Introduction, ''Communicating the Climate: From Knowing Change to Changing Knowledge''

Katrin Kleeman, Jeroen Oomen
2019 Zenodo  
After decades of climate change debate, what should have been obvious from the beginning has become increasingly difficult to ignore, and increasingly urgent: tackling anthropogenic climate change was never going to be straightforward, and it was never purely a scientific, political, or economic question. Instead, something as seemingly abstract and all-encompassing as "climate change" is, and always will be, an existential question, produced by an intimate collaboration between the life worlds
more » ... and convictions of many different stakeholders. If we expect people to grapple effectively with what climate change means, interdisciplinary academic collaboration—combining the data-driven knowledge of the Earth's complex systems with an understanding that is more sensitive to the unpredictable and diverse world of humans—has to be part and parcel of how experts shape their messages and share them with the public. Climate change cannot be solved by dumping facts into the public sphere. Because of the scale of sociotechnical transformations that tackling climate change necessitates—changes to the energy system, changes to the agricultural system, changes to the way cities are built, changes to mobility, to name a few—it really is a deeply uncomfortable truth. For many, adapting to climate change means a complete redefinition of their lives. Unsurprisingly, many receive this message, and climate change as its carrier, with skepticism. So, efforts to communicate the daunting complexity of climate change, and the scale of the change needed to prevent or mitigate it, have to account both for how people make sense of these facts and how this knowledge (along with its consequences and distribution) affects them. Yet so far, while there have been attempts to forge the interdisciplinary connections that are key to communicating issues relating to climate change, truly interdisciplinary collaborations have been few and far between.
doi:10.5281/zenodo.3269243 fatcat:xqi2zub7sfb25djsbicp2535cy