will increase until we reach net-zero emissions. At that time, the climate will finally stabilize at a new normal with a highly dangerous level of extreme weather events.”

Barring a series of extraordinary volcanic eruptions or a major geoengineering effort, even under an optimistic “low” emissions climate scenario, the earliest the climate might stabilize is in the mid-2070s (Fig. 5); thus, the weather will grow more extreme, on average, for at least the next 50 years. Considering that CO2 emissions have not yet peaked and may be following the “Intermediate” pathway shown below, there is considerable danger that the weather will still be growing more extreme when today’s children are very old early next century. But even when net zero emissions are reached, sea level rise will continue to occur at a pace difficult to adapt to, and the climate crisis will continue to intensify.

The high probability that the weather will grow more extreme throughout the lifetime of everybody reading this essay means that we have to take seriously some very bad long-term threats. As I wrote in my 2022 post, “ The future of global catastrophic risk events from climate change ,” a global catastrophic risk event is defined as a catastrophe global in impact that kills over 10 million people or causes over $10 trillion (2022 USD) in damage. Since the beginning of the 20th century, there have been only three such events: World War I, World War II, and the COVID-19 pandemic. But climate change is a threat multiplier, increasing the risk of five types of global catastrophic risk events:

• Coastal flooding from sea-level rise and land subsidence
• Collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the powerful currents that circulate warm water in the tropical Atlantic Ocean to the Arctic and back (an August 2024 study gave a 59% chance of an AMOC collapse occurring before 2050)

The likeliest of these is a global catastrophic risk event from sea level rise, which is highly likely to occur by the end of the century. For example, a moderate global warming scenario will put $7.9-12.7 trillion dollars of global coastal assets at risk of flooding from sea level rise by 2100, according to a 2020 study, “ Projections of global-scale extreme sea levels and resulting episodic coastal flooding over the 21st century .” Although this study did not take into account assets that inevitably will be protected by new coastal defenses, neither did it consider the indirect costs of sea level rise from increased storm surge damage, mass migration away from the coast, increased saltiness of fresh water supplies, and many other factors. A 2019 report by the Global Commission on Adaptation estimated that sea level rise will lead to damages of more than $1 trillion per year globally by 2050.

Furthermore, sea level rise, combined with other stressors, might bring about megacity collapse — a frightening possibility when infrastructure destruction, salinification of freshwater resources, and a real estate collapse potentially combine to create a mass exodus of people from a major city, reducing its tax base to the point that it can no longer provide basic services. The collapse of even one megacity might have severe impacts on the global economy, creating increased chances of a cascade of global catastrophic risk events. One megacity potentially at risk of this fate is the capital of Indonesia, Jakarta, with a population of 10 million. Land subsidence of up to two inches per year and sea level rise of about an eighth of an inch per year are causing so much flooding in Jakarta that Indonesia is constructing a new capital city in Borneo.

Is the #AMOC approaching a tipping point? Here's my take after researching this topic for over 30 years. Open access, peer-reviewed, in full colour & understandable for non-experts. https://t.co/gMu6Zw5mR7 pic.twitter.com/mrgzO9NMxR — Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf 🌏 🦣 (@rahmstorf) April 11, 2024

I also expect one or more climate change-amplified global catastrophic risk events from drought will occur this century. Mexico City, with a metro area population of 22 million, has suffered record heat over the past year, is in danger of its reservoirs running dry, and is drilling ever-deeper wells to tap an overtaxed aquifer. Though the city will muddle through the crisis now that the summer rains have come this year, what is the plan for 30 years from now, when the climate is expected to be drier and much, much hotter? Although Mexico City can greatly improve its water situation by fixing a poorly maintained system that has a 40% loss rate , it is unclear how the city will be able to survive the much hotter and drier climate of 30 years from now. And at least 10 other major cities are in a similar bind.

Technology can help us adapt to a hotter climate by providing air conditioning (if you are rich enough), but technological solutions to create more water availability when the taps run dry are much more difficult to achieve. I believe water shortages will drive a partial collapse of and mass migration out of multiple major cities 20-40 years from now, significantly amplifying global political and economic turmoil. For example, a 2010 study, “ Linkages among climate change, crop yields and Mexico-US cross-border migration ,” found that a 10% reduction in crop yields in Mexico leads to an additional 2% of the population emigrating to the United States.

In his frightening 2019 book “ Food or War ,” science writer Julian Cribb documents 25 food conflicts that have led to famine, war, and the deaths of more than a million people — mostly caused by drought. Since 1960, Cribb says, 40-60% of armed conflicts have been linked to resource scarcity, and 80% of major armed conflicts occurred in vulnerable dry ecosystems. Hungry people are not peaceful people, Cribb argues.

Though climate change itself is not accelerating faster than what climate scientists and climate models predicted , devastating impacts from climate change do seem to be accelerating. That is because the new climate is crossing thresholds beyond which an infrastructure designed for the 20th century can withstand. These breaches are occurring in tandem with an increase in exposure — more people with more stuff living in harm’s way — which is the dominant cause of the sharp increase in weather-disaster losses in recent years. It’s sobering to realize that the current U.S. insurance crisis has primarily been driven by increased exposure and foolish insurance policies that promote development in risky places — not climate change — and that climate change’s relative contribution to the crisis is set to grow significantly.

Accelerating sea level rise alone is sure to cause a massive shock to the U.S. economy; according to a 2022 report from NOAA , sea level along the U.S. coastline is projected to rise, on average, 10-12 inches (0.25-0.30 meters) in the next 30 years (2020-2050), which will be as much as the rise measured over the last 100 years (1920-2020). At this level, 13.6 million homes might be at risk of flooding by 2051 , triggering a mass migration of millions of people away from the coast.

