Climate Change Communications on Twitter

         
      As my culminating action project for my Climate Change Communication class I decided to make an informative twitter page about climate change information and tips on communicating that information as a teenager or young adult


         It's hard for young people to feel like they're making a difference when voting is such a big part of change. So to give young people some tools to impact and educate other people on climate change I made an account on a forum that lots of young people use. Featured in the tweets were information I learned from the papers we read in the class such as the Hall, Cook, and Kahan papers. They delve into why people are confused by the media in terms of climate change, the real climate consensus, and how relating to people through values and ideologies is the best way to reach them. The media has formed climate change into an "opinion" issue with two sides, even though 97% of scientists agree that climate change is happening and is anthropogenic. We also found that giving people more resources isn't going to help convince them, its better to relate to them on core values and approach it based on ideologies rather than more science. These papers gave me that information I needed to correct some the climate science misconceptions and share the real information, and the ways we can share that information with others in a productive and successful way. I made sure to transform that information from the papers and class material into short snippets that were easily understandable for anyone, and put other resources on there in case people wanted to find more information for themselves. 


      Here are some examples of my tweets and resources that I retweeted on the page. One of the links I provided on the page was one that shows you what climate change will feel like in different places so people can see what impact it will have in their local areas.

 All of this information can help everyone feel a little less helpless dealing with climate change, a situation that seems big and scary but far away and mysterious at the same time. This method of communication allows for people to get information and learn ways to make a change in a way that is quick and easily digestible, which is perfect for young people nowadays.

        I wrote the tweets in a lighthearted and hopeful tone, so as to make them sound encouraging instead of scary and looming. Although climate change is a very serious and urgent topic, I don't think it's helpful to spread fear and doomsday narratives, those will cause people to lose hope and that's not going to help us. We need encouraging but informative content, and that is what I aimed to produce. There are a ton of climate change activism accounts that aim to deliver information to people but a lot of the people who follow them already know that information, and are actively doing their part, but there are many people who aren't sure where to start or how to communicate the information they learn and I wanted to kind of bridge that gap. Overall the account was just created to give people a tool they can use to help other people understand and care about climate change, and hopefully if that can be shared to the world then we can all work together to take climate action.



References

Cook, J., Oreskes, N., Doran, P. T., Anderegg, W. R. L., Verheggen, B., Maibach, E. W., … Rice, K. (2016). Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming. Environmental Research Letters, 11(4), 048002. doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002

Hall, M. P., Lewis, N. A., & Ellsworth, P. C. (2018). Believing in climate change, but not behaving sustainably: Evidence from a one-year longitudinal study. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 56, 55–62. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2018.03.001

Kahan, D. M., Jenkins-Smith, H., & Braman, D. (2010). Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus. SSRN Electronic Journal. doi: 10.2139/ssrn.1549444

Stoknes, P. E. (2015). What we think about when we try not to think about global warming: toward a new psychology of climate action. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.