It’s been a week since the United Nations released an exhaustive report on climate change. I’ll wager that few people have read the entire report unless it’s been their full-time job. At 1,300 pages, the climate report would have taken the average reader 43 hours to finish.
Despite the massive size of the document and its technical conclusions, it sparked a global conversation across thousands of news articles and social media posts, in addition to a daily mix of experts weighing in on television news.
How the U.N’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) presented the document is a case study in translating complex information for non-experts.
Provide Bite-Sized Headlines
A fundamental rule of translating complexity is, of course, to keep it simple. How? Don’t make readers work too hard to find key messages. Instead, make it easy by providing headlines that are short, digestible, and bite-sized.
Within minutes of the report’s release on August 9, writers around the world used the same word to describe its main conclusion: “unequivocal.”
“Unequivocal that human influence has warmed the planet.” – ABC News
“It is unequivocal: Humans are driving worsening climate disasters.” – Buzzfeed
“Scientists reach unequivocal consensus on climate change.” – Bloomberg
The word “unequivocal” was so uncommon that Google searches for its definition spiked 300% after the report’s release. The word came from the first line of the IPCC’s Headline Statements. It reads,
In addition to “unequivocal,” another statement captured the headlines even though it does not appear in the final report. The phrase is “Code red.”
“IPCC report is code red for humanity” — BBC
“U.N climate change report sounds code red for humanity.” — Reuters
“U.N report warns climate change is code red for humanity.” — NBC News
Once again, the headline was handed to reporters. U.N. Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres said the analysis represents a “code red” for humanity. “The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse‑gas emissions from fossil-fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.”
It should be no surprise to regular readers of my column that metaphors like ‘code red’ and ‘alarm bells’ would grab headlines. I’ve written about metaphorical language as one of the most powerful and irresistible tools of persuasion. Since your readers and listeners think in metaphor, use these figures of speech to communicate complex topics.
Build Complexity in Layers
The IPCC report provided 14 headlines, the first layer of content. A 42-page summary provided the next layer of complexity.
For example, more details followed the headline, It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.
According to the report, “Observed increases in well-mixed greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations since around 1750 are unequivocally caused by human activities. Since 2011 (measurements reported in AR5), concentrations have continued to increase in the atmosphere, reaching annual averages of 410 ppm for carbon dioxide (CO2)…”
If the headline had started with the news that greenhouse emissions have reached “410 ppm” (parts per million), few people would have understood its implications and even fewer would have written about it or shared it on social media. The details support the headline statement.
The second headline reads, The scale of recent changes across the climate system as a whole and the present state of many aspects of the climate system are unprecedented over many centuries to many thousands of years.
What, exactly, does “unprecedented” mean in the context of climate change? The next layer of information provides the answer:
“In 2019, atmospheric CO2 concentrations were higher than at any time in at least 2 million years…”
Readers of complex material need to see the big picture before diving into the details. For most people, the 42-page summary provides more than enough information. But for policymakers and scientists, there’s an even deeper, far more technical layer of analysis that fills out the remaining 1,300-page report.
The robust research behind the IPCC’s latest report should get more people— even previous skeptics—to agree that climate change is happening and that humans are responsible for it. The fact that much of the world’s population is experiencing the effects of record-setting heat in the form of droughts, fires and other catastrophes will serve to highlight the report’s urgency.
A far greater challenge in my opinion, will be to convince people to accept climate change solutions, all of which have pros and cons as well as unintended consequences. According to Bill Gates in How to Avoid a Climate Crisis, “Virtually every activity in modern life—growing things, making things, getting around from place to place—involves releasing greenhouse gases,” The bad news, he says, is that things will get worse if we do nothing. The good news, however, is that we have many of the tools we need to avoid the worst outcome—and we can build on what we’ve learned to invent cleaner technologies.
Effective communication must accompany every step of the process if we hope to align people around clean energy solutions—communication that’s simple, clear, and understandable. As a communication coach who has worked with executives at major energy companies as well as climate experts and scientists, I believe the messaging that surrounds climate change will play a critical role in how effectively countries, corporations, and consumers adopt vital and increasingly urgent solutions.