If we add to sea-level-rise-induced migration the additional migration that will result from climate change-intensified wildfires, heatwaves, and hurricanes, we are forced to acknowledge the reality that a nation-challenging Hurricane Katrina-level climate change storm has already begun in the U.S., one which has the potential to cause catastrophic damage. As I wrote in my June post, The U.S. is finally making serious efforts to adapt to climate change , there have been some encouraging efforts to prepare for the coming mass migration. But, as I argued in my follow-up post, The U.S. is nowhere near ready for climate change , we remain woefully unprepared for what is coming.

And my subsequent post, Can a colossal extreme weather event galvanize action on the climate crisis? , argues that we should not expect that any future extreme weather event or breakdown of the climate system will galvanize the type of response needed — we’ve already had at least 13 events since 1988 that should have done so, yet have not. Even if such an event did prompt strong, transformative change, it’s too late to avoid having life turned upside-down by climate change. It’s like we’ve waited until our skin started getting red before seeking shade from the sun, and we’re only now taking our first stumbling steps toward shade. Well, it’s a long hike to shade, and a blistering sunburn is unavoidable.

Given the unprecedented nature and complexity of this planetary crisis, there is huge uncertainty on how this drama may unfold; there are climate scientists who offer a more optimistic outlook than I do (for example, Hannah Ritchie , author of “Not the End of the World”), and those who are more pessimistic ( James Hansen ).

I suggest that you make the most of the current “calm before the storm” and prepare for the chaotic times ahead, which could begin at any time. I will offer my recommendations on how to do this in my next post in this series, “What should you do to prepare for the climate change storm?”

The urgency to rapidly deal with the climate crisis was succinctly summarized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its latest summary report: “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.”

But taking advantage of that window of opportunity is difficult because of human psychological and political realities. In climate scientist Peter Gleick’s 2023 book, “The Three Ages of Water,” he quotes Harvard’s E.O. Wilson, father of sociobiology, who perhaps said it best: “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”

The boat of civilization has already hit multiple rocks along the rapids of climate change and is taking on water. Perilous rapids with even more dangerous rocks and waterfalls lie before us, but the course of our boat cannot be so easily altered to avoid the rocks, because of our Paleolithic emotions and medieval institutions. As a result, we may have only a few more years — or perhaps as long as 15 years — of relative normalcy in our everyday lives here in the U.S. before the approaching climate change storm ends our golden age of prosperity. But this “golden age” was made of fool’s gold, paid for with wealth plundered from future generations.

Though this essay has dwelt on some grim realities, I am optimistic that we will prevent climate change from becoming a civilization-destroying category 5-level catastrophe. But we must fight extremely hard to correct the course of our boat and not allow its inertia to carry us into the rocks that stud the rapids of climate change. This is not a task that can be accomplished in our lifetimes.

Susan Joy Hassol, the climate communication veteran who served as a senior science writer on three National Climate Assessments, put it this way in an interview with Yale Climate Connections contributor Daisy Simmons: “This is the fight of our lives, and it’s a multigenerational task. We need what’s been called ‘cathedral thinking.’ That is, the people who started working on that stone foundation , they never saw the thing finished. It took generations to get these major works done. This is that kind of problem. And we have to all do our part. The more I act, the better I feel, because I know I’m part of the solution.”

Actions we take now will yield enormous future benefits, and the faster we undertake transformative actions to adapt to the new climate reality, the less suffering will occur. The Global Commission on Adaptation says that “every $1 invested in adaptation could yield up to $10 in net economic benefits, depending on the activity.” We should work to build our cathedral of the future with the thought that each action we take now will multiply by a factor of 10 in importance in the future.

An excellent @nytimes article on rapid growth of wind, solar, & EVs, including factories, in the US. Costs are below fossil and nuclear (see graphs). Reasons why, graphs with how fast, pictures of it happening. https://t.co/uglQDnE97t pic.twitter.com/oIpLmlp28v — Willett Kempton (@WillettKempton) September 5, 2023

But some of the hardest work has been done: The cornerstone of this cathedral of the future has already been laid. The clean energy revolution is here and has progressed far more rapidly than I had dared hope. Passage of the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and 2023 Inflation Reduction Act has been instrumental in getting this cornerstone laid. Solar energy is now the cheapest source of energy in world history, and the costs of wind power and battery technology have also plummeted. Two recent reports were optimistic that climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions had finally peaked in 2023, and GDP growth has decoupled from carbon dioxide emissions in recent years, giving hope that economic growth can still occur without making the planet hotter.

At its heart, the root of the climate crisis is humanity’s spiritual inharmoniousness: We overvalue the pursuit of material wealth and we worship billionaires but undervalue growing more connected to our spiritual selves and acting to preserve and appreciate the natural systems that sustain us. Making yourself more peaceful and loving through quiet spiritual pursuits and time spent in nature will help counteract the anxiety and fear sparked by the climate crisis. But in tandem with your increased peace must come a righteous anger to “throw the money changers out of the temple” and topple the might of the fossil fuel industry and its enablers.

So put your shoulder to an oar! Help us power the boat of civilization through the rapids of climate change. All of humanity shares the same boat, and you have the opportunity to make your own unique and valuable contribution to the effort.

This is a nice way to visualize the pathway to your unique climate action. https://t.co/cjlv5XXrak — Jeff Masters (@DrJeffMasters) May 15, 2024

As promised, here is the rainbow at the end. It’s the intro image from my first and last Weather Underground blog posts, “ The 360-degree Rainbow ,” and “ So long, wunderground! ” My unique and valuable contribution to building our new cathedral has not yet reached the end of the rainbow, for a rainbow has no end — it is a full circle. One just has to fly high in a rainstorm where the sun is shining to see it.

