My name is Marlise Tumolo and I am a
National Education Specialist for NOAA's Office of
National Marine Sanctuaries.
I am also a certified climate interpreter
through an organization called the National
Network on Ocean and Climate Change
Interpretation, which I will refer to as NOCI for short.
So tonight I'm going to talk with you all a
little bit about how we can frame our conversations
on climate so that they can be most productive and most sticky for our audiences.
I recognize that you all bring a variety of
experience and expertise to the table when
it comes to climate change education.
And today I'm hoping that I can give you
another tool you can add to your, already I'm very
sure, large toolbox that will help you to communicate about climate change.
So before we start our presentation, I do
want to give you a little bit of information
about the organization that I work for.
The Office of National Marine Sanctuaries,
which is part of the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, manages a
national marine system of protected areas that span
more than 170,000 square miles of ocean and Great Lakes waters.
To give you guys an idea, that's a little bit
larger than the size of the state of California.
So it's a lot of area that we manage.
We have sanctuaries that range from the
Hawaiian Islands to the Florida Keys and from Lake
Huron in Michigan to American Samoa.
National Marine Sanctuaries were
established because of their ecological, cultural, or
recreational importance.
And there are places where we promote
conservation while facilitating commercial and recreational
activities as well.
So these are places that are meant for the public to enjoy.
If you're interested in learning more about
sanctuaries, you can see our website at the
bottom of the screen there.
So please feel free to go look at that.
So our main event.
Bruce, would you mind putting up our poll question here?
We are going to put these up for those of you who are watching the recorded version
of the webinar so you can see the poll questions.
Okay, we've got the first poll question up.
Molly's.
Okay.
So, our poll question is, "What do Americans think is causing climate change?"
And I'm going to let you all look at those answers.
Is it A, burning fossil fuels for energy, B, pollution, or C, holes in the ozone?
Okay, Bruce.
I think we can go ahead and take that down.
Thank you.
Done.
Okay.
So, in your heads, if you answered either
B, pollution, or C, holes in the ozone, you
are correct.
The average American has a lot of confusion
about the basic mechanism of climate change.
Research done by an organization called
Frameworks Institute, which is a nonprofit focused on
communication, showed that when people are
asked the question, "How does climate change
work?"
The most common answers related to
pollution, holes in the ozone, and or a description of
the impacts of climate change.
Most of the time, people are unable to explain
the cause, hence our confused looking individuals
on our slide.
By meeting people where they are and filling
in gaps and understanding that they have about
climate change, we can begin to create a space
to help people understand what's causing climate
change, and by helping them understand the
cause, we can naturally lead them towards
a discussion on solutions.
So enter NOCI, or the National Network on Ocean and Climate Change Interpretation.
As mentioned earlier, NOCI is a partnership
between informal science educators, climate
scientists, cognitive and social scientists, and evaluators.
And their mission is to change the world
through better communication techniques around climate
change.
NOCI believes that if we train enough
voices in proven communication techniques, and by
proven they mean researched, we can change
the national discourse around climate change
to be productive, creative, and solutions focused.
For me, this is really exciting because we
see these words, productive, creative, solutions
focused, and those are something positive,
which is often hard to encounter when we're
talking about climate change.
So this is really exciting.
So NOCI has participated in a bunch of
trainings for science educators around the country that
they call study circles.
And these study circles are in-depth
trainings on these communication tactics that we're
going to be talking about tonight.
If you are interested in googling NOCI
online, they're currently accepting applications
for their final study circle.
And applications are open from now until May 31st.
So if you're interested, I would suggest
that you go Google that, read a little bit more
about the study circles, and consider participating yourselves.
So now to our main event.
It's important for us to remember that we
can really teach the basic mechanism of climate
change in less than 60 seconds.
There's a really easy and a simple and effective way to talk to people about this.
And we're going to show you how to do this in just a few minutes.
As mentioned earlier, Frameworks Institute
is a nonprofit organization, and they've done
research with over 9,000 Americans to determine
the clearest and most effective way to communicate.
They call this method of communication "strategic framing."
So you'll hear me talk about that term a lot throughout this presentation.
Strategic framing is a research-backed method of communication.
What it does is clear up misconceptions
about climate change and help people to begin to
think about solutions and how they can become heroes of the climate story.
