Ethan Swope/Associated Press
Stop me if you've heard the one about the sizzling planet.
Oh, never mind. I'm no more successful at telling jokes than many climate scientists are at getting their message out. It's not that they're bad communicators or that they don't know their stuff. It's that many of us tend to want to listen to those we already know or to famous people we admire.
One possible remedy to climate experts' communication woes? A dose of levity. A group out of the UK is pairing climate scientists with well-known comedians to try and break through the din of our digital lives and push people to action.
The traditional approach, where climate experts sound the alarm by pointing to hockey-stick growth in warming, isn't working because many people don't respond to facts, Ben Carey, one of the ad creatives behind the comedy effort, called Climate Science Translated, told Insider.
"We needed a way of bringing the science to life and telling it like it is. And that's what comedians are allowed to do," he said.
In the group's latest video, Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, says the changing climate is leading to weather events we've never seen before. Nish Kumar, a comedian, translates: "Bad weather used to mean don't forget your umbrella. Now it means possible death. 'And now the weather report — sponsored by Simmons Funeral Plans.'"
Humor is in order, Carey said, because the other messages on climate often aren't landing. "It's not coming across in a way that kind of triggers our emotions and moves us to action," he said. We're more likely to respond, Carey said, to people we like, including comedians. "They've been on TV for 10, 15 years," he said. "They've made me laugh, and now they're telling me to get off the couch and do something. I'm much more likely to do that."
But breaking through could be tough. In a Pew Research Center poll conducted about a month ago, 37% of American adults said they cared "a great deal" about climate change. That's down 7 percentage points from 2018.
In a separate survey, Americans ranked Leonardo DiCaprio as the most trustworthy famous authority on the climate crisis. And in a recent New York Times op-ed, a climate scientist said he and his colleagues were nearly out of adjectives to describe the shocking degree of planetary warming they're documenting.
Carey said part of the intent of the comedy videos is to help shift social norms. He noted that 20 years ago, many people were against gay marriage. Now, he said, in many places it's socially unacceptable to discriminate against gay couples. That type of change is possible around things like the expansion of the fossil fuel industry, Carey said.
The goal, he said, is to make pumping money into expanding fossil fuels "as bad as selling cigarettes to toddlers."
Climate Science Translated hopes to work with scientists and comedians in the US in 2024, Carey said.
Robert Gifford, a professor of psychology and environmental studies at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, told Insider there were dozens of psychological roadblocks that could prevent us from taking action — even when doing so would benefit us. Instead, short-term self-interest often gets in the way of making more logical decisions.
One way to help beef up climate messaging, Gifford said, would be to make it visual and as focused on a person's life as possible.
"Nobody cares what happens to polar bears — not really. So you can have an image of a polar bear suffering, and people say, 'Gee, that's too bad,'" he said. What's needed, Gifford said, are images from as close to that person's home as possible to drive the idea that this is happening to them, not just to their grandkids or to animals they'd see at a zoo.