I will continue to make my voice heard as long as climate science-denying politicians, corporations, media pundits, and wealthy individuals continue to row the boat of civilization into the rocks of climate-change catastrophe. I encourage those of you who have learned about extreme weather and climate change from me to do the same. To get started, learn from one of the best communicators in the business, climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe :

Recommended reading:

• What should you do to prepare for the climate change storm?
• Can a colossal extreme weather event galvanize action on the climate crisis?
• The U.S. is nowhere near ready for climate change
• The U.S. is finally making serious efforts to adapt to climate change
• Book review: “On the Move” is a must-read account of U.S. climate migration
• Book review: “The Great Displacement” is a must-read
• Part one of my three-part sea level rise series: How fast are the seas rising?
• Part two of my three-part sea level rise series: Eight excellent books on sea level rise risk for U.S. cities
• Part three of my three-part sea level rise series: 30 great tools to determine your flood risk in the U.S.
• Bubble trouble: Climate change is creating a huge and growing U.S. real estate bubble
• Many coastal residents willing to relocate in the face of sea level rise
• Disasterology: a book review
• The future of global catastrophic risk events from climate change
• With global warming of just 1.2°C, why has the weather gotten so extreme?
• Recklessness defined: breaking 6 of 9 planetary boundaries of safety
• Retreat From a Rising Sea: A book review
• Quick facts on climate change, extreme weather-related events, and their impacts on society
• Susan Crawford’s Substack feed on climate adaptation policy, Moving Day
• Climate futurist Alex Steffen’s newsletter

Susan Joy Hassol ( @ClimateComms ) and Bob Henson ( @bhensonweather ) provided helpful edits for this post.

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Fighting for a future beyond the climate crisis

Awe, not hope, is the prerequisite to action.

• Lydia Millet archive page

When it comes to climate breakdown and the extinction crisis, the question I get most often is: How can we have hope? 

People ask me this in a range of contexts—in Q&A sessions, in emails, and on podcasts and radio shows, whether I’m doing outreach for my novels, like A Children’s Bible or Dinosaurs , or for nonfiction like We Loved It All , my new memoir. I see numerous iterations of it in the media and my social feeds and hear accounts of its ubiquity from writer friends, scientist and lawyer colleagues, activists and community organizers.

I’ve thought about the impulse behind the asking and am left with the lingering sense that many of us tend, in this cultural moment, to privilege our feelings on these existential threats over reason, say, or moral virtue, or apparently antiquated notions of civic and collective duty. Feelings are the beacon we entrust with shining a path through the fog to guide us home—anger and aggrievement, maybe, on the right of the political spectrum, and on the left something akin to defensive self-righteousness. 

It’s almost as though we lay our fate at the feet of feelings and wait for deliverance.

In the realm of emotion, hope guards against despair, whose rationalized intellectual output is cynicism—a free pass out of the tension of grappling with our responsibility to the future, with the difficulty and possible unpleasantness of engagement and resistance. But like cynicism, hope is its own free pass, filling the space of subjectivity with a passive expectation of relief. For the most part “hope” functions as a unit of rhetoric, as amorphous as “happiness” or “freedom”: a shredded flag in the discourse around climate doomsaying and denial that can only droop over a citadel under relentless siege. If we rely on hope, we give up agency. And that may be seductive, but it’s also surrender.

It’s possible that feelings aren’t our most useful gift. Other animals have feelings too, yet they haven’t radically modified the planet toward unlivability; we’ve done so by pairing our feelings with the unique combination of capabilities that were our species’ answers to the pressures of evolution. These include communication and collaboration, the sophisticated languages we share, our ability to conceptualize a distant past and future and make tools with our opposable thumbs—capacities that, together, have allowed us to construct empires and complex machines and cast our intelligence into the deep sea and the far-off thermosphere. Even beyond the sun. 

Yet the mission we chose to undertake has been one guided by desire and by a framework of ideas we’ve built to justify projecting that desire into the appropriation and liquidation of our resource base. The result has been voracious production and reproduction. Over the course of just a handful of fast-moving centuries, that hysterical vector of taking and making has landed us in a state of emergency that suddenly appears, with a high degree of credibility, poised to bury us under the sea or burn us off the land: in effect to steam open our small envelope of life and peel our paper-thin atmosphere, forests and rivers, grasslands and tundra and reefs and polar icescapes and the creatures they sustain, right off the surface of the world.

To fathom the danger of our situation, to let its immediacy dawn on us and drive us to act, it’s true that emotion is required. But in the stable of emotions to which we have ready access, hope is a pale horse. To spark an understanding of our history of error and push us to reconceive and heal as passionately as we now lay waste, we need to embrace a more extraordinary recognition.

We need shock and awe in the face of the majesty and fragility of nature, humility in the face of the vastness of the transformations our kind has set in motion—a bristling realization of imminent peril, a visceral apprehension of the nonfungibility of our zone of life. Of this marvelous place, infinitesimal in the solar system if not the galaxy, that has given us, on the thin skin of a solitary planet, the combination of flowing water and breathable air that are the preconditions for life. 

Only awe can drive us to work as frenziedly from fear as, it might be argued, we’ve worked from greed until now.

More than ordinary emotions, we need an encounter with the shock of our finitude, a sensation of awe, reverence, and astonishment before the richness and precariousness of being. 

Ordinary emotions let us blunder through the onslaught of information in the slow befuddlement of a stubborn belief that the familiar is bound to persist. But without a swift, far-reaching, and cooperative global effort, the familiar will not persist. Social and political stability will vanish along with biological and geophysical vanishments—the disappearance of coral reefs, for instance, whose absence will denude the oceans of diversity, or the collapse of the AMOC, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, under the influx of fresh water from melting ice, which could render Northern Europe inhospitably cold, raise sea levels along the US Eastern Seaboard, and overheat the tropics. 

In the realm of emotion, awe is the prerequisite to action. Not hope. Only awe can drive us to work as frenziedly from fear as, it might be argued, we’ve worked from greed until now. And whether it’s music or nature or art or religion that leaves us awestruck or just a simple decision to suddenly, deeply notice the world beyond ourselves, each of these requires the suspension of chatter—a willingness to halt and stand still within the rushing momentum of daily life. 