It also creates a sense of hope for climate
communicators and for people who are hearing
these communications.
It's simple and concise, and that makes it
ideal for use in climate change education.
So there's a couple different steps that
are really important when we're going through
the strategic framing process, and I'm going
to walk you through each of these steps during
our presentation tonight.
The first is using a conversational tone.
When we communicate about climate change, it's
really important that we maintain a reasonable
tone.
What we really want to avoid is a crisis tone.
When people hear a crisis tone, especially
when it is in regard to an issue that's as
large as climate change, they tend to shut
down and be unavailable to talk more about
solutions.
We want to try to maintain this reasonable
tone so that we can lead people through an
entire conversation and get to some
important solutions that we can all work on together.
Our next step is leading with a value.
I'm going to talk about each of these in
the upcoming slides, so I'm not going to go in
depth as I go through here.
The third step is put issues into context.
The fourth step is use tested metaphors.
The fifth step is connect to solutions.
The final step is awakening social responsibility.
As many of you know in your time in education
and working as communicators, one of the golden
rules of communication is know your audience.
This institute did a lot of research to
determine what they call the swamp of ocean and climate
change.
This is basically how the general public
is thinking about ocean and climate change.
Underneath each of these headers you see bullets.
What these bullets represent is cultural models.
Cultural models are widely shared ways of
thinking that people use to organize their
thoughts on a specific topic.
What are their cognitive shortcuts?
Understanding how your audience, whether they
be the students in your classroom or the guests
that are visiting your informal science
center, are thinking about a topic will help you to
determine the best way to communicate with them in regards to that topic.
This chart shows the dominant ways of
thinking that Americans are referencing when they're
reasoning about ocean and climate change.
You'll notice that some of these cultural models, the ones that are circled here in
green, are going to be productive cultural models.
When these models are cued, they lead towards action and solution-focused thinking.
Unfortunately we also have some unproductive
cultural models that Americans are carrying
around when it comes to climate change.
These are going to be these red models.
The red models, when these are cued, tend
to lead towards inaction or misunderstanding.
When we're communicating, we want to try to
avoid cuing these red cultural models that
are not productive.
When we focus on these productive green
cultural models, we're automatically leading people
towards solution-focused thinking.
To give you a little bit of practice or a little bit of an idea, and I do encourage
you to do this at home if you are listening
to the webinar recorded, we're going to go
through these questions together.
When you're having these conversations with
your students or in your institutions, they
may go something like this.
A gentleman walks up and he says, "Coal reefs
are breaking down because of ocean acidification."
The person he's talking to thinks something's always changing in the ocean.
I'm sure it'll work out.
Now I would like you to take a look on the
right-hand side to that yellow box with the
title Nature.
This is the nature zone of cultural models in response to ocean and climate change.
Which one of these cultural models do you
think is being pulled forward through this
conversation?
Is it we need to take care of it, shared
fate or one big web of life, works in cycles,
Mother Earth, or change is natural, you shouldn't stop it.
I think we can go ahead and pull it down, Bruce.
Thank you.
The answers in this, the cultural models
that are being evoked by this conversation are
going to be works in cycles or change is natural.
The problem with bringing forward these
cultural models, works in cycles or change is natural,
is that if you think change is natural,
then you have a feeling that it's going to fix
itself or that idea that the Earth is working
in cycles and it's going to go down but then
fix itself and come back.
These ideas aren't going to lead us to being motivated to change or to take action.
Here's another example of slightly changing
the way that we're framing our conversation
so that we're pulling forward a different cultural model.
Our presenter says, "The ocean absorbs the
extra carbon dioxide we emit into the atmosphere
when we burn fossil fuels and that changes the chemistry of the ocean.
We call this ocean acidification and it is breaking down coral reefs."
The person listening thinks, "That is such a shame.
I wonder if there's something we can do."
Take a look at that yellow box again and decide which cultural models you think are
being queued in this specific conversation.
Is it we need to take care of it, shared
fate, one big web of life, works in cycles, Mother
Earth or change is natural, you shouldn't, couldn't stop it.
First, do you want to put up the poll for us again here?
Okay, it's up.
Thank you.
So I'm just going to give everyone who's
listening a moment to read through those answers again
so they can decide in their heads which they're going to choose.
