iOS app Android app More  David Roberts  David Roberts  Posted:
April 3, 2007 02:29 PM  'Climate change': Too Big and Too Little
This past Saturday evening I was on a panel on "communicating
about climate change." As I was walking to the venue, I had the
following mini-revelation: the problem with communication about
climate change is that it's been too focused on climate change.
The notion of climate change, and most of what we know about it,
came to us from scientists. And it has remained a thoroughly
scientized subject. Which is fine if you're a scientist, but not
if you're trying to mobilize a large-scale shift in the way the
world's people interact with each other and with the planet.  I
put it like this: as a lever for creating social change,
"climate change" is both too big and too little.  It's too big
in the sense that it's difficult to rouse people behind the goal
of stabilizing GHG levels in the atmosphere at no more than 450
ppm. That's an enormous, clinical, abstract notion. It does not
stir the