If we wish to thrive beyond it, the next century will have to be a time of unmaking and remaking: unmaking the technologies and culture of fossil fuels and their massive, entrenched infrastructure and remaking our template for prosperity from one based on limitless growth into one aimed at accommodation to a delicate biosphere. This means, among other key policy steps, defending and funding reproductive rights, equity, and education both at home and abroad—chiefly for women, since women’s access to education is a central driver of the lower birth rates that will be crucial to living within our means. 

To champion makerdom alone as the answer is to add willful ignorance to hubris. It’s a fact that we need to manufacture and rapidly propagate better tools—energy and food delivery systems that don’t disintegrate our life support to fuel our daily activities—and, equally, it’s a lie that better making by itself can save us or the other life forms we depend on.

Less making and unmaking are also the solution—less making of what we do not need and more unmaking of harmful machines and ideas. The sprawling patrimony of bad ideas—that Homo sapiens reigns supreme over nature and so is miraculously independent of it, in defiance of ecology and physics; that market capitalism is the unassailable apogee of civilization and ongoing expansion the correct communal goal, including endless human procreation cheered on by neoliberal economists who whinge over declining birth rates in industrialized nations—should be dismantled as steadily as the destructive machines. 

Neither the United States nor the world community has mechanisms in place to adequately curb potentially catastrophic enterprise, either when that enterprise is demonstrably causing climate chaos or when it purports to meet the demand for fixes. Treaties made under international law have been famously toothless to date, while the US legal system, which does possess sharp teeth, defers to the legislative bounds established by a Congress deeply beholden to fossil fuels and related industries bent on maintaining the status quo. And that legal system, far from being disposed to address the exceptionally high public health and security risks posed by climate change and extinction, is clearly, through the recent stacking of courts with antigovernment and antiscience jurists, in the business of radically increasing its deference to private actors as it erodes the rights of the dispossessed and the power of federal oversight. 

If we in this country can’t rely on the legislative or judicial branches of our central government to tackle the crises of their own volition, while the executive branch directs, at best, movement toward renewables without movement away from fossils; if we can’t rely on the myopic and nihilistic companies dominating the energy sector to pivot anytime soon; then who remains to help us? To whom can we turn, we who exist, always and only, here and nowhere else, in this walled city of the Earth under such terrible siege? 

The answer may be, for now, only ourselves. Those of us who have language and believe in the wisdom science can offer. Who know the surpassing vulnerability of the rivers and prairies, the jungles and wetlands, the cypress swamps of South Florida, the Cape Floristic Region of South Africa, the Siberian taiga, the Tropical Andes, Madagascar, the island Caribbean. Who can gaze into the future and, beholding the prospect of a frightening and emptier world for our descendants, feel compelled to fight on behalf of the one we have. 

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American Climate Policy Opinions

Aug. 27, 2024

Jon A. Krosnick and Bo MacInnis

Publication

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Introduction

In Climate Insights 2024: American Understanding of Climate Change, we showed that huge majorities of Americans believe that the earth has been warming, that the warming has been caused by human activity, that warming poses a significant threat to the nation and the world—especially to future generations—and that governments, businesses, and individuals should be taking steps to address it.

In this report, we turn to specific federal government opportunities to reduce future greenhouse gas emissions, often referred to as climate change mitigation. Policies to accomplish this goal fall into several categories, including:

• Consumer incentives that reward people for taking steps that reduce their use of fossil fuels and, by extension, reduce their carbon footprint
• Carbon pricing policies that require emitters to pay for their carbon emissions, such as a carbon tax (which would require carbon emitters to pay a tax for each ton of carbon they emit), or a cap-and-trade program (which would require businesses to have a permit for each ton of carbon they emit)
• Regulations that require manufacturers to increase energy efficiency of their products
• Tax incentives that encourage manufacturers to increase the energy efficiency of their products

This 2024 survey asked Americans about their opinions on a wide array of such policies, which allows us not only to assess current opinions, but to track changes in those opinions over the past two decades through comparisons with responses to comparable questions asked in earlier national surveys.

Explore the Data

Click here to explore the report's findings using our interactive data tool.

Overall emissions reduction strategies

In 2024, we asked for the first time whether Americans prefer using “carrots” to reduce emissions or “sticks.” The former entails offering incentives to reward companies for achieving desired outcomes, and the latter involves penalizing companies that fail to reach desired goals. 59 percent of Americans prefer a carrot approach in which government lowers taxes for companies that reduce emissions, and 35 percent prefer a stick approach such that government raises taxes on companies that do not reduce emissions (see Figure 1).

Overall emissions reduction principles

Over the past decades, a consistently large majority of Americans has wanted the government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by US businesses. In 2024, 74 percent of Americans endorse this mitigation policy principle (see Figure 2). This number is not significantly different from the 77 percent seen in 2020 and is about the same as it has been since 1997 when this series of surveys was launched.

Most Popular Policies (>60 percent approval)

Taxing imported emissions.

In 2024, we asked about import taxes tied to emissions; respondents were asked whether they would favor taxing foreign companies for importing products that put out more greenhouse gases than a comparable US product. A huge majority of Americans, 84 percent , favor the special tax (see Figure 3).

Assisting with job transitions

In 2024, we asked whether the federal government should spend money to help people who lose jobs due to a transition from fossil-based electricity generation to electricity generated from renewable sources. 78 percent of Americans favor the government paying those people to learn to do other kinds of work.

Filling abandoned oil wells

In 2024, we asked whether the federal government should spend money to close off abandoned oil wells that emit greenhouse gases; 76 percent of Americans favor the government spending money to fill these old wells.

Shifting energy generation to renewable power

Huge numbers of Americans favor government effort to shift electricity generation away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources.