Okay, Bruce, thank you.
Okay, it's down.
Okay, so as many of you may have guessed,
this framed conversation is likely queuing
the cultural model we need to take care of it or shared fate, one big web of life.
And as you can see, both of those cultural
models are going to evoke some kind of responsibility
in the listener which is going to motivate towards action.
It's important to remember that we can steer
conversations in a productive direction when
we know our audience and we help them understand the causes of climate change.
By adjusting our message, our conversations can be more productive.
And by focusing on human causes of climate
change like the burning of fossil fuels, the
listener was able to focus on human solutions.
Okay, so the next step in our strategic
framing is going to be leading with a value.
Values help people to connect with the information that you're presenting.
Leading with these values will help your
learners to be engaged with the information that you're
teaching from the very beginning.
It'll also help them to think of themselves as part of the solution.
Frameworks Institute tested specific values
that were most likely to lead people towards
productive and solutions focused thinking.
And the two values that tested the best in
their research were the values of protection
and responsible management.
Protection focuses on protecting people in
places from the harm and the threats that
are facing our environment.
Responsible management focuses on a
responsibility to tomorrow and future generations with an
emphasis of what that looks like to live up to that responsibility today.
In the resources that are available to you
all on the wiki page, we have something called
value reframe cards or value framing cards.
Those cards are going to give you a little
bit more information on each of these values
that were tested on protection and responsible management.
Feel free to take a look at those to get some more background information.
When I think about these values, I tend to
think of protection as kind of the heartstrings
value, the kind of warm and fuzzy value, and
responsible management as the kind of practical
step-by-step value.
I tend to present them in that light.
The important thing to remember is that by
leading with these values, by throwing them
out there at the very beginning, we're engaging
people in our conversation from the very start.
They're likely to stay with us throughout our framing.
We want to put these values out early and we want to put them out often.
We want to bring them back up throughout
our conversations to continue engaging people
in our discussions.
The next step of strategic framing is to fill in gaps with a metaphor.
Gaps and understanding are those places where
the way that the public thinks about an issue
is very different from what experts understand to be true about that same issue.
We can help to fill in these gaps and
understanding with the correct information so that people
can begin to start thinking about solutions.
Different metaphors are concrete and
simple, memorable ways to explain a complex topic.
They can be used to help fill in gaps and
understanding that people have when thinking
about climate change.
Because the metaphors are simple and sticky, they're also great for education.
Metaphors aren't something new.
We've been using metaphors since probably the beginning of human time.
What the Frameworks Institute did is they were able to test specific metaphors that
were explained specific climate change
elements that were really easy for people to grasp
and then re-explain and reuse.
Frameworks Institute tested four different metaphors.
They tested a lot of metaphors, but there
were four specific metaphors that were found
to be the most effective.
In tonight's presentation, I'm going to review two of those metaphors.
In the resources that were given to you on
the wiki page, I have given you what are called
metaphor cards.
I gave you metaphor cards for all four of the metaphors.
Please feel free to visit there and look through each of the metaphors.
They're explained pretty well in these
short cards that are easy for you all to access.
The first metaphor that we're going to talk
about is the heat-trapping blanket metaphor.
This is a metaphor that is meant to explain the basic mechanism of climate change.
Remember earlier when I said that you can
explain climate change in 60 seconds or less?
This is how you're going to do that.
Basically it's simple.
When we burn fossil fuels such as coal, oil,
or natural gas for energy, we release excess
carbon dioxide into our atmosphere.
Carbon dioxide is a gas that traps heat.
As the excess carbon dioxide builds up, it
acts like a blanket trapping in heat that
would otherwise escape.
This blanket effect is warming the planet's
atmosphere, disrupting the balance that keeps
the climate stable.
There we go.
Simple, effective, easy way to explain climate change.
And also very concrete with this idea of a heat-trapping blanket, meaning that it
could be used easily with students in a classroom.
Another great way to visualize this idea for
people, I've seen at aquariums before, they've
used the survival blankets and they've cut it into small pieces.
While they're explaining the heat blanket
metaphor, they ask people to hold that piece
of the blanket around their hand.
It can feel in that short amount of time
it beginning to heat up, even with that thin
layer of blanket.
I think that's a really visual way to explain this to people.
