Debating climate science isn’t worth the time. But having a handle on the basics of climate science can be a game changer. Why?
Say you think of carbon dioxide as the natural and necessary stuff we breathe out and that plants breathe in. You wonder: How can it possibly be bad enough to seriously damage the climate? You remember something about a hole in the ozone. Is it letting heat in? You’re not clear how fossil fuels make it worse. You want to do the right thing for the climate, so you recycle, turn down the thermostat, and do your part to keep pollution out of the water.
If that’s you, it could be a heavy lift to get you exited about economy-wide policies to cut fossil fuel emissions. It simply might not seem obvious.
The bad news is that this is a common starting place.
FrameWorks Institute research tracks default patterns of thinking—correct and incorrect—and the prevalent gaps in people’s knowledge when it comes to the mechanics of climate change, and there’s a fair deal of confusion. Problems is, these defaults and the way we visualize how climate change works can dictate which solutions seem logical or urgent or important. The right visualizations and metaphors are key.
The good news is that FrameWorks has done extensive message testing in the US and Canada to develop simple, memorable ways to explain climate science basics so that causes and solutions are more clear. Click here to see more about how these metaphors fill the most common gaps in knowledge and redirect thinking toward community-level climate action.
Here is your cheat sheet for putting these climate science “pictures” to work.