In 2024, 72 percent of Americans believe that the US government should offer tax breaks to utilities in exchange for making more electricity from water, wind, and solar sources. However, this is a statistically significant decline from the 85 percent seen in 2020, and a record low since 2006 (see Figure 6).

13 percentage points fewer Americans believe that the US government should offer tax breaks to utilities in exchange for making more electricity from renewable sources in 2024 than 2020.

Slight changes to the question wording yielded similar results: 76 percent of Americans in 2024 favor either mandates or tax breaks for utilities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. This number is not significantly different from the 82 percent seen in 2020 and is about the same as it has been since 2009. Before 2009, this proportion was slightly higher: 86 percent and 88 percent in 2006 and 2007, respectively (see Figure 7).

Increasing the energy efficiency of products

About two-thirds of Americans favor government efforts through tax breaks or mandates to improve the energy efficiency of various consumer products (see Figure 8).

Specifically, 62 percent of Americans in 2024 favor increasing the fuel efficiency of automobiles, a statistically significant drop from the 72 percent seen in 2020.

68 percent favor increasing the energy efficiency of appliances, similar to the 71 percent observed in 2020.

69 percent favor increasing the energy efficiency of new buildings, a statistically significant decline from the 76 percent in 2020.

Sequestering carbon

In 2024, 63 percent of Americans favor reducing emissions by sequestering (i.e., capturing and storing) carbon released by burning coal. This level of support has been steady over the past 15 years (see Figure 9).

84% of respondents favor import taxes tied to emissions, making it the most popular policy we surveyed.

Moderately Popular Policies (50–60 percent approval)

Reducing subsidies for fossil fuels.

In 2024, we asked for the first time whether the federal government should continue its long-standing practice of offering subsidies to oil and natural gas companies by reducing their taxes.

61 percent of Americans favor ending government reduction of oil companies’ taxes, and 37 percent believe these subsidies should continue.

42 percent of Americans favor ending government reduction of natural gas companies’ taxes, and 56 percent believe that these subsidies should continue.

Taxing greenhouse gases

When asked whether companies should be charged a tax for every ton of greenhouse gases they emit, 54 percent of respondents were in favor in 2024, a statistically significant decline from the 66 percent observed in 2020 (figure 10).

Creating a cap-and-trade program

Although economists generally assert that a carbon tax incentivizes companies to reduce emissions (Baumol and Oates, 1971; Climate Leadership Council, 2019; Marron and Toder, 2014; Montgomery, 1972; World Bank, 2017), a carbon tax does not guarantee that such emissions reductions will happen.

A cap-and-trade or cap-and-dividend policy, on the other hand, are alternative policies in which a government sets a limit, or ‘cap,’ on emissions. The cap is imposed by government-issued permits that limit emissions. The government gives, sells, or auctions the permits to companies, creating an opportunity to generate revenue. A cap-and-dividend program would return this revenue to consumers through a rebate.

The logic in asking this question about cap and trade is to assess whether more Americans would favor a greenhouse gas tax if assured that it would result in emissions reductions. However, we show cap-and-trade and cap-and-dividend policies are not notably more popular than straightforward taxes.

In 2024, 52 percent of Americans favor a cap-and-dividend policy, a statistically significant decline from the 63 percent observed in 2020 (see FIgure 11).

Subsidizing solar panels

In 2024, we asked respondents whether the federal government should spend money to help people install solar panels on houses and apartment buildings. Respondents were randomly assigned to be asked one of four versions of the question. Two versions asked about the government paying all of the installation costs, and the other two versions asked about the government paying some of the costs.

For half of each group (chosen randomly), the question was preceded by this introduction:

“Solar panels can generate electricity when the sun is shining, and that electricity can be stored in batteries to be used when the sun is not out. However, companies that make electricity cannot install enough solar panels to make all of the electricity needed in the country. People can put solar panels on the roofs of many houses and apartment buildings so much more of America’s electricity can be made from the sun. But it is expensive to do this, and most people cannot afford to pay that amount of money.”

Among people who did not hear the introduction, 51 percent favor the government paying some of the cost, and 42 percent favor the government paying all of the costs.

Among people who did hear the introduction, 77 percent favor the government paying some of the cost, and 74 percent favor the government paying all of the costs.

Permitting reform

In 2024, we asked whether the federal government should expedite the process of granting permits to build new power plants that make electricity from sources other than coal and petroleum. 52 percent of Americans favor expediting this process.

Least Popular Policies (<50 percent approval)

Nuclear power tax breaks.

Although nuclear power does not directly emit greenhouse gases, tax breaks for the construction of new nuclear power plants are among the least popular policies asked about in 2024. 47 percent of Americans favor this policy; however, it is notable that this is a statistically significant increase from the 37 percent observed in 2020 (see FIgure 12).

All-electric vehicle tax breaks

In 2024, 46 percent of Americans—a record low—think the government should require or give tax breaks to companies to build all-electric vehicles, a statistically significant decline from the 60 percent observed in 2015 when this question was last asked (see Figure 13).

Taxes on consumers

The least popular policies impose new taxes on consumers to incentivize them to consume less fossil fuel. Few Americans favor increasing taxes on retail gasoline and electricity purchases for this purpose. 15 percent approve increasing taxes on electricity, a statistically significant decline from the 28 percent observed in 2020. Likewise, 28 percent approve increasing taxes on gasoline, a statistically significant decline from the 41 percent observed in 2020 (see Figure 14).

Economic Effects of Mitigation Policies

Perceived effect on the economy.

Implementing many policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will cost consumers and companies in the short term. Implementing such policies may also increase the cost of American-made goods and services relative to the costs of those goods and services produced elsewhere. This has led some observers to urge caution about implementing greenhouse gas emissions reduction policies (e.g., Cassidy, 2023; Gross, 2021), because they may result in undesirable economic side effects.

