Communicating Inclusively and Reliably About Climatological and Meteorological Events

Howe, William T.; Shpeer, Maria

doi:10.1002/9781119751847.ch14

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 19 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Framing involves highlighting certain aspects of an issue in order to influence cognitive processes and shaping the audience's interpretation (Wicks, 2005). For example, people perceive messages about extreme weather and climate change as more credible when they are attributed to the government rather than a nonprofit (Howe & Shpeer, 2022). Effective framing can evoke specific emotional responses, activate certain cognitive structures, and ultimately shape individuals' perceptions of reality (Lakoff, 2014), although the effects may differ across some demographic variables (e.g., party affiliation; Druckman et al, 2019;Bayes & Druckman, 2021).…”

Section: A Extreme Event Attributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Communicating the Links between Climate Change and Heat Waves with the Climate Shift Index

Thomas-Walters,

Goldberg,

Lee

et al. 2024

Weather, Climate, and Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Extreme weather, including heat waves, poses a significant threat to ecosystems and human health. As global temperatures continue to rise, the frequency and severity of heat waves will increase. Because of this, communicating heat-related risks to the public is increasingly important. One commonly-used communication tool is the Climate Shift Index (CSI), which establishes how much more likely an extreme weather event, such as a heat wave, has been made by climate change. To test the impact of the CSI on people’s understanding of the links between climate change and extreme weather, we conducted an experiment informing 3,902 American adults that climate change made the July 2023 heat wave in the U.S. at least 5 times more likely. In addition to this standard CSI wording and 2 control messages, we also explored the effectiveness of reframing magnitude as a percentage, and whether mechanistic and attribution explanations of the relationship between climate change and heat waves further increase understanding. All treatments increased the belief that climate change made the July 2023 heat wave more likely and is making heat waves in general more likely as well. Additionally, we found that expressing the magnitude as a percentage was more effective than the standard CSI framing. We also found that just talking about the heatwave, without mentioning climate change, was enough to change beliefs.

show abstract