‘The Science Is Clear’: Why the Climate Crisis Needs New Narratives
To counter climate denialism, new narratives are needed. For decades, the dominant story about global warming has leveraged scientific interpretations of historical data and statistical modeling to tell apocalyptic stories about what will happen—or what is already happening—if societies fail to act: more catastrophic storm events, larger wildfires, hotter summers and rising seas. These stories are grounded in both scientific fact and observable reality. But they have proven inadequate to not only the challenge of communicating environmental science in the context of anti-science but also the need to speak to diverse and often divergent experiences of the climate crisis. This talk will identify alternatives to the data-driven doomsday story of climate change.