2018 Conference

Individual Paper Presentation

Communicating the risks from global climate change effectively, so as to elicit responses that mitigate these risks, needs to overcome two distinct but interrelated barriers: the risks are not immediate and their description comes almost exclusively from scientific analysis.  Communicating the risks from global climate change is essentially scientific communication.  Conventional scientific communication (i.e., peer-reviewed articles and books, lectures, and science journalism) is explicitly designed to access and engage the human intellect.  This type of communication, however, is not effective in eliciting risk mitigating responses.  Risk perception research conducted over the past twenty years has revealed that risk perception is characterized by a dual process in which rational-analytic thinking is preceded by and, ultimately, shaped by experiential-affective response.  Neuroscience research has further shown that all decision-making processes are based on an integration of affective and analytic responses.  Effective communication of the risks from global climate change requires first enabling the subjects to visualize the risks and then eliciting an affective response from them.  Only then will the intellect be engaged to generate risk mitigating action.  We propose that a solution to the problem of legitimating the scientific research on global climate change with segments of society that do not accept its findings and, furthermore, engage those who do accept the research findings in a more proactive response to mitigate the risks from climate change, requires accessing people’s experiential and affective/emotive systems.  It is these systems that translate reality into images, metaphors, and, ultimately, narratives.  The primary means that humanity has for creating affective meaning is not science but, rather, the arts, including literature, the performing arts, visual arts, etc.  In this paper we describe the ways in which the arts (our specific focus is literature) can explore the risks from global climate change and elicit responses that mitigate these risks.