Our next metaphor that was tested is the regular and rampant carbon dioxide.
This is a metaphor to explain how humans are impacting the carbon cycle.
A quick note that the name of this
metaphor, regular and rampant, was tested well with
adults because the alliteration of the
words regular and rampant was something that was
easy for people to remember.
I have heard people mention that sometimes with
younger audiences or with different audiences,
they find that this word rampant is difficult for people to grasp.
I do think that it can be useful, depending
on your audience, to include the word extra
or excess to help explain what rampant means.
The regular versus rampant metaphor.
Plants grow by using regular carbon dioxide.
The animals exhale.
Some carbon dioxide is part of normal life processes.
We are also adding carbon dioxide into the
air when we burn fossil fuels like coal, oil,
and natural gas for energy.
We call this rampant carbon dioxide because
there's too much of it and it's getting out
of control.
Now that we have a couple sticky metaphors
that we can use to explain how climate change
is happening, we're going to get into our explanatory chains.
What the explanatory chains do is they reveal invisible processes.
They explain how if we say climate change is
bad for the animals that live in the ocean,
for example.
We want people to understand why.
Explanatory chains help to explain that process.
These are essentially our teachable moments.
By filling in gaps and understanding with
explanatory chains, we're inviting our learners
into a richer and deeper understanding of
the problem which will allow them to again
begin thinking about solutions.
Which is our main goal really?
We want to be driving people to thinking about solutions.
Explanatory chains need to answer three key questions.
What is the original cause of the problem?
What is set in motion by the problem?
And what are the effects?
I'm going to show you all an example of an
explanatory chain that I created for our mascot,
Sanctuary Sam.
Sanctuary Sam is California sea lion.
The first question that's going to be answered
by the explanatory chain is what is the cause
of the problem?
When we use fossil fuels like coal, oil, and
natural gas for energy, we also use them to
make plastic.
When we burn these fossil fuels, carbon
dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere and acts like
a heat trapping blanket that warms our planet and ocean.
So you see here right from the beginning the
cause of the problem which includes our sticky
metaphor for the heat trapping blanket.
Next we want to mention what is set in motion by the problem.
California sea lions and California sea lions like Sanctuary Sam eat fish.
As the ocean becomes warmer, California sea
lions are having a harder time finding food.
The fish they usually eat are moving further
away to stay in cooler waters that they find
comfortable.
This means that sea lions have to travel
further and search longer to find the food that they
need.
So at E we're explaining what's happening, what's set in motion.
And then finally we want to get to the effects.
What is the effect of this problem?
The ocean is warming and that is messing up the food web depend on.
Notice the use of we pulls in both a food
web that sea lions depend on but also a food
web that humans depend on.
That's kind of pulling in our values again in this conversation.
So as you can see this is clearly explained
and so people are able to grasp what's happening.
Now that we have led with a value, filled in
some gaps in understanding using our metaphors
and our explanatory chains, we can begin talking about solutions.
Understanding what can be done to make things
better is a really essential part of framing
social problems.
It's important to remember that the
solutions that we offer need to match the scope and
scale of the problem.
And with a problem like climate change that's pretty large.
With this in mind, Frameworks Institute
strongly recommends focusing on a collective wide scale
solutions and not individual behaviors.
This isn't to say that individual
solutions are not important because they absolutely
are but policy level changes are key to
addressing a problem as large as climate change.
By focusing on collective actions, we help
to frame the public conversation from one
that's about sacrifice or individual actions
to one that's about citizenship or collective
actions.
So we're going to take a minute to think
about how we can reframe individual solutions
to collective solutions.
So you'll see here two columns.
On the left we have our individual solutions
and on the right we have the collective solutions.
So we can move from an individual solution
from like riding your bike to a collective
solution like supporting bike shares.
An individual solution such as use reusable
bags can be shifted to a collective solution
of support plastic bag bands.
So when we did the live version we had people make some suggestions.
So feel free at home if you're listening to
this to think of how you can change an individual
solution that's relevant in your daily
communications to a broader more collective scale solution.
Another example would be something like turning
off your lights is often an individual solution
but we can change that to support community energy audit programs.
You kind of get a feel for how this works.
Hey Marlies, I have some of the items that folks from the other evening wrote down.
I could review some of them if you'd like.
