If you want to tap into public concern about rising temperatures, severe weather, ocean acidification, and all the other problems and impacts associated with fossil fuel burning, it’s better to talk about “global warming” rather than “climate change,” according to a study released earlier this week by Yale and George Mason Universities. Across key demographic groups in the U.S., “climate change” is associated with greater certainty that the problem is real, greater understanding that humans are the primary cause, more intense worry about the issue, and a more immediate sense of personal threat. Problem is…climate change is about so much more than warming, and I’ve yet to see any online commentary on the risk (or even the ethics) of sacrificing accuracy for reach. Anyone interested in some informal message testing around a brand new term like, maybe, “global warming and climate change”? As Yale and GMU suggest on the cover of the report: “It’s complicated.”
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