Cinematic climate change,a promising perspective on climate change communication

The Day after Tomorrow

Until The Day after Tomorrow was released, the ascendance of environmental struggle as a key position on the social and political landscape was largely unreflected in popular science fiction films (Podeschi, 2002). Thus, entertainment movie The Day after Tomorrow makes use of global warming in a specific way, where climate plays “a role” in dramatic action and a new relationship between society and the environment is provided. The film makers suggested that the film might increase awareness about climate change among an international audience. As Kirby (2011) demonstrates, the main science consultant of the film, Michael Molitor, had little concern over the accuracy of the scientific knowledge, but was instead primarily interested in using the film to raise awareness of the issue.

Scientific community responses to the film were mixed. Hart and Leiserowitz (2009) focused on the increase of information seeking behavior about climate change fostered by the theatrical release of the film and concluded that the film created a teachable moment of heightened interest and concern. Von Burg (2012) demonstrates that the scientific commentary surrounding the film shapes new, productive avenues of public scientific discourses. However, much has been said with regard to the fear-inducing representations of climate change (O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole, 2009), and the exaggerations and false scientific facts of the film (Murray and Heumann, 2009; Reusswig et al., 2004). Although The Day after Tomorrow conveys a strong political message regarding politicians’ responsibility for climate change inaction and the film’s depiction of global warming’s political elements rang true for scientific observers at the political frontline (Kirby, 2011), Salvador and Norton (2011) argue that the film undermines calls for public action, as it lacks any mention of climate change mitigation and strips from its heroes any linkage to environmental activism or any modeling of communal activity.

Five independent studies carried out a pre/post-test survey on filmgoers before and after watching the film in United States (Leiserowitz, 2004), United Kingdom (Balmford et al., 2004; Lowe et al., 2006), Japan (Aoyagi-Usui, unpublished), and Germany (Reusswig et al., 2004) in order to investigate the impact of The Day after Tomorrow on people’s perception of climate change. Overall, the results indicate a plurality of different ‘audiences’, with differences in cultural, social, and political perceptions of risk and climate change, but in more general terms, the film did increase awareness and concern about the potential effects of climate change and had positive, although short-lived, effects on willingness to act. German viewers appear to be the more engaged, with a significant “self-selection effect” (Reusswig and Leiserowitz, 2005). German viewers, also, perceived the film as more or less realistic. On the contrary, UK viewers recognized the film as fiction and not as science, as they do not trust Hollywood films as a credible science information source. The film has stimulated learning effects to German, UK and US viewers about the multiple dimensions of climate change. However, for viewers in Germany, United Kingdom, and Japan, there was uncertainty about the likelihood of such events actually occurring. Moreover, German and UK viewers felt dislocated from the events depicted. It seems that viewers experienced a change in their mental model of climate change due to the uncommon scenarios provided by the film. Only US viewers express an increase of perceived probability of climate change, because the film has reached a less concerned and informed audience (Lowe, 2006). Longevity of respondents’ perceptions of climate change was only measured in the United Kingdom by Lowe et al. (2006) and in Germany by Reusswig et al. (2004). Researchers found that the sense of urgency about climate change had diminished weeks after watching the film. Individual contributions to address climate change appeared weakened and a major role is ascribed to public policy.

An Inconvenient Truth

Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is described as a documentary that skillfully frames global warming as a problem we share but can solve together (Murray and Heumann, 2009). Through the use of catastrophic discourse, Gore does not simply report science but presents his personal experience with the severity of climate change and directly gives information about how the viewers can adopt environmental friendly behaviors. Climate change communication theorists and practitioners have long and heatedly debated about the effectiveness and accuracy of the film (Mieszkowski, 2006; Svoboda, 2011). Rosteck and Frentz (2009) argue that by emphasizing scientific accuracy, political polarization, or self-aggrandizement, critics focus on the wrong aspects of the film and, ultimately, An Inconvenient Truth encourages real world action by using an effective combination of personal narrative, scientific demonstration, and political jeremiad. However, it is because of the film’s failure to resolve the issue of truthfulness, that discourse of accuracy becomes problematic (Mellor, 2009), along with a perspective of truth that narrows understanding of the subjective uncertainty of climate change discourse, the diversity of opinions, and opportunities for citizen involvement in climate change policy (Russill, 2011). Still, it seems that critiques of the film do not matter at all in terms of its impacts on scientists, who gave positive evaluations to the film (Farnsworth and Lichter, 2012; Mazur, 2009). This may explain why climate change communication scholars did not examine An Inconvenient Truth’s effects on audience climate change perceptions and reports on the film’s impacts are found in other fields rather than in climate change communication.