That would be wonderful Bruce, thank you.
Sure well one of them was recycling at home
and perhaps incorporating a recycling program
at your work.
There's carpooling individually or supporting van shares.
Buying local foods for yourself or supporting CSA locations.
There's using your car less often or supporting better public transit.
And actually one of my favorites was composting
in your home or supporting bio digesting facilities
to generate energy to get restaurants,
hotels and stadiums to contribute their food waste
to.
That's what I got.
Wonderful thanks Bruce.
People came up with some really really great collective solutions.
And I mentioned this in the live webinar and
I think it's important to note now that coming
up with these ideas for collective solutions
and kind of creating this solutions bank is
something that we as a communication community can begin to do.
And I think it's really powerful for people
to think of all the solutions, the collective
solutions that exist in their
neighborhoods or in their areas and share those so that
these are wider known among the wider
community so that people hear about these solutions
and can begin to get engaged.
So when we read through those solutions you
actually realize that naturally they're all
kind of fitting under one of these three themed solution strategies.
So part of the goal of strategic framing is to engage the public in a more informed
civic discussion.
With this in mind we want to talk about
solutions that meet the root cause of the problem.
And for climate change that's fossil fuels.
So NOPI recommends framing all of our
solutions discussions under one of these three prongs.
An energy shift or moving towards renewable energy.
Energy efficiency or reducing fossil fuels.
And then changing the conversation which is
talking with others about how they can reduce
their reliance on fossil fuels and how we
as a community as a collective can reduce our
reliance on fossil fuels.
Knowing that many of you who attend these
webinars are working with students I wanted
to highlight a couple student led collective level solutions.
Because I think it can be hard sometimes to
think about how we can frame this to youth
who are not yet a voting age or not yet able
to engage in some of those more formal civic
discussions.
But it's wonderful to see that there's
plenty of ways that students are getting involved
on a collective level.
So the two examples that I would like to highlight.
On the left you see a photo and this was taken from some work that students did at
the National Presbyterian School in Washington DC with their teacher Dale Class.
And this was done as part of a climate stewards mini grant funded project.
And at their school fifth graders fifth grade
students brainstormed researched and developed
a project to address idling in the carpool lane at school.
And as a result of their work to address
idling larger initiatives green initiatives
happened at their school including
priority spaces in the pickup lane and parking for
carpoolers as well as transportation subsidies for faculty and staff.
So these students were able to have a larger collective impact.
Another example of this on the right hand
side is Students for Zero Waste Week which
is a program that is done through the Office
of National Marine Sanctuary's Ocean Guardian
program.
Zero Waste Week is a school driven week long
campaign to reduce waste on school campuses
and within local communities with the intention of moving towards zero waste.
A lot of the waste that people are trying to reduce in this program is energy waste
as well as tangible physical waste.
Now this movement itself was started by students.
In 2012 students at All Saints Day School
were working on a race reduction effort for
their school.
As the students were working they discovered
that there was no national zero waste week.
And with this in mind they decided to create a
zero waste week movement in the United States.
And they engaged not only other schools
but also local businesses and people in their
community.
So this is the way that students can really get involved on that collective level.
Okay.
So, Strategic Framing Roadmap.
We've been making our way through all of
the different elements of strategic framing.
We learned about how to use a
conversational and reasonable tone in our communication.
How leading with the value, in particular responsible management or protection, can
help to get people engaged from the very beginning.
How through using explanatory chains and
tested metaphors we can help people to fill in gaps
in understanding so they understand how
climate change is happening and what it's causing.
And then finally we learned how to connect
people to solutions on a collective level
so that we can awaken social responsibility.
Okay.
Now that we've learned all of the elements
of strategic framing I would like you all
to take a look at how this can all fit together
in a fully strategically framed communication.
So on the bottom of the website here you see a link.
Look on the screen.
It was probably a little bit difficult to
hear over reading but you see this link on
the screen.
I would like you all to pull that link up
in a separate window and go ahead and watch
the strategically framed video.
Go ahead and put me on pause.
Since we're doing this as a recording I'm going to go ahead and walk you through an
explanation of the video.
If at this point you have not watched the
video yet please pause the recording of the
webinar, go watch the video and then come back so we can talk through.
Okay.
