Climate Change Communication Challenges Part 3: Visualizing Climate Change

Visualizing climate change is one of the biggest barriers to the public's understanding of it. You know the phrase a picture's worth a thousand words? Though its clichd, it's also got a grain of truth. Yellowstone didn't become the US's first National Park because someone wrote a good description of its geysers. It took William Henry Jackson's photos to get Congress to designate it as a protected area.

We have five senses, but perhaps none is as important to us as our sense of sight. Look at how TV displaced the radio or how ubiquitous digital cameras are (we even put them in cell phones!). Many people worry about what it would be like to be blind.

Well, in a way we're blind to climate change. Think about it. What does a ton of carbon dioxide look like? How do you show a receding glacier? These are incredibly difficult to capture: one is an invisible gas and the other takes place slightly faster than a normal glacial pace (literally). Yet crafting images of these processes (along with better messaging and a more balanced media) will help win public support for action on climate change.

There are a couple problems we face with visualizing climate change. Some of the most common images of climate change lack the oomph needed to make it present in people's minds. Smokestacks have been used too many times for other pollutants (think acid rain in the 1980s). They don't inspire action in part because we've been desensitized to them. Also on the list of "can't use" images: polar bears. For better or worse, they've been politicized. While environmentalists may love them, they haven't won the hearts and minds of skeptics.

If the goal is to win over people who are skeptical, then images need to be understandable, irrefutable, and relatable. There are some strong techniques that can convey the importance of climate change in these terms.

One is comparison. A photo of a glacier by itself doesn't really give me a sense of what glacial retreat looks like. But a photo of a glacier now compared to 70 years ago would make the concept of glacial retreat understandable and irrefutable.

Another is using human scale. Images of people in Bangladesh coping with the effects of flooding due to sea level rise and increased frequency of typhoons drive home the point of how climate change is directly affecting people. Images that are local have an even stronger impact. In California, images of people in Los Angeles area coping with wildfires might have an even stronger impact that people dealing with typhoons in Bangladesh.

Showing the science is also important. At Copenhagen, there was an art display that showed how large a ton of CO2 is. Personally, until I saw pictures of it, I had trouble visualizing exactly what that would look like. Now, I think of my carbon footprint, I have a much more vivid image in my head. Showing scientists in the field also makes their work more accessible and lends the science a human face.

Finally, it can't all be bad news. While climate change has a lot of negative repercussions, there's also a lot of positive work being done around it. Focusing on all the bad effects can bring people down and inspire apathy. Showing positive work being done to confront climate change gives people hope and inspires action. In other words, we can't always be descriptive of the problem, we have to be prescriptive and offer solutions.

There are a couple of groups working on these issues. Particularly notable are GHG Photos, a collective of photographers who work solely on climate change and Cape Farewell, a group of climate scientists, artists, and communicators who work on visualizing climate change in the Arctic. Both organizations showcase work is at once both beautiful and powerful.

The other beauty of using strong climate change imagery is that skeptics will have a hard time combating it. You won't find too many forests thriving after a bark beetle infestation or glaciers that are expanding nor is it easy to show people not being affected by climate change. So go what are you waiting for? Go grab your camera or charcoal and see what you can do to show the effects of climate change. You're one click away from writing a thousand words.