Communicating about Climate Change: The Technical and Public Spheres

This semester, I'm teaching COMM499: Public Controversies, a class that I started as a part of a Provost's Fellowship. As a part of the foundational theory weeks (before we delve into specific topics and controversies), we are discussing sphere theory. Sphere theory involves categorizing different arenas where communication occurs. G. Thomas Goodnight theorized three communication arenas, the public sphere, the private sphere, and the technical sphere. I will first briefly explain these concepts before exploring a recent news article that caught my attention on the complexity of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) environmental reports. I argue that these reports are not targetting their intended audience, the public, and are instead retaining too many characteristics of the technical sphere. The UN needs to better bridge the gaps between the technical and the public sphere to increase public understanding of the severity and risks of climate change. Removing jargon and becoming more accessible can help remove the stigma of elitism from science and encourage people to engage themselves more with the science.

For additional discussion of the spheres and climate change, look up Mosley-Jensen's book.

The public, private, and technical spheres have their own standards for engagement with communication and often happen with different scopes, effects, and speakers. The public sphere is so named because it is the arena where the public, people, and politicians communicate about topics in general, accessible language. An example of a communication activity in the public sphere would be President Obama's State of the Union, which is a speech given to the general public about topics of great impact. The private sphere involves more intimate communication between smaller groups of people often not accessible to the public. Conversations between couples, family members, or employees and bosses would be considered private, because they have limited public impact. These conversations may also include situation-specific language, such as inside jokes or personal references. The technical sphere is made up of experts that have a standard, formalized discourse that often includes specified jargon and expectations. Legal jardon and law journals are an example of technical discourse, aimed at a specific, expert audience with advanced knowledge of a particular field.

Cartoon retrieved from this site.

In writing climate reports aimed at the general public, the UN is participating in what I call "bridging," where technical knowledge is translated into public discourse. Information created and anlayzed in the technical sphere is transferred to the public sphere. The article in question summarizes the conclusions of linguistics scholars Barkemeyer, Dessai, Monge-Sanz, Renzi, and Napolitano in their 2015 analysis of UN reports between 1990 and 2014. The analysis focused on the readability of the summary section of the reports aimed at policymakers and the public. The authors focused on the complexity of the vocabulary and sentence structure as potential barriers to public understanding. Compared to the readability of tabloid papers (50+ on their scale) and even scientific magazines (30+ on their scale), no IPCC reports surpassed 30 and the most recent barely hit 15. There is evidence that these reports have become increasingly unreadable, making it difficult for the general public to understand the IPCC's analysis and its implications.

Retrieved from Tollefson from the original article in Nature

The article noted that the IPCC is considering adding more members to the board to improve readability or potentially providing better communication training for the summary's writers. In my graduate research on the rhetoric of science and scientific controversies and membership in the Earth Sciences Communication Intiative, I have found that scientists are often more concerned with their own analysis instead of making the content accessible to the public. The jargon used can be off-putting and even unintentionally misleading. For example, my partner is a graduate student in physics and I am often asked to edit his papers. One example of jargon that has repeatedly stuck out to me is the use of "trivial." When my partner calls a result "trivial," he is indicating a specific standard of statistical impact, whereas I read the term with a disparaging and dismissive tone. Because these articles are often written with experts in mind, they also often gloss over important background knowledge or comparative statements that would elucidate the importance of the results. This writing style is appropriate for the technical sphere, but could potentially lead to misinterpretations by the public and can become fodder for climate skeptics.

Image retrieved from this site.

Scientists should pay more attention to how they communicate. Whether that involves creating stronger bridges and training people to go-between, or including communication courses in science programs, Even including more sign-posting types of summaries, such as the chart above, would help clearly and succintly communicate the important take-a-ways for the reports. I think more problems would be minimized if attention to the ways people understand and process information were increased.