Introduction to the Research handbook on communicating climate change

Communicating climate change in the twenty-first century has never been more pressing. The science is in, the solutions known, but the communication is not nearly adequate to the gravity of the issue, and current emissions pathways are rapidly hurtling towards a climate ever more dangerous for humans and millions of species that are already being affected. Scientists know enough about climate change to advise politicians and policy makers of the scale of the problem and its solutions. The science informs global processes of arriving at climate policy recommendations by groups such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). But for many outside the most vulnerable regions, such as equatorial and small island nations, climate change is seen to be distant in space and time, even in countries with strong public interest journalism and investigative reporting. For them, most of the processes of climate change are not available to the senses, and few understand the nature of climate sensitivity – where just a small change in global average temperature, caused by heat-trapping gases from human activity, can rapidly lead to a climate that is incompatible with human settlement and an unsuitable habitat for nearly all living things. The globalization of consumer culture, and the energy-intensive infrastructure that it requires, has emancipated much of the developed world from the direct compulsion of need. But this has only been made possible by the exploitation of nature through fossil fuel energy sources that have super-charged the industrial forces of production. Or, as climate columnist George Monbiot has put it, today: ‘We inhabit the brief historical interlude between ecological constraint and ecological catastrophe’ (Monbiot 2006, p. 6). As a result of these industrial activities, humans have emitted greenhouse gases in concentrations that are changing the climate at 170 times the natural rate. What once took 8500 years to happen now takes only 50. With industrialization, the world of the Holocene – the 10 000 years of relatively stable climate that allowed human civilization to develop – has abruptly ended. Rather, we now live in the ‘Anthropocene’, where greenhouse emissions are effectively a geo-engineering of the Earth’s atmosphere, adding a dangerous amount of energy into the climate system and committing the Earth to hundreds of years of extreme climate impacts.