The timing of climate reports and communication to the public

 “The immense collective effort to produce periodic climate assessments is typically not 

well matched with public communication and outreach efforts for these reports, leaving a

 vacuum to be filled by less authoritative sources.”

-Peter C. Frumhoff

Despite the numerous climate reports released every year by many organizations, the pubic is still not convinced by the science. Ekwurzel in 2011 et al. from the Union of Concerned Scientists, delved into this a bit deeper and found that perhaps it was the shear timing and outreach and communication efforts made to publicize them!  

The paper looks in depth at many reports and how exactly they were released but a good example of a bad choice of communicating and releasing an important report is when the first US NCA report was released in November 2000, when every US news station was focused on the Presidential election.

NCA = National Climate Assessment released in November 2000; ACIA = Arctic Climate Impacts Assessment released in November 2004; WG1 = IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) Working Group 1, released in February 2007; WG2 = IPCC AR4 Working Group 2, released in April 2007; USGCRP = Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States released in June 2009; ACC = America’s Climate Choices released in May 2010; GW = Global Warming; CC = Climate Change

(Some of this information was covered in a previous post of mine, including Boykoff 2011.)

It was interesting that the ACIA covers cryospheric impacts far from where the population live and low media coverage of climate change, but received greater total and proportional coverage (17%!) than the USGCRP Assessments, or the America’s Climate Choices.

it was (nicely) surprising that WGI and WGII media coverage were still significantly higher 

than the controversy in 2010 (of the Himalayan glaciers disappearing) than they 

propagated. It was such a big issue and is still talked about today, so it goes to show that 

even if something negative is not widely released, its magnitude of controversy can 

cause it to percolate through the public ears and take a very long time to be forgotten with 

time. 

Boykoff M (2011) 2000-2011 US newspaper coverage of climate change or global warming. Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. 

Ekwurzel, B. 2011. Climate uncertainties and their discontents: increasing the impact of assessments on public understanding of climate risks and choices. Climatic Change. 108. 4, 791-802.http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-011-0194-6

National Assessment Synthesis Team (2001) Climate change impacts on the United States: the potential consequences of climate variability and change, report for the US global change research program. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.