However, this argument does not appear to have taken hold with the majority of Americans. For example, only 36 percent of Americans in 2024 believe that taking action to address global warming will hurt the US economy, about the same as was observed in 2013 (30 percent), though this is a statistically significant increase from the 29 percent observed in 2020 (see FIgure 15). Likewise, in 2024, 34 percent believed that these efforts would hurt their state economy, a statistically significant increase from the 24 percent observed in 2020.

More Americans believe that climate action will help the economy. 44 percent of Americans believe this in 2024, about the same as was observed in 2020 (48 percent) and 15 years ago (46 percent) (see Figure 15). 39 percent of Americans believe that efforts to reduce global warming will help their state economy in 2024, a statistically significant decrease from 46 percent in 2020.

Job availability

A similar picture emerged regarding beliefs about how climate action will affect job availability. Only 27 percent of Americans believe that efforts to reduce emissions will reduce the number of jobs in the nation—the same as was observed in 2020 (see Figure 16). And in 2024, 35 percent of Americans believe that climate change action will increase the number of jobs in the country, similar to the 39 percent observed in 2020.

28 percent of Americans believe that climate change action will reduce the number of jobs in their state, similar to the 23 percent observed in 2020 (see Figure 16). And 32 percent of Americans in 2024 believe that climate action will increase the number of jobs in their state, about the same as the 35 percent observed in 2020.

27 percent of Americans believe that efforts to reduce emissions will reduce the number of jobs in the nation

Personal economic impacts

In 2024, we asked respondents about the likely impact of mitigation efforts on their own personal economic situation. A majority of Americans believe that they will have the same amount of money regardless of mitigation efforts (54 percent). 36 percent believe their wealth will decrease, a statistically significant increase over the 20 percent observed in 2020 (see Figure 17). But 8 percent believe that climate change mitigation will increase their wealth, similar to the 10 percent observed in 2020.

Likewise, a majority (64 percent) believe that mitigation efforts will have no impact on their chance of getting a good-paying job. 17 percent believe that mitigation efforts will make them less likely to get a good-paying job, a statistically significant increase from the 12 percent observed in 2020 (see Figure 17). 17 percent believe that mitigation efforts will increase their ability to get a good-paying job, similar to the 16 percent observed in 2020.

Voting in the 2024 Election

Are the many policy preferences outlined in this report just talk, or do they inspire action in the voting booth? We turn to that question next and describe the findings from a test.

Respondents were read a statement by a hypothetical candidate running for a seat in the US Senate and were asked whether hearing that statement makes the respondents more likely to vote for the candidate, less likely to vote for the candidate, or has no impact.

One statement expressed “green views” that summarized opinions expressed by majorities of Americans:

“I believe that global warming has been happening for the past 100 years, mainly because we have been burning fossil fuels and putting out greenhouse gases. Now is the time for us to be using new forms of energy that are made in America and will be renewable forever. We can manufacture better cars that use less gasoline and build better appliances that use less electricity. We need to transform the outdated ways of generating energy into new ones that create jobs and entire industries and stop the damage we’ve been doing to the environment.”

The other statement proposed expanding production of energy from traditionally used fossil fuels:

“The science on global warming is a hoax and is an attempt to perpetrate a fraud on the American people. I don’t buy into the whole man-caused global warming mantra. We must spend no effort to deal with something that is not a problem at all. We should not invest in windmills and solar panels as alternative energy sources. Instead, we should continue to focus on our traditional sources of energy: coal, oil, and natural gas. We should expand energy production in our country, including continuing to mine our coal and doing more drilling for oil here at home.”

Hearing a green view makes 57 percent of Americans more likely to vote for the candidate, a statistically significant decline from the 65 percent observed in 2020 (see Figure 18). Democrats are significantly more likely to be attracted to a “green” candidate (83 percent) than are Independents (56 percent) and Republicans (23 percent) (see Figure 19).

Hearing the green statement makes only 18 percent of Americans less likely to vote for the candidate (see Figure 18).

Hearing the candidate make a “not-green” statement makes only 21 percent more likely to vote for the candidate (see Figure 18). 43 percent of Republicans are more likely to support the candidate, compared to 20 percent of Independents and 5 percent of Democrats (see Figure 19).

Hearing the “not-green” statement makes 63 percent of Americans less likely to vote for the candidate, similar to the 66 percent observed in 2020 (see FIgure 18). This proportion is greatest among Democrats (88 percent), smaller among Independents (62 percent), and still smaller among Republicans (29 percent) (see Figure 19).

Because almost all Republican citizens vote for Republican candidates and almost all Democratic citizens vote for Democratic candidates, the greatest impact of candidate statements in shaping election outcomes is among Independents. Among them, the same pattern appears that appears among all Americans: taking a “green” position helped a candidate and taking a “not-green” position hurt the candidate.

Taken together, these results point to climate change mitigation policies that may be pursued in the future with widespread public support (such as efforts to reduce emissions from power plants). Furthermore, these results also identify a few policy directions that are well received by few Americans, despite being plausible in theory and in practice (like taxes on electricity and gasoline).

For decades, one school of thought commonly followed by some scholars and policymakers is that economic growth and environmental protection are incompatible, and that any efforts to grow the economy must, of necessity, take resources away from helping the environment. Such a presumption creates an “either the economy or the environment” mindset. This mindset has been reinforced by survey questions asking Americans (e.g., Mildenberger & Leiserowitz, 2017), for example: “With which one of these statements about the environment and the economy do you most agree? ‘Protection of the environment should be given priority, even at the risk of curbing economic growth.’ Or: ‘Economic growth should be given priority, even if the environment suffers to some extent’” (Gallup, 2024).

