Committee for Skeptical Inquiry

[Barry Karr <SkeptInq@AOL.COM>]

A “Two Step Flow of Popularization” for Climate Change:

Recruiting Opinion-Leaders for Science

Matthew Nisbet

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Released in early February, the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) represents history's most definitive statement of scientific consensus on the issue, yet despite the best efforts of scientists and advocates to magnify wider attention to the moment; the release still only scored a modest hit on both the media and public agendas. The inability of the IPCC report to break through to the public about the urgency of climate change is just more evidence that relying on traditional science communication strategies has increasingly limited returns.

Instead, other public engagement methods are sorely needed. Among options, in this column I suggest reaching the wider public not directly via news coverage, but rather indirectly by way of a “two-step flow of popularization.” This strategy, employed widely in marketing and political campaigns, involves recruiting “opinion-leading” citizens to participate in nationally coordinated efforts. These local community members would serve as information brokers, passing on messages about climate change that speak personally and directly to their peers, co-workers, and friends.

Innovative communication efforts are now more important than ever. The new Democratic majority in Congress has finally put climate change back on the legislative agenda, yet despite great optimism, it might not be until 2009 when any major policy action is adopted. For one, there remains the lingering distraction of Iraq, and the very real possibility that President Bush might veto any “cap and trade” bill that makes it to his desk. On top of all that, the close industry ties of key House Democrats, in combination with personality conflicts among several Senators might serve to significantly stall or derail any legislation. In overcoming these potential roadblocks, public opinion is likely to be the final catalyst for policy action.

Why the IPCC Report Failed as a Communication Moment

From the outset, generating major public attention to the IPCC report's February 2 release stood as an almost impossible task. First, it was a technical backgrounder, a massive synthesis of the state of climate science. As exciting as that might sound to the small number of Americans who closely track the issue, it's a major snoozer for the rest of the public. For journalists, not only is an authoritative distillation of past research a tough story to make exciting, but the main themes of the draft report had been predicted for a few months, eliminating any real surprises.

Though this latest IPCC report was expected to include the "strongest" language to date emphasizing the urgency of climate change, the take away conclusions that appeared in the lead paragraphs of the stories filed from Paris fell well short of major headline material. The IPCC, wrote journalists, was "90% certain that human emissions of greenhouse gases rather than natural variations are warming the planet's surface" and that the evidence was "unequivocal."

Moreover, the Friday scheduling of the report's release couldn't have been worse. The end of the week is when you strategically choose to release embarrassing news, not a major scientific report. Whether it relates to political scandal or to poor corporate earnings, any release on a Friday has a high probability of getting buried in the weekend news cycle, with the media agenda moving on to other issues by Monday.

This is exactly what happened with the IPCC report. In an analysis released by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, for the week leading up to the February 2 release, coverage of climate change only accounted for roughly 5% of the total news hole across media outlets, dwarfed by the roughly 40% of news attention captured by the combined issues of Iraq, Iran, and the 2008 Presidential horserace. Yet, in the week following the Friday release of the IPCC report, the issue quickly dropped from among the top stories, as tracked by Pew. Climate change coverage was replaced in headlines by news of the death of Anna Nicole Smith and the murder plot involving an astronaut.

In a separate analysis that matched the media trend indicators to national survey data, Pew found that not surprisingly, in the days after the IPCC’s Friday release, few if any Americans reported that global warming was the issue they were following most closely. Instead, the public remained galvanized by the war in Iraq, while others, especially women ages 18 to 29, were distracted by the media frenzy over Anna Nicole Smith.

To Read More of This Column Visit: http://www.csicop.org/scienceandmedia/climate/

About the Author

Matthew C. Nisbet (Ph.D., Cornell University) is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at American University. His research on the interplay between science, media, and politics appears in the journals Communication Research, the Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, Political Behavior, the International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Public Opinion Quarterly, the Public Understanding of Science, and Science Communication. From 1997 to 1999, he worked as Public Relations Director for CSICOP. Nisbet maintains the blog FRAMING SCIENCE, which tracks news coverage of technical controversies. He lives year round in the Woodley Park area of Washington D.C. Email: nisbetmc@gmail.com

 

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