Matthew C. Nisbet, Ph.D, is a professor in the School of Communication at American University where his research focuses on the intersections between science, media, and politics. E-MAIL: nisbetmc@gmail.com
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Overlooked in the coverage and discussion of Copenhagen are the remarks of Calif. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger who in his speech at the summit emphasized that the real future of policy innovation and action rests at the local level. Watch in the clip above as Schwarzenegger calls for a follow-up summit of cities, states, provinces, and regional/municipal governments on climate change, volunteering the state of California as the host.
Of course, if cities and regions are going to be the engines for change and innovation on climate policy, they need the communication infrastructure to fuel these actions, a challenge I've focused on at this blog.
Roughly 90 scientists, journalists, educators, PIOs, and policy staffers turned out to Sunday afternoon's AGU workshop on climate change communication. I will have more to say about the panel in forthcoming posts, but for now, Steve Easterbrook provides an amazingly thorough, transcript-like overview of the panel and session. Slides and video of the presentations will eventually be posted at the AGU site.
It's too early to say what impact the protests in Copenhagen will have on the negotiating process or on world public opinion. However, when it comes to social protest generally, past research suggests several common and powerful barriers to communication success. There are a few rare exceptions, such as the Civil Rights marches of the 1960s, but on issues such as world trade, food biotechnology, or the war in Iraq, social protest has had difficulty achieving effective communication outcomes.
Protests over climate change are unlikely to be any different. Which raises the question: By taking to the streets, do climate advocates undermine the chances of policy action? A preliminary answer might be in the affirmative. Consider, for example, that the Agence France Press image at the top of this post serves as the visual frame in more than 300 news stories worldwide.
Generally, not only are participating protest groups, despite passion and months of intensive planning, often disorganized and uncoordinated in their message, but they also often fail to consider even the very basics when it comes to effective visuals and storylines for the mainstream media, the broader public or policymakers, the supposed direct target of their campaign.
The messages certainly appeal to protesters, reinforcing ideology and recruiting like-minded others to the cause, but these very same messages may actually serve to undermine the ability of the protests to achieve policy outcomes or to influence public opinion.
The unfortunate communication mish-mash offered by protest groups is made worse by the routinized tendencies of journalists and news organizations in covering social protest. Below are four possible frames through which the media historically cover protest, drawn from a body of scholarship that has labeled these media tendencies "The Protest Paradigm."
Research finds that protest is almost exclusively covered through the first two frames of reference and it is rare that coverage spans into more substantive or sympathetic portrayals of the protest event.
My reading of the protest coverage this morning suggests to me that predictably, journalists have applied the first two frames and storylines to the Copenhagen protests [For examples, see links in the caption to the picture atop this post]:
Showdown with policy or public officials, Dissection of strategies and tactics, Comparison or association frame with other groups that legitimize or marginalize
Sympathetic Frames
Protest defined as creative expression or as unjust prosecution. An emphasis on telling "our story" or that "protesters are not alone" in working for change.
The Balanced Frame
The debate: Focuses on issues and complaints.
The Copenhagen protests offer the opportunity for an in depth scholarly analysis of key differences by country or across news organizations, blogs, and alternative media in how the protests have been portrayed. Consider, for example, coverage at the NY Times and WPost, which features elements of the second and fourth frames in this typology, respectively.
One of the arguments I have been making in talking to journalists is to beware the hype over the relative impact of the climate skeptics movement in contributing to societal inaction on climate change. As many studies, articles, and experts have documented and described, the impact of the skeptic movement is only one of several significant contributors to political gridlock and perceptual differences on climate change.
In a recent blog post on Copenhagen, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus adeptly argue this point. I don't agree with all of their post and I don't share the same pessimism on Copenhagen, yet as they often do, they raise important issues and meaningfully expand the scope of discussion. Here's their specific point on the climate skeptic blame game:
Copenhagen was preceded by a seemingly genuine fight between skeptics who deny the reality or threat of global warming, and greens who deny the political economy of carbon. In their respective simulacra, they see each other as mortal enemies. In reality, they desperately need each other.
