The two greatest myths about global warming communications are 1) constant repetition of doomsday messages has been a major, ongoing strategy and 2) that strategy doesn’t work and indeed is actually counterproductive!

These myths are so deeply ingrained in the environmental and progressive political community that when we finally had a serious shot at a climate bill, the powers that be — led by team Obama! — decided not to focus on the threat posed by climate change in any serious fashion in their $200 million communications effort (see “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?“).

These myths are so deeply ingrained in the mainstream media that such messaging, when it is tried, is routinely attacked and denounced — and the flimsiest studies are interpreted exactly backwards to drive the erroneous message home (see “Dire straits: Media blows the story of UC Berkeley study on climate messaging“)

The only time anything approximating this kind of messaging — not “doomsday” but what I’d call blunt, science-based messaging that also makes clear the problem is solvable — was in 2006 and 2007 with the release of An Inconvenient Truth (and the 4 assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and media coverage like the April 2006 cover of Time). The data suggest that strategy measurably moved the public to become more concerned about the threat posed by global warming (see major study here).

You’d think it would be pretty obvious that the public is not going to be concerned about an issue unless one explains why they should be concerned about an issue. And the social science literature, including the vast literature on advertising and marketing, could not be clearer that only repeated messages have any chance of sinking in and moving the needle, as I discuss in my book “Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga.” One of the most popular quotes in the book is from GOP wordmeister Frank Luntz:

There’s a simple rule: You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again and again, and about the time that you’re absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time.

Because I doubt any serious movement of public opinion or mobilization of political action could possibly occur until these myths are shattered, I’ve been posting on the best work on climate messaging and public opinion analysis (see “Must-Read: A Guide For Engaging and Winning on Climate And Clean Energy” and Krosnick: Candidates “May Actually Enhance Turnout As Well As Attract Voters Over To Their Side By Discussing Climate Change“).

Since this is Oscar night, though, it seems appropriate to update my post on what messages the public are exposed to in popular culture and the media. It ain’t doomsday. Quite the reverse, climate change has been mostly an invisible issue for several years and the message of conspicuous consumption and business-as-usual reigns supreme.

The motivation for this post actually came up last year because I received an e-mail from a journalist commenting that the “constant repetition of doomsday messages” doesn’t work as a messaging strategy. I had to demur, for the reasons noted above.

But it did get me thinking about what messages the public are exposed to, especially as I’ve been rushing to see the movies nominated for Best Picture this year. I am a huge movie buff, but as parents of small children know, it isn’t easy to stay up with the latest movies.

That said, good luck finding a popular movie in recent years that even touches on climate change, let alone one a popular one that would pass for doomsday messaging. Last year, Best Picture nominee The Tree of Life was been billed as an environmental movie — and even shown at environmental film festivals — but while it is certainly depressing, climate-related it ain’t. In fact, if that is truly someone’s idea of environmental movie, count me out.

This year Beasts of the Southern Wild is an environmentally-themed movie that has won its share of awards and is nominated for Best Picture. It is seemingly related to climate change. But it hardly counts as a popular movie, scoring a whopping $12 million in domestic gross to date, which means it was seen by somewhere north of one million Americans.

The closest to a genuine popular climate movie was the dreadfully unscientific The Day After Tomorrow, which is from 2004 (and arguably set back the messaging effort by putting the absurd “global cooling” notion in people’s heads!) Even Avatar, the most successful movie of all time — $2.7 billion global gross — and “the most epic piece of environmental advocacy ever captured on celluloid,” as one producer put it, omits the climate doomsday message. One of my favorite eco-movies, “Wall-E, is an eco-dystopian gem and an anti-consumption movie,” but it isn’t a climate movie.

I had some hopes for The Hunger Games movie. I’d read all 3 of the bestselling young adult novels — hey, that’s my job! — and while post-apocalyptic, they don’t qualify as climate change doomsday messaging. And the movie has nothing to do with global warming. So, no, the movies certainly don’t expose the public to constant doomsday messages on climate.

Here are the key points about what repeated messages the American public is exposed to:

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By Kenneth Bossong

According to the latest “Energy Infrastructure Update” report from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Office of Energy Projects, 1,231 MW of new in-service electrical generating capacity came on line in the United States in January 2013 — all from wind, solar, and biomass sources.

– SUN DAY Campaign News Release via RenewableEnergyWorld.com

by Auden Schendler

There’s a taboo and terrifying thing people do in the mountains called “trundling.” It means pushing an often frighteningly big rock off the side of a mountain, then watching it roll down, bounce, explode, crush trees, and smoke off into the valley below. It is not sanctioned; it is dangerous to the trundler and to others; people who do it don’t talk about it. But it happens.

If you have ever “trundled” a big rock (and I’m not saying I have, at least not intentionally) you know that the moment it tips from massive geologic inertia to kinetic energy is both terrifying and thrilling.

That is the uncomfortable point we may have reached in the climate movement. I saw this at a rally in Denver last week, which I attended with my wife and two young children:

The first characters we ran into wore black bandannas as facemasks and backpacks. And there were a lot of them. My response was a gut feeling of panic. What, exactly, did these guys think was going to happen here? They seemed ready for the Seattle world trade protests, or something gnarly out of Eastern Europe.

I had thought this protest was about stopping the Keystone XL pipeline as a way for Obama to draw a line in the sand on climate. But there were people railing against just about everything connected to the environment, including social justice, indigenous people’s rights, and fracking. “What the Frack!” was one chant. There was a guy carrying a book on Marx, there were some homeless guys with the agenda of not being bored. Later, at the rally, a child activist (who emceed the event) talked about suing Boulder for violating the public trust by polluting the air.

Suing Boulder, one of the greenest cities in the world, seems like an odd tactic: it’s like suing Jesus for not being loving enough. (Turns out, on further research, they were suing Colorado, not Boulder.) Whatever—there were many different viewpoints, from the hobo who blessed me, to the 12 year old radical, and many of them I did not agree with. It was both a rainbow coalition and a Babel of agendas.

Despite the facemasks, the event was civil: I never saw a cop, and I heard grumbling from some of the several hundred marchers that “when we have half a million, that’s when we’ll take over the street…” and “this is the only protest march that stayed on the sidewalk…” Point being, it might have even been too civil. See “At climate rally, some signs of fraying in a movement’s big tent.”

Only at one point did the event tip slightly to the radical.

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