So did you all notice the framing elements
that were scattered throughout this communication
video?
It started really, really strong by
appealing to the value of protection and explaining
that climate change will impact both animals and humans.
It then goes on to explain the basic
mechanism of climate change by using the heat trapping
blanket as well as the regular and rampant metaphors.
Next, the video links to a local creature to
explain how climate change is really impacting
our environment.
In this case it's coral and it explains how
climate change will cause problems for coral
reefs and the rest of the animals that live there.
Finally, the video starts to outline solutions.
If you notice the solutions brought us to a community level.
This video outlined two specific solutions.
The first was a plastic bag tax that was instituted in Washington, D.C.
The second was a disposable water bottle ban in San Francisco.
When we're presenting solutions in our own
communications at our own sites, it's important
that we try to find local examples of solutions to climate change.
This will allow people to tap into civic actions
that they can take locally in their own communities.
This video does a great job of showing us how strategic framing can be put together
to create a clear and solutions focused message.
If you're all interested when you go to this
link on YouTube, you will see that other videos
pop up.
They made a suite of these videos
describing impacts to different animals and different
natural resources.
If you're interested, take a look and see what else they've outlined there.
Finally our takeaways, it's important to
remember that we have really simple, effective,
and research-backed tools that we can use to communicate about climate change.
When using these tools, sometimes it feels
a little bit strange to communicate in a way
that we haven't done before or to practice
explaining a metaphor that we're not super
familiar with.
Just remember that practice makes perfect.
The more time that you spend practicing, the more natural these things are going to
come.
And please practice them with your own audiences.
See how they work.
See what engages people.
See what works best in the circumstance that
you're in, whether you're teaching your students
or you're communicating at your science center.
See what works best for you and your audience and use that tool.
It's important to remember that you all have support.
You have an incredible network here through Climate Stewards.
You can reach out to that network with
questions, with ideas to get support in your communication
efforts.
There's also a network on a website called Climate Interpreter.
ClimateInterpreter.org you can go ahead and create a profile.
A lot of people on this site are familiar with
and are using a lot of these no-key strategically
framed communications.
Reach out to them with questions.
Engage in that community.
And finally, it's really important to
remember that the point of strategic framing is to
lead people towards solutions.
So by framing our communications in this way,
we're creating a sense of hope and we're allowing
people with a concrete understanding of how they can be part of the solution.
Together we have the power to inspire change.
If you're interested in learning a little
bit more about communicating climate change
than about strategic framing, I encourage
you, Frameworks Academy is created by Frameworks
Institute and they have a free online
course that goes into depth on strategic framing.
So everything we talked about tonight but with more details.
If you're interested, go ahead and go to that link on the website.
You do have to take the course and put it in your cart and then check out as if you
were purchasing the course.
But it is free so you do not have to pay for it.
You can also read the research.
Frameworks Institute puts all of their research online.
So if you're interested in hearing more about
the sample groups that they used or how they
did the experiments or when they were done,
go ahead and read the research reports online.
It's all available to you.
Yale Project on Climate Change Communication
is another really robust resource with a lot
of research on communicating climate change.
So I encourage you to go ahead on that website and poke around a little bit.
And then finally, please feel free to contact
me, Marlise Tumolo at marlise.tumolo at noaa.gov.
If you have any questions, I'm more than
happy to talk to people who reach out to me and
are interested in finding out more.
Thank you very much.
Thanks.
Thanks so much, Marlise.
You know, I would like to offer a few more
resources for folks and then actually a few
questions for you, Marlise, if you have a moment or two.
Some additional resources.
The psychology of climate change
communication, which was done a while ago through Columbia
University, is a terrific resource to use
and is really helpful in terms of having a
better understanding of how to approach
different audiences focused particularly on climate
change.
And connecting on climate.org is a wonderful resource for everybody to check out.
Marlise had mentioned the Yale program on climate communication.
In particular, after having taken a look
at it, really would suggest having a look at
the messaging section.
I think that will be very helpful for a lot of folks with resources for you.
And of course, climatecommunication.org,
their education resources, material specifically
for addressing different grade bands of students.
And with that, you know, I do have a few
questions, Marlise, that we had from some folks yesterday.
One of them, one of the questions that came
in last night was two of our staff members
participated in the NOCI and we've begun
programming focused on climate change and started to design
educational exhibits about climate change.