If Americans do perceive this trade-off as inevitable, the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic crisis a few years ago might have tilted them away from environmental protection generally and away from efforts to mitigate climate change; the subsequent recovery might have increased support for such efforts. The present study refutes that notion resoundingly. In fact, we see small changes in the opposite direction: slightly less public support for some emissions-reducing policies than four years ago.

Few people believe that taking steps to reduce emissions will hurt the national economy, their state’s economy, or their personal finances, and more Americans believe that such policies will improve these economic outcomes.

Finally, we saw that the policy positions candidates take on this issue are likely to influence the votes of many Americans. Thus, policymakers and their challengers have opportunities to use these issues to help assemble the coalitions needed to accomplish electoral victories. By taking “green” positions, candidates gain considerably more votes than they lost.

Download the Report

Click here to view the full report with citations.

PDF — 5.2 MB

Download the Technical Report

Click here to read more about the methodology and survey questions.

PDF — 716.3 KB

Click here to read the report press release.

• Federal Climate Policy
• Comprehensive Climate Strategies
• Climate Insights

Jon A. Krosnick

University Fellow

Jon A. Krosnick is an RFF university fellow and Stanford University-based social psychologist who does research on attitude formation, change, and effects, on the psychology of political behavior, and on survey research methods.

Bo MacInnis

Lecturer, Political Psychology Research, Stanford University

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The worldwide catastrophe of rising seas especially imperils Pacific paradises, Guterres says

FILE - Tourists watch the sun set along a popular beach in Tamuning, Guam, May 6, 2019. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks at the opening of the annual Pacific Islands Forum leaders meeting in Nuku’alofa, Tonga, Monday, Aug. 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Charlotte Graham-McLay)

High school students march for climate justice as Pacific leaders meet in Nuku’alofa, Tonga, Tuesday, Aug. 27, 2024. (AP Photo/Charlotte Graham-McLay)

Vanuatu Prime Minister Charlot Salwai, from left, Niue Prime Minister Dalton Tagelagi and New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters attend the opening of the annual Pacific Islands Forum leaders meeting in Nuku’alofa, Tonga, Monday, Aug. 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Charlotte Graham-McLay)

FILE - A section of land between trees is washed away due to rising seas on Nov. 6, 2015, in Majuro Atoll, Marshall Islands. (AP Photo/Rob Griffith, File)

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NUKU’ALOFA, Tonga (AP) — Highlighting seas that are rising at an accelerating rate, especially in the far more vulnerable Pacific island nations, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued yet another climate SOS to the world. This time he said those initials stand for “save our seas.”

The United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization Monday issued reports on worsening sea level rise, turbocharged by a warming Earth and melting ice sheets and glaciers. They highlight how the Southwestern Pacific is not only hurt by the rising oceans, but by other climate change effects of ocean acidification and marine heat waves.

Guterres toured Samoa and Tonga and made his climate plea from Tonga’s capital on Tuesday at a meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum, whose member countries are among those most imperiled by climate change. Next month the United Nations General Assembly holds a special session to discuss rising seas .

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued yet another climate SOS to the world, highlighting seas that are rising at an accelerating rate, especially in the far more vulnerable Pacific island nations.

“This is a crazy situation,” Guterres said. “Rising seas are a crisis entirely of humanity’s making. A crisis that will soon swell to an almost unimaginable scale, with no lifeboat to take us back to safety.”

“A worldwide catastrophe is putting this Pacific paradise in peril,” he said. “The ocean is overflowing.”

A report that Guterres’ office commissioned found that sea level lapping against Tonga’s capital Nuku’alofa had risen 21 centimeters (8.3 inches) between 1990 and 2020, twice the global average of 10 centimeters (3.9 inches). Apia, Samoa, has seen 31 centimeters (1 foot) of rising seas, while Suva-B, Fiji has had 29 centimeters (11.4 inches).

“This puts Pacific Island nations in grave danger,” Guterres said. About 90% of the region’s people live within 5 kilometers (3 miles) of the rising oceans, he said.

Since 1980, coastal flooding in Guam has jumped from twice a year to 22 times a year. It’s gone from five times a year to 43 times a year in the Cook Islands. In Pago Pago, American Samoa, coastal flooding went from zero to 102 times a year, according to the WMO State of the Climate in the South-West Pacific 2023 report.

“Because of sea level rise, the ocean is transforming from being a lifelong friend into a growing threat,” Celeste Saulo, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, told reporters in Nuku’alofa on Tuesday.

While the western edges of the Pacific are seeing sea level rise about twice the global average, the central Pacific is closer to the global average, the WMO said.

Sea levels are rising faster in the western tropical Pacific because of where the melting ice from western Antarctica heads, warmer waters and ocean currents, UN officials said.

Guterres said he can see changes since the last time he was in the region in May 2019.

While he met in Nuku’alofa on Tuesday with Pacific nations on the environment at their leaders’ annual summit, a hundred local high school students and activists from across the Pacific marched for climate justice a few blocks away.

One of the marchers was Itinterunga Rae of the Barnaban Human Rights Defenders Network, whose people were forced generations ago to relocate to Fiji from their Kiribati island home due to environmental degradation. Rae said abandoning Pacific islands should not be seen as a solution to rising seas.

“We promote climate mobility as a solution to be safe from your island that’s been destroyed by climate change, but it’s not the safest option,” he said. Barnabans have been cut off from the source of their culture and heritage, he said.

“The alarm is justified,” said S. Jeffress Williams, a retired U.S. Geological Survey sea level scientist. He said it’s especially bad for the Pacific islands because most of the islands are at low elevations, so people are more likely to get hurt. Three outside experts said the sea level reports accurately reflect what’s happening.

The Pacific is getting hit hard despite only producing 0.2% of heat-trapping gases causing climate change and expanding oceans, the UN said. The largest chunk of the sea rise is from melting ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland. Melting land glaciers add to that, and warmer water also expands based on the laws of physics.

