Visualising climate change
In a recently-released paper looking at how people visualise climate change, Saffron O’Neill at University of Exeter joined other researchers in the UK, US and Australia, to see how people engaged with climate change images drawn from mass media sources in those countries.
They investigated responses to images ranging from icons of nature, such as coral reefs, snowstorms, bushfires, cracked ground and ice sheets to human made phenomena, such as wind farms, traffic jams, low reservoirs, smoke-stacks, and fuel pumps and then images of political leaders.
For each image they wanted to measure:
1) “salience” – whether it raised the importance of climate change
2) empowerment or “self-efficacy” – the sense of being able to take any action on climate change.
2) empowerment or “self-efficacy” – the sense of being able to take any action on climate change.
My comments below on the article lasted only microseconds before they were removed as breaching Conversation "standards" or "off topic" - I don't know which.
There are major problems in communicating climate change
hysteria because most of the old scary things used in the past have been proved
false. The polar bears are increasing in number according to rangers.
Global warming as defined by global temperature has
stalled and is on the decline.
Since alarmists now have to resort to "hidden"
effects such as the so-called deep ocean heating and antarctic ice somehow
melting in the deep these do not lend themselves to sexy images.
Pictures of horrendous snowy winters in the Northern
Hemisphere don't work well and pictures of corn crops in trouble are few and
far between with the record harvests this year.
It is probably best to carry on and make things up as
usual.