Communications that are based on our emotional response to a problem rather than our rational or informational needs are called “fear appeals.” They are called that because they try to take advantage of our fear of a problem to get us to act.

Global Warming: Worry. worry VERY much

Cover reviewTIMWell, April 3, 2006

You will die of old age; I will die from climate change

Anonymous climate protester

Climate change poses some potential danger to both human and non-human life. But perhaps the most pressing danger is one we hear very little about: the rise of climateism and its ideological army, the Green Church. All the social, political, environmental and meteorological phenomena facing the world today – from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to wildfires, from floods in Europe to terrible blizzards in North America – are rapidly becoming “climatized” through so-called attribution studies that explain, that they are caused by climate change. When complex political and ethical issues are viewed so narrowly, stopping climate change becomes the central political challenge of our time, and everything else becomes subordinate to that single goal.

As I’ve documented in a series of previous articles, climateism has grown in popularity in recent years, becoming so pervasive and well-entrenched in public life that it’s increasingly difficult to expose it without being branded a climate denier. We face this dangerously myopic vision every day, which reduces the state of the world to the fate of global temperature or the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, at the expense of giving serious attention to other, more diverse and priority issues such as poverty, health, education, terrorism, freedom etc.[1] We have come to live as if only the climate determines our present and future.

Today we live in an atmosphere (sic!) of fear for the future of our climate. The language of public discourse about anthropogenic global warming (natural warming is out of the question) regularly uses a vocabulary full of words such as “catastrophe,” “apocalypse,” “emergency,” “extinction,” “terror,” “red code”. “, “danger”, “collapse”, etc.

But discourses about the fear of climate change are not, as one might think, a media invention of recent decades. In fact, to present them in a broader temporal perspective, I must mention the existence of at least three types of discourses, culturally determined and historically positioned.[2]

1. Climate as a heavenly sentence (fear of unknown causes)

Weather has been an important part of the religious narrative throughout the ages. Extreme weather events (droughts, storms) have long been interpreted by premodern people and cultures as signs of divine judgment, a situation that still persists in many traditional societies. The fears caused by those extreme events were caused by ignorance and misunderstanding of the real, natural causes. Example: burning at the stake “witches” who during the Little Ice Age (1500-1650) caused abundant and persistent cold, and therefore hunger and disease.[3]

This kind of fear was removed, or at least tamed, by the acceptance of naturalistic explanations of meteorological phenomena.

2. Climate as a pathology (fear of the unknown)

From the 16th century to the 19th century, European explorers discovered new populations and climates, such as tropical, desert, polar, different from what was known before. The classification of tropical climates as dangerous and threatening was closely woven into the discourse of acclimatization – could white Europeans live and survive in a ‘hostile’ climate? This is how the moral classification of tropical climates appeared, in addition to the existing geographical ones, proposed by Humboldt or Köppen.

There is no such fear among Europeans anymore. But tropical climates and developing countries are generally considered dangerous and deadly to their own native inhabitants. When some climate studies talk about millions of inhabitants who are at risk, they are in these regions.

3. Climate as a catastrophe (fear of the unknown future)

Here we are in a well-known and relevant place – the discourse of fear and danger increasingly dominates the portrait of anthropogenic global change or its image of “global warming” as a planetary catastrophe.

What is very little known and even less mentioned for propaganda reasons are the statements of scientists with which the beginning of modern research on global warming is associated. I will give only two significant quotes:

Svante Arrhenius wrote in 1906 that global warming would allow future generations

to enjoy epochs of a fairer and better climate, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth, epochs when the earth will produce far more abundant crops than at present, for the benefit of the rapid growth of mankind.[4]

Similarly, in his classic 1938 paper in which he first linked the global warming trend to increasing CO2 concentrations, Guy Callendar argued that

warming is likely to benefit humanity in several ways; in addition to providing heat and electricity… it would help increase agricultural production and indefinitely delay the return of deadly glaciers.[5]

If the first two types of discourses about negative emotions caused by climate change – fear of unknown causes and fear of unknown places – have been substantially destroyed (not completely eliminated), the fear of a future in which climate change is a possible catastrophe increases. a few vital questions: Can we defuse this modern discourse of climate fear, ubiquitous and dangerous? Or, on the contrary, are we doomed to live forever with the sword of climate catastrophe hanging over our heads? Is it possible to somehow overcome this fear, the disease that destroys many meridians, according to the mottos chosen for the article and the many examples that readers could find in my articles in recent years?

Appeals to fear

One possible answer is to identify and characterize fear appeals in climate change communications: what are they, how do they appear, what are their characteristics, how dangerous are they, what can be done to destroy them?

Communications that are based on our emotional response to a problem rather than our rational or informational needs are called “fear appeals.” They are called that because they try to take advantage of our fear of a problem to get us to act.

Fear appeals are persuasive messages that attempt to induce fear by highlighting the potential danger and harm that may befall people if the suggestions in the message are not followed.

For fear appeals to be effective, both threat assessment and adaptive response assessment must be included. A threat appraisal must include a serious situation to which a person feels vulnerable, whereas a threat response appraisal includes the component that causes its effectiveness.

[Pentru ca frica să stimuleze] there must remain some hope of salvation in regard to what men worry about. A sign of this is that fear makes people think, although no one thinks about hopeless things.
Aristotle, Rhetoric350 BC
(trans. trans. according to the edition of J. H. Freese)

Aristotle’s suggestion, made more than two millennia ago, would be worth following: for fear to successfully persuade people to think and act about a problem, they must also be given a sense of hope that their problem can be solved. According to the quote above, appeals to fear make people feel hopeless. In turn, this impasse will make people reluctant to delve deeper into the problem to find a solution. Inspiring hope, Aristotle suggests, may be the key to preventing this rupture. 2,300 years later, modern communication researchers have built on Aristotle’s ideas to develop a psychological framework that explains the need to counter appeals to fear with recommendations for specific actions.[6]

Case in point: appeals to fear on magazine covers Economist2005 – 2022

The mass media of recent decades – television, movies, newspapers, magazines, blogs, social networks – are the main vectors (some would say the main viruses) that carry climate fear appeals, a clear demonstration of the third type of discourse briefly described above: Climate as a disaster or fear of an unknown future. There are plenty of examples to illustrate my point above – I’ve described at least two dozen myself over the past few years.

Climate communication scholars recognize the importance of visual representations in shaping perceptions and actions related to specific aspects of climate change. Unlike other media, including newspapers, television, and film, research on the visual representation of climate issues in magazines is sparse.

The first attempt was published in 2013, where the covers of the respective magazines were analyzed time from 1923 to 2021. The authors used a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analysis to examine how “nature and environmental issues,” including global warming, were represented in 312 covers.[7]

The second attempt was published in 2021. The author analyzed 9 covers of a well-known business magazine Economistpublished from 2005 to 2016.[8]

Since I myself used the cover of a well-known magazine to illustrate an article published in 2018 (The “Hot” Myth: Global Warming and Fires), I decided to conduct, for the first time in Romania, a third study and a longitudinal analysis of fear appeals presented textually and visually, on 14 magazine covers Economist (US edition) published between 2005 and 2022 (Fig. 1). Read more at Contributors.ro