We did a quick survey of our participants,
including AP students, regular high school
students, middle school students, as well as families to see if they understood the
word rampant.
And I think you talked about this a little bit, Marlise.
And this woman found that less than 50% of
the people that they had pulled had knew the
word or were able to infer its definition.
Now the question is, do you think that
rampant versus regular is essential in communicating
climate change?
Is there another word you might suggest?
And how do you get over these bumps in
different education levels in different areas of the
country?
Absolutely.
When the research was done through Frameworks
Institute, they did it with American adults.
And they found that this regular versus
rampant was a concept that most of the people that
they interviewed understood.
I do think that it is--you all are experts on your particular audiences.
So I know that Frameworks Institute would say
that the research-backed method, the research
was done specifically with the metaphor as is, regular versus rampant.
So they would recommend that you keep the metaphor as it was researched.
Now moving forward, this was not researched with children.
And I think in particular, you mentioned
middle school students, high school students, and
families that were in your audience group.
And I think that with those younger
audiences, often using some descriptive words such as
"extra" or "excess" or something that they
can get a hold of and something that they
can grasp, which will help them to fully understand.
And I think what's most important is that
you all know your differences and you're able
to determine what their level of understanding is.
And I think it's important to use that
information in our communications to help ourselves fill
in those gaps in understanding.
So rely on the research-backed methods when we can.
And when we need to move beyond that to
increase understanding, I think it's important that
we do so by providing some extra explanations for
people that are having a tough time understanding
it the way it was originally presented.
Thanks, Molly.
You know, another question that came in was,
"How can you determine in advance where your
audience is?"
Sort of in quotes.
Do you think it's possible?
Yeah, absolutely.
So I think that one of the ways that we can do that is by asking questions.
We can engage our audience.
We can ask a little bit about their
background, ask a little bit about what they know before
we even start our presentations or before we even start our lessons.
And that helps us to gather a little bit of
background information on what cultural models
they're bringing to the table.
I also think that becoming familiar with
this swamp of climate communication that we
showed, ocean and climate change, those are
the most likely referenced cultural models
for American adults when it comes to climate change.
Molly, why don't you pull that back up?
I showed your screen again.
Yeah, there you go.
So these are the most referenced.
So this has actually been researched.
We know that this is what people are...
These are the ways that people are
understanding ocean and climate change, at least American
adults.
So I encourage you to become familiar with this chart a little bit.
And once you become kind of familiar with
it, you'll see that people are referencing
these.
In your conversations with them, you'll see when something pops up.
And if you see, for example, that somebody
is referencing, "Eat it while you can," in
consumerism.
So you're talking about climate change and
they say, "Well, if lobsters are going to
be gone soon, we better eat them all now."
You can kind of, through your conversation,
shift to that ecosystem's valuable resources
frame, that cultural model.
So by being able to determine where people
are in these cultural models, we can shift
to one that's more productive.
Finally, the Yale Project on Climate Change
Communication has done a lot of research with
the American public to determine how people are thinking about climate change.
So they have different audience profiles, what they call the six Americas, and they
explain a lot about those audience
profiles from demographics, age, where people tend
to live, income, et cetera, and where they tend to fall in these scales.
So I encourage you to take a look at those
because it'll give you a little bit of background
on where people could be.
And the more that we can gather information
on the research that's been done, the more
set up we are for these communications.
Thanks, Marlice.
You had mentioned earlier a little bit about
the Milky Certification process and the website.
Some of the questions that was asked was,
are there any scholarships for going through
this training?
And maybe you can describe very briefly
what the set up is for this kind of training.
Yeah, absolutely.
So I'm going to go ahead and pull my screen
down for a second because I did pull up for
you all to see.
So if you go to, you should see up on the
website up here, www.nokinocci.org, you can
find information about the National Network
for Ocean and Climate Interpretation as well
as the Study Circle.
The Study Circle is basically a learning
group with a bunch of marine science, or with a
bunch of science educators from around the
country, as well as some scientists who are
studying, most of them are studying their postdoc or their doctorate degrees.
In this Study Circle session, you do three
in-person meetings that are each four days
long.
And during those in-person meetings, you're
trained in depth on all of these strategic
framing methods of communication.
