Climate Change

Population, Consumption, and Climate: A conversation with Al Bartlett

March 14, 2012

Al Bartlett is a celebrated physics educator, and he’s right here in Boulder.  One of the things he’s well-known for is a talk that he’s been giving since the 1960′s on the simple arithmetic of population growth, and what this means for our planet.  I’ve seen that talk — Arithmetic, Population and Energy:  Sustainability 101 [...]

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The Psychology of Climate Change Communication

June 16, 2011

I’m increasingly interested in how education researchers can more effectively get their messages across, so that people act on these findings (see my post about my FFPERPS talk, Get the Word Out).   I’ve been writing a lot about climate change communication lately because climate change communicators face some of the same challenges — communication of [...]

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The importance of mental models

June 13, 2011

I wrote last week about how the metaphors we use in communication have a powerful effect on how the issue is framed and how people understand and/or are convinced by what we say. Part of the thing that is so powerful about metaphors is that they prime us to think about something in a certain [...]

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Communication and persuasion: The importance of metaphor and framing

June 6, 2011

I‘ve written here and here about climate and persuasion, and what this means for us as education reformers working to change the system from within.  Today I want to write about metaphor and framing. Framing is basically how you describe, or “frame” an issue — what is the issue, why is it important, what should [...]

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When arguments backfire: Climate change communication and persuasion

June 1, 2011

I wrote before about how skeptics of Obama’s birthright aren’t convinced by a flimsy slip of paper indicating his citizenship — that hitting a belief head-on with data generally doesn’t work.  Instead, arguments are more persuasive when they fit with someone’s previous mental models of how the world works.  Confronting a “birther” with Obama’s birth [...]

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