Antarctic and Greenland “melting has greatly accelerated over the past three to four decades due to high rate of warming at the poles,” Williams, who was not part of the reports, said in an email.

About 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases goes into the oceans, the UN said.

Globally, sea level rise has been accelerating, the UN report said, echoing peer-reviewed studies . The rate is now the fastest it has been in 3,000 years, Guterres said.

Between 1901 and 1971, the global average sea rise was 1.3 centimeters a decade, according to the UN report. Between 1971 and 2006 it jumped to 1.9 centimeters per decade, then between 2006 and 2018 it was up to 3.7 centimeters a decade. The last decade, seas have risen 4.8 centimeters (1.9 inches).

The UN report also highlighted cities in the richest 20 nations, which account for 80% of the heat-trapping gases, where rising seas are lapping at large population centers. Those cities where sea level rise in the past 30 years has been at least 50% higher than the global average include Shanghai; Perth, Australia; London; Atlantic City, New Jersey; Boston; Miami; and New Orleans.

New Orleans topped the list with 10.2 inches (26 centimeters) of sea level rise between 1990 and 2020. UN officials highlighted the flooding in New York City during 2012’s Superstorm Sandy as worsened by rising seas. A 2021 study said climate-driven sea level rise added $8 billion to the storm’s costs.

Guterres is amping up his rhetoric on what he calls “climate chaos” and urged richer nations to step up efforts to reduce carbon emissions, end fossil fuel use and help poorer nations. Yet countries’ energy plans show them producing double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than the amount that would limit warming to internationally agreed upon levels, a 2023 UN report found.

Guterres said he expects Pacific island nations to “speak loud and clear” in the next General Assembly, and because they contribute so little to climate change, “they have a moral authority to ask those that are creating accelerating the sea level rise to reverse these trends.”

Borenstein reported from Kensington, Maryland.

Follow Seth Borenstein and Charlotte Graham-McLay on X at @borenbears and @CGrahamMcLay

Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org .

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What the Lobstermen of Maine Tell Us About the Election

By Scott Ellsworth

Mr. Ellsworth, a historian, traveled to Maine for this essay.

Mid-July is peak season on the central Maine coast. The blueberries — the small, low-bush kind long prized by the state’s jam makers and pie bakers — had started to appear in the farmers markets, along with the first of the tomatoes. Bright orange tiger lilies burst from front yards, while Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod line the two-lane roads. The summer light dazzles, falling in soft waves upon the spruce and cedar, and brightening the paint on both midcentury saltboxes and grander Victorian homes. It’s no wonder that people want to come here.

Stonington is, without a doubt, one of the prettiest towns on the Maine coast. Over breakfast one morning at Stonecutters Kitchen, I asked Linda Nelson, the town’s economic and community development director, how many Hallmark movies had been filmed there.

“Not enough,” she replied.

Stonington also happens to be the largest lobster port in America. Dozens of fishing boats are anchored in the harbor, while lobsters caught in nearby Blue Hill, Jericho and Isle au Haut Bays are exported across the country and, more recently, across the globe. I was told by locals that not one of the beautiful wooden homes that form Stonington’s classic picture postcard view is owned by a fishing family, who now live elsewhere on Deer Isle or over the bridge on the mainland. From the perspective of a lobsterman, many of whom have deep Maine roots, the P.F.A.s — People From Away, as locals call them — are a presence to be tolerated. The lobster fishermen and the tourists and part-time residents coexist in two separate worlds, one that is changing beneath the surface.

In a significant political year, when a small group of voters in a few places will most likely shape the answers to pivotal questions about our government, how does a community living out climate change feel to its residents? This part of Maine is represented by a Democrat in Congress, but the district, Maine’s second, has voted for Donald Trump twice by decent margins; this is one of those places where every vote can matter. Here, the punishing demands of the present, how hard everyday work is, how important costs and prices are, make the pivotal nature of this time feel very distant from politics.

During much of the past two decades, record numbers of lobsters have been caught off the Maine coast, providing a steady living for scores of lobster fishermen and their families. But a host of recent pressures has been building up that may upend a way of life that, for some, stretches back for generations. Indeed, as far as climate change goes, Maine’s lobster fishing community may well be America’s own canary in the coal mine.

“Everything has changed. Everything is changing,” said Dana Black, age 50, who is a fourth-generation fisherman and lives with his wife and two daughters over the bridge in Brooksville. “That’s all I’ve done,” he said. Mr. Black got his first job, on a lobster boat, when he was 12. By the time he was in high school he had gotten a taste of what kind of money could sometimes be made on the water. He skipped school one Friday to work as a sternman on an offshore boat, hauling lobster traps. By the time he got back on dry land on Monday, he recalled, “I had made 2,700 bucks.” Like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him, Mr. Black had found his calling.

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Essays on climate crisis a welcome call to action

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Opinion Letters to the Editor

I encourage people to do the same thing now to address climate change. Send your elected representatives emails supporting climate initiatives. Details about bipartisan carbon fee and dividend legislation, permitting reform and upgrading our national grid can be found on the Citizens’ Climate Lobby website. This outreach takes only a few minutes and their offices will respond. We can’t risk worsening wildfires, floods and increasing food prices.

— Margaret Mann, Point Loma

Do your part on the climate crisis

Thank you for featuring three op-eds on climate change. Now everyone needs to answer Michelle Obama’s question: What are you going to do? There are simple and effective actions people can take. Volunteer for the Environmental Voter Project, which works to have people who are concerned about the environment become regular voters. Volunteer for Citizens’ Climate Lobby, the most effective organization in the country at helping Congress to pass meaningful climate legislation. It’s election season, ask candidates what they are going to do about climate change and remind them you are a climate voter. Joan Baez said “action is the antidote to despair.”  We are grateful the Union-Tribune gave so much space to this critical issue. Now it’s up to the rest of us to get to work.

— Mark Reynolds, Loma Portal

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