In a brilliantly timed release of emails and data stolen from Britain's East Anglia Climate Research Unit, skeptics managed to create an international debate over the evidence of climate change, calling the hack "climategate." The emails didn't challenge human-caused global warming. But that didn't stop the skeptics from waving the emails around as proof that it was all a hoax. Greens dismissed the controversy and the bad behavior of prominent climate scientists, aggressively spinning the CRU hack as "swift-boating."
The result was a phony debate. It served greens and skeptics well but did nothing to spark an honest discussion of economics and technology. Instead, climate scientists and environmental activists continued their running battle with skeptics over trivial disputes such as warming and cooling in the medieval period -- a subject that offers no insight whatsoever into what we should do about today's global warming.
Journalists and activists alike value "global warming deniers" because they are useful villains in the story. Reporters and activists never tire of writing about Exxon-Mobil's funding as some kind of a major scoop, and a researcher at Media Matters can feel like Woodward and Bernstein after just a few hours downloading IRS 990 financial statements from Guidestar.
But really it is phony investigative journalism posing as the real thing. In truth, skeptics of global warming are poor, not rich. According to Media Matters, Exxon-Mobil has given conservative think tanks less than $7 million total since 2001 -- about $1 million a year. By contrast, the combined annual budgets of America's leading environmental philanthropies and NGOs total well over $500 million a year. Two funders alone have promised to spend $2 billion on climate communications over the next few years. And governments collectively spend billions annually, as they should, funding climate scientists to conduct research and publish their work.
Activists, with the help of reporters, have grossly exaggerated efforts by the Bush administration to muzzle NASA scientist James Hansen, perhaps the best-known scientist in the world. Hansen routinely publishes blunt attacks on Congressional proposals and advocates his own agenda all as a government employee. After the Bush Administration attempted to censor his work he complained to the New York Times and the problem disappeared. Hansen has one of the safest jobs in America.
The notion that climate skeptics are to blame for collective government inaction is as phony as the debate over whether the stolen emails change our understanding of the science. Neither skepticism of anthropogenic warming nor the belief that scientists are divided nor the public's lack of understanding of science have been significant factors in preventing action on global warming.
The big story is that there is now 20 years of evidence that green communications on climate have backfired. Public concern about global warming today is no greater than it was 20 years ago. Public support for action to reduce carbon emissions quickly evaporates as soon as there is a serious price tag attached. Increasingly dire warnings of impending climate catastrophes have triggered apocalypse fatigue and rising skepticism about climate science. Greens have not only failed to achieve action, they have made the situation worse, alienating the public even more than they had alienated them before 2004, when the two of us denounced apocalyptic environmentalism in "The Death of Environmentalism."
The reason for inaction is the same today as it has been for 20 years. Consumers and businesses alike are loath to increase energy costs in order to address global warming. Fossil fuels are cheap. Low carbon power sources are expensive or, like nuclear power, politically unpopular. No political economy in the world is going to significantly raise energy prices and slow its economy to deal with climate change. So long as the primary lever that climate policy proposes to use to address global warming are mechanisms that, one way or another, increase energy prices, efforts to substantially reduce global carbon emissions will fail.
This reality is as firm as the relationship between emissions and warming, but it is one that the United Nations, the world's largest governments, and green activists refuse to accept. For this reason, global warming deniers are, for greens, highly useful enemies -- ones they simply cannot let go.
Audio of yesterday's discussion at WAMU's Kojo Nnamdi Show on science, religion, and the climate debate is now available online. I wish we had more time to focus in depth on several of the themes raised in the program. In particular I think there is much more to explore relative to my concluding comments on how scientists and environmentalists need to find more communication partners on climate change, ranging from religious leaders and public health professionals to national security experts and business CEOs.
Tomorrow at 130pm, I will be a guest on WAMU's Kojo Nnamdi Show to discuss the communication challenge on climate change and strategies for overcoming political polarization.
