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Public understanding of climate change terminology

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Abstract

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other institutions communicate about climate change to diverse audiences without a background in climate science, including the general public. The effectiveness of these communications depends in part on how well the presented terminology is understood. In qualitative interviews, we examined how US residents interpreted key terms drawn from IPCC reports, including tipping point, unprecedented transition, carbon neutral, carbon dioxide removal, adaptation, mitigation, sustainable development, and abrupt change. We recruited twenty participants with diverse views on climate change from a nationally representative sample. We identified common themes and misunderstandings. Overall, 88% of the themes arose by the tenth interview, and no new themes arose after the seventeenth interview. Mitigation, carbon neutral, and unprecedented transition were perceived as the most difficult to understand. Adaptation and abrupt change were perceived as the easiest to understand. However, even if a term appeared to be understood, participants were not always clear about how it applied to climate change. Participants tended to draw on their mental models of non-climate contexts where terms had different meanings. Reading the terms in the context of sentences taken from communication materials was not always helpful due to the use of complex language. Based on participants’ interpretations and the science communication literature, we provide suggestions for communicating about each term. Generally, recommendations are to simplify wording, make links to climate change explicit, and describe underlying processes. Our findings are relevant to climate change communications by the IPCC and other institutions.

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Notes

  1. To check the readability of a document in Microsoft Word, go to File > Options > Proofing and turn on “Select readability statistics.”

  2. Six participants (30%) referred to “emissions” though one participant deemed that term confusing due to its association with “exhaust emissions” (interview 15).

  3. The sentence also used a “c” that participants guessed was Celsius (interview 12), though they noted that it would have been easier for an American audience to understand if it was changed to Fahrenheit (interview 5).

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Acknowledgements

This project is a collaboration between the University of Southern California and the United Nations Foundation. This research was supported by the University of Southern California Dornsife College Public Exchange. Wändi Bruine de Bruin was additionally supported by the Center for Climate and Energy Decision Making (CEDM) through a cooperative agreement between the National Science Foundation and Carnegie Mellon University (SES-0949710).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sol Price School of Public Policy, Dornsife Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Wändi Bruine de Bruin

  2. Center for Economic and Social Research, Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, United Nations Foundation, Washington, DC, USA

    Lila Rabinovich

  3. Public Exchange, Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, United Nations Foundation, Washington, DC, USA

    Kate Weber & Marianna Babboni

  4. United Nations Foundation, Washington, DC, USA

    Lance Ignon

  5. Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, United Nations Foundation, Washington, DC, USA

    Monica Dean

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  1. Wändi Bruine de Bruin
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  3. Kate Weber
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  4. Marianna Babboni
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  5. Monica Dean
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  6. Lance Ignon
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Correspondence to Wändi Bruine de Bruin.

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This article is part of the topical collection "Climate Change Communication and the IPCC", edited by Saffron O'Neill and Roz Pidcock

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Bruine de Bruin, W., Rabinovich, L., Weber, K. et al. Public understanding of climate change terminology. Climatic Change 167, 37 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03183-0

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