Top-of-mind climate comms resources

A big part of talking climate is learning and adapting how we talk climate.

Life gets crazy busy out of nowhere sometimes, don’t it? No time to stop neglecting the post planned for this week. Instead, here’s a quick list of some climate communication resources that have been truly valuable for me.

If you’re an educator or profesh communicator, depending on what age levels you’re interested in reaching, the Yale program on climate change communication has a good page of free pdf resources for educators targeting kiddos and teens.

For a handful of topics, eg connecting data to storytelling, there are 2 versions, one for educators, one for students. so that’s nifty.

And for stats specific to communication, their data visualizations section is stacked.

From a lecture by Dr Alex Gardner of JPL.

On the other end of the spectrum, a colleague recently pointed me to quico toro’s newsletter, one percent brighter. On topic after topic, toro manages the feat of using small words to unpack big ideas without oversimiplifying anything. Also his voice is peronal and engaging and sarcastic as hell.

His post lies, damn lies, and climate solutions is a near-perfect mini-homily on one of the biggest challenges facing climate communication: climate friendlies love talking about well-funded climate solutions that don’t matter because they don’t scale. And, as Bill McKibben memorably put it, “winning slowly is the same as losing.”

How much is ten billion tons, anyway?

Imagine all the weight of all the crude oil extracted worldwide over an entire year. Now double it. You’re still not quite at 10 gigatons.

Or add all the cement produced in a year, then double it, then add all the steel produced: you’re still 100 million tons short.

If your head is swimming now, that’s the point. It’s horribly uncomfortable to try to think at this scale. But we have to, because too much of our climate conversation happens at the wrong order of magnitude. Or, worse, without any awareness of orders of magnitude at all.

That’s how you end up with a point-missy climate discussion that goes nowhere.

Bonus points to Toro for a) going to the Ocean Visions summit (Brad Ack and his colleagues are building real momentum) and b) getting obsessed with a favorite soapbox of mine: ocean fertilization.