Also as guests from Copenhagen will be Richard Cizik, formerly VP of the National Association of Evangelicals and Eric Chivian, director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard University. In 2008, Cizik and Chivian were named among Time magazine's 100 most influential people.
Earlier this year in a paper published at the journal Environment, I discussed the efforts by Cizik and Chivian in partnering on intiatives that span the political gridlock on climate change.
More details on the segment are here which you can also listen to online either live or archived.
On Copenhagen, not surprisingly, ideologically driven media outlets are working overtime to brand themselves and appeal to their respective audiences. Not only do we have the expected conservative commentary and reporting from brands such as Fox News and National Review archived daily at hubs such as the Drudge Report but there is also an initiative called the Copenhagen News Collaborative that brands together in one place commentary and reporting from reliably liberal news organizations and blogs such as Mother Jones, Huffington Post, TreeHugger.com, and Grist.
Conservative and liberal echo chambers on Copenhagen are unavoidable and likely to be extremely profitable for the respective news organizations and bloggers. But the unfortunate consequence is that the "Daily Me" of like-minded views on climate change is only likely to amplify polarization.
Over at the Columbia Journalism Review, Curtis Brainard and Cristine Russell file their first overview and analysis of Copenhagen coverage. Their daily round up of mostly mainstream news reporting promises to be a must read for the coming weeks.
ClimateGate: A now ubiquitous tagline that conveys a preferred storyline.
In a paper published earlier this year at the journal Environment, I explained how claims and arguments relative to the climate change debate can be classified and tracked using a typology of frames that are common to science-related issues.
With the recent controversy over the East Anglia stolen emails, one of these common frames has come to dominate discussion leading up to Copenhagen. What's different this time around is that climate skeptics and conservatives are applying the frame, rather than liberals and environmental advocates.
This specific frame defines a science debate narrowly in terms of "public accountability and governance":
Is research or relevant policy in the public interest or serving special interests? The emphasis is on matters of control, transparency, participation, responsiveness, or ownership; or debate over proper use of science and expertise in decision-making ("politicization.")
In the Environment paper, I described how historically the public accountability frame has been used by Democrats, environmentalists, and science advocates in an attempt to raise concern that conservatives, industry, and the Bush administration were ignoring scientific expertise in favor of economic interests and/or ideology. Common frame devices used to instantly evoke and lock in this interpretation were allegations over a "war on science" and the "manufacture of uncertainty." As I wrote in the paper, while this frame might mobilize a liberal base it also likely inadvertently leads to further disengagement among the broader public, who are likely to see claims about a "war on science" as just more elite, partisan bickering.
The irony now is that conservatives and climate skeptics have discovered the utility of the public accountability frame to inflame and mobilize their base while also (intentionally) deactivating concern about climate change among the broader public.
The now commonly used term "ClimateGate" to refer to the case of the East Anglia stolen emails is an extremely effective frame device that instantly--if not falsely--conveys that there is wrongdoing, politicization, and a cover-up on the part of mainstream scientists.
Focusing events have the potential to powerfully amplify the resonance of a frame pushed by advocates. If the focusing event imbues a preferred storyline with even a tiny bit of validity, it can catapult a much stronger and broader frame into dominance. The case of the East Anglia emails, now defined in conversation as "ClimateGate," threatens to follow this trend. We will have to watch closely to see if the storyline cast by conservative skeptics and media becomes one of the classic examples of frame resonance in politics.
For a relevant case study on how an event can launch a politically preferred frame of reference into prominence, see this post from 2005 where I detailed how Hurricane Katrina fueled a larger narrative about the the Bush administration as a presidency in a "state of denial."
I will be discussing more on this issue at the workshop on climate change communication held Sunday at the annual meetings of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. More than 115 attendees have registered and there will be ample time allotted for questions and comments with the panelists.
EHP is a monthly journal of peer-reviewed research and news on the impact of the environment on human health. EHP is published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and its content is free online.