Environmental psychology scholars assessed the effectiveness of An Inconvenient Truth as a motivation tool toward the adoption of environmental behavior. Despite the film’s strongly advertized power of altering behaviors, findings showed limited behavioral effects. More specifically, in the United States, Nolan (2010) observed differences between those filmgoers who already cared enough to spend leisure time watching a lecture about melting polar ice caps, and university students who might not otherwise choose to see the movie. Participants in both groups were significantly more concerned and more knowledgeable about global warming after seeing An Inconvenient Truth, and the film led to an increase in their willingness to reduce greenhouse gases. However, 1 month after the initial movie showing, Nolan (2010) checked self-reported behavior of students and found that their increased willingness to act did not necessarily translate into actual behavior. In the United Kingdom, Beattie et al. (2011) used highly informative and emotional clips from An Inconvenient Truth to measure mood states as well as social attitudes and cognitions. Beattie et al. (2011) found that the clips did affect emotion; in particular, they decreased the happiness and calmness of participants, but they also felt more motivated to do something about climate change. However, the study did not examine the longevity of the effects.

Based on Ajzen et al. (1996) view that willingness to pay for a public good depends on the quality of the arguments used to describe the good, environmental economics scholars Jacobsen (2011) and Morisson and Hatfield-Dodds (2011) examined the relationship of media and willingness to pay in the context of climate change following the release of An Inconvenient Truth and found, also, mixed results. Jacobsen (2011) tested whether An Inconvenient Truth was effective in encouraging individuals to act toward climate change mitigation by examining one specific behavior, the purchase of voluntary carbon offsets through two datasets, a list of zip codes where the film appeared in a theatre and a record of carbon offsets purchased following the film’s release. Jacobsen (2011) found that the film caused a 50% increase of the purchase of voluntary carbon offsets within a 10-mile radius of a zip code where the film appeared, but the effect did not persist for more than 1 year. Morisson and Hatfield-Dodds (2011) used general population longitudinal surveys to identify the effect of increased media climate change reporting because of An Inconvenient Truth, the Stern Report, and drought in Australia, where public support for action to address global climate change is high. Results demonstrate that after the release of An Inconvenient Truth and Stern Report, increased information caused weakly engaged supporters to disengage and strengthened more engaged respondents to express higher support to high-cost action.

The Age of Stupid

The Age of Stupid uses dramatic images, real-life stories, and cartoon animations to engage viewers in climate change mitigation. It received media attention but little academic attention. This may be attributed to the fact that the film did not gain the kind of international box-office success that the other two climate change films did. The film was a hit in United Kingdom and was launched with red carpet premieres in New York, Auckland, New Zealand, and Sydney, Australia. The film, without benefit of large distribution networks, was distributed with great success through a new Indie Screenings Model, which allows anyone, anywhere to buy a license to hold a screening of the film. ¹

The Age of Stupid addresses viewers openly from the opening credits, appeals strongly to their emotions by mixing documentary images of existing geographical spaces in the present with those of an imaginary and dystopian ecological space in a fictional future, in order to remind them of their ethical responsibility for the cultural and ecological spaces that are still to come (Weik von Mossner, 2013). Similarly to The Day after Tomorrow, drama-documentary The Age of Stupid uses fictional fear-inducing representations of climate change, and unlike An Inconvenient Truth does not directly give information about how viewers can respond to global warming. The film was described as a “much sterner and more alarming polemic than An Inconvenient Truth” (Holden, 2009). However, claims have been also made that the film ignores the illogic of human–environmental interaction (Bryant, 2009a) and pushes the complexity of climate change issue into a black and white narrative, while the whole premise of the film implies that people who do not engage in low carbon behavior are stupid (Bryant, 2009b).

Howell’s work on the effects of the film on UK audience perceptions of climate change provides evidence of the longevity of respondents’ perceptions, several weeks after the release of the film and a year after watching the film (Howell, 2011). Howell found that the film raised levels of concern and motivation to act, but this was no longer in evidence 10–14 weeks after the release of the film; the actions or behavioral changes in which respondents were most often engaged are those requiring less effort, money, or time; and the engaged and highly educated respondents in this study believe that climate disaster exaggerations depicted by The Age of Stupid could happen. One year later, Howell (2012) provided a follow-up finding that participants persisted with changes made, but there is a question of the reliability of causal self-attributions of behavior.

The deficit model

In the films cited here, the processes by which climate change is framed are based on the idea that public ignorance or irrationality is the main reason for the inability to address climate change. In this regard, these particular representations of climate change were shaped by the assumption that given the facts, the public has to accept the message. However, simply presentation of the facts is not in itself persuasive (Appel and Richter, 2007).

Many communication efforts are motivated by an approach that has become known as the “deficit” model, that inaccuracies in media, or other information sources erode scientific literacy, and that corrections can bolster public knowledge (Kirby, 2003), but the literature suggests that science literacy only accounts for a small fraction of the variance in how lay publics form opinions about controversial areas of science (Allum et al., 2008; Dunwoody et al., 2009; Sturgis and Allum, 2004). Research on environmental behavior suggests that although knowledge is necessary, simply providing the facts will not lead to great behavior change (Hines et al., 1987; Hungerford and Volk, 1990).

But “knowledge deficit” is also a “trust deficit” (Alaszewski and Brown, 2007; Stebbing, 2009). Under conditions of uncertainty, public trust in the risk communicator is one of the most important explanatory variables of public perceptions of risk (Slovic, 1999). Trust involves