There’s a really interesting author who focuses on this
Katharine Hayhoe. Worth a follow on LinkedIn especially.
She calls herself a climate communicator.
Profile on her here
With an extract that covers her key thesis below.
" At its root, she notes, the climate-change divide isn’t a disagreement about facts. “In a study of fifty-six countries, researchers found people’s opinions on climate change to be most strongly correlated not with education and knowledge, but rather with ‘values, ideologies, worldviews and political orientation,’ ” she writes. One salient problem is an aspect of human behavior that researchers have termed “solution aversion.” Solving the climate crisis will require ending our reliance on fossil fuels, which people believe would involve major sacrifice. “If there’s a problem and we’re not going to fix it, then that makes us bad people,” Hayhoe said. “No one wants to be a bad person.” So instead people are happy to seize on excuses not to take action. Most are what she calls “science-y sounding objections, and, in the U.S., religious-y sounding objections.” Hayhoe often hears that the Earth has always heated and cooled according to its own intrinsic cycle, or that God, not humanity, controls the fate of the planet. These objections can then harden into aspects of our political identity.
“We often assume that the tribes that form around climate change can be sorted into two categories: them and us. In reality though, it’s a lot more complicated than that,” she writes. She cited a study that shows seventy-two per cent of American adults agree that the weather is changing. She breaks out categories—originally defined by her colleague Anthony Leiserowitz, at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, and other researchers—of attitudes toward global warming: alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, and doubtful. Only the remaining eight per cent of Americans fall into the final category, dismissive. Hayhoe eschews the term “climate denier,” saying that she has “seen it applied all too often to shut down discussion rather than encourage it.” Nevertheless, she doesn’t spend much time engaging dismissives. “Once in a while, maybe one time out of one thousand, there’s a miracle,” she told me. But research has shown her that dismissives are nearly impossible to influence. They are also few enough that it should be possible to build political will around fighting climate change by focussing on others. The doubtful, unlike dismissives, can be swayed."