You also participate in weekly reading and
homework assignments as well as engaging in
an online community to get a richer and deeper experience.
So this is all paid for by a grant.
So if you are accepted as a participant in
the NOKI Study Circle, your travel and your
per diem and the cost of you going to the locations is covered by the NOKI grant.
So I do encourage people to apply.
If you go to the website here, you can see the application.
There's also a lot more information on the compensation, the different criteria.
You do need to apply with a partner from your
organization and you do need to have support
from your supervisor.
So I encourage you guys to check out the
website here and you can find out more information.
And the next applications – this is the last Study Circle session.
So if you're interested, I would apply now.
And the applications are going to close on May 31st.
Thanks, Martin.
You know, just look at what – I think that
we'll close with, you know, just this question
before we just go back to one of the items.
And this one educator mentions that their
site was recently involved in regional meetings
of the Nature Center staff.
And in developing sessions for the meeting,
several of the sites explicitly stated that
they didn't want the words climate change
or global warming used in any of the session
materials.
Do you have any thoughts about this or was
this kind of thing brought up during the NOKI
training?
Well, it absolutely was.
And I think that this is a concern with all of
the political nature that has been surrounding
climate change.
I think this is a concern for people often
that they are worried about saying climate
change.
When we talk about strategic framing and we
talk about filling in gaps in understanding,
it's important to remember that most of the
American public that we're going to encounter
when we're communicating or when we're
teaching about climate change are going to be people
that are a little bit confused as to how climate change is happening.
So there's a small percentage of what we
consider deniers, the people that we worry that they'll
hear climate change and they'll automatically
shut down and won't listen to any of our further
communications.
Most people are open, they just aren't understanding what's happening.
And so I think that with that view in mind,
it's really important that we help fill in
those gaps in understanding and that does
involve using the words climate change and
talking about how the climate is changing,
making sure that we give them these concrete
metaphors that they can reference for the mechanism and what's happening.
If you're interested in finding out more
about communicating with these specific audiences,
again the Yale program on climate
communication does have information on communicating with
the denier audience.
So if you encounter a lot of people that
you consider to be deniers in your work, there
is information on communicating with those audiences specifically.
But for the general public, yeah, I would
encourage us to keep using the words climate
change because this is something really big
that we're going to have to work on together
and in order to work on it, we need people to really understand what's happening.
Thanks Marlies.
That's really great.
I very much appreciate your perspective on that.
So earlier we've presented some of these
education resources and one of the things that I again
want to point out is that all of these
resources you should be able to see here on our webinar
archives page.
We've got the links to the poll which is
also on the YouTube page that you're looking at
right now.
Please take just a few short minutes to take a look at that.
Marlies' slides, her bio as well as her
email here so you can get back in touch with her.
These information slides which I have shown
are attached as well as the list of cultural
models, the SWAMP as Marlie refers to it, is
available for download as well as a framing
overview page and a reframing cards focused
on protection, responsible management as well
as metaphor reframing cards, climate's heart,
heat trapping blanket, osteoporosis and regular
and rampant CO2.
Just one of our final notes.
Save the dates, May 23rd, NOAA Climate
Stewards Book Discussion Group, Water Resources being
led by Peg Steffen.
You can find out more about it through our
listserv which you can get to and join by
going on to the NOAA Climate Stewards
webpage, just Google NOAA Climate Stewards, you'll
get right to it, as well as next Monday, June
6th, 7.30 p.m. Eastern Time, the NOAA Climate
Stewards webinar.
We'll close by again saying thank you to
Marlies Tumolo who is doing a lot of work in NOAA's
Office of National Marine Sanctuaries.
In fact, she is the education
representative on the National Marine Sanctuaries climate
team and part of her work involves creating
climate change education and communications
training for folks throughout the entire
organization which are 14 and going on possibly
more National Marine Sanctuaries across the United States.
If you're interested in more, please go to that website.
Thanks a lot for watching this and Marlies, I'll give you the final word.
Great, thank you, Bruce.
I wanted to say thank you everybody for attending
and thank you, Bruce, for hosting this incredible
community for everyone and keep doing what
you're doing and keep practicing and keep
promoting hope and we will get to a solution.
There you go.
Thanks Marlies, have a great rest of your day.
Bye bye.