Chapter Contents
Obstacles to Addressing Climate Change
- Controversial Issues and Complex Systems
- Creating Meaningful Dialogue
- Factors That Influence How We Think
- How do People Change Their Minds?
- How Can We Envision New Systems?
- Resources
Image above by Ingrid Zabel for PRI's Earth@Home project (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license) with image from Canva
Online Resources
The website You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney, the author of the book of the same name, includes an excellent series of podcasts on logical fallacies. McRaney's book, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion, offers about how people change their minds on important issues.
See the website YourLogicalFallacyIs.com, which is titled at the top “Thou Shalt Not Commit Logical Fallacy.” The site compiles in table form information about many of the best known logical fallacies, and offers this as a poster that can either be downloaded as a pdf or ordered from the site.
The Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School offers a large selection of articles written for both academic and popular publications and blog posts on cultural and psychological issues that complicate science communication.
The website for the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication includes the various “Six Americas” reports that cluster Americans into six groups based on their attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, policy preferences and risk perceptions related to global warming. The six groups are: Alarmed, Concerned, Cautious, Disengaged, Doubtful, and, Dismissive, and the website includes resources and strategies for effective communication with these different groups. The sister site, Yale Climate Connections, “is an online news service providing daily radio broadcasts and original online reporting, commentary, and analysis on the issue of climate change,” with readings and 90 second daily podcasts that are readily usable in the classroom.