Great Yale Climate Forum post from 2011: Is Climate Fatigue setting in?
Happened across this article at the Y.C.M.F. and thought I'd share it. I realize it's kinda old, but there's some important points to be made.
http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2011/10/is-climate-fatigue-setting-in/
Responding in The Washington Post, Brad Plumer writes that, “it’s a complex, multi-layered story.” But the two biggest factors, he suggests, are the recession and the Senate’s institutional procedures, which prevented a simple majority vote in 2010 on cap-and-trade legislation.
Joe Romm, however, sees “collapsing media coverage” of climate change as a major reason for the erosion in public concern. A larger media failing was also the central argument that former Vice President Al Gore made in his Rolling Stone essay earlier this year. But a number of leading social scientists who study the media and climate change intersection don’t agree with this take. For example, in a recent interview, Stanford’s Jon Krosnick said,
“According to our national surveys, large majorities of Americans have believed that climate change is real and human-caused, will have undesirable consequences, and merits substantial government action to address it. These majorities rose a little in the years preceding 2007 and fell a bit in the years after, but the majorities remain large … I’d say the news media have paid plenty of attention to the climate science, but truth be told, that science is now an ‘old story,’ one the media have told many, many times before. It’s understandable, therefore, that every new climate study is not at the top of the front page of every newspaper in the country.”
Krosnicks’s observation that climate science has become an “old story” is worth noting: The doom element to many stories likely contributes to public fatigue with climate change.....
Sadly, I would have to go farther and say that doom-and-gloom type stuff might just be one of the biggest causes, if not the
primary cause, of climate fatigue.....and in fact, I'm far from the only one out there who thinks it's
bloody obvious. The sad truth is, we've had a complete and total messaging failure over the past 10 years; who wants to wake up to global warming, when most of what they hear is doomsday predictions and Chicken Little type fearmongering(yes, Guy McPherson, I'm looking at you)? Pretty much nobody, unfortunately.
I blame the mass media heads for most of our problems; the truth is, it isn't just the denier spin they're putting out there; every once in a while, they'll slip in a "doomsday" article, too, to try to disengenously fool us into thinking that they DO care about ACC issues.....when they really don't.
= new reply since forum marked as read
