Finding the Heart to Talk About Climate
Talking about climate disruption can be difficult no matter your background. Simply delivering information is rarely enough; communicating hard truths may depend on first forming heartfelt human connections.
Climate One · Climate One from The Commonwealth Club
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Show Notes
Ever have a difficult conversation about climate? Pretty much everyone has. Knowing all the facts and figures only goes so far when talking to someone who just doesn’t agree. So how do we break through the barriers? Scientists trained to present information in a one-way lecture format face a particular challenge: they first need to unlearn old habits.
“Everybody's trying to figure out ‘how do we move past this idea that just arming people with facts will lead to a better world,’ right, because we’ve just seen that that’s absolutely not true,” says Faith Kearns, author of Getting to the Heart of Science Communication.
Kearns argues that we all need to move from an “information deficit” model of communication – where it’s assumed that the audience simply needs more information – to a relational model, where the science communicator does as much listening as talking in order to first find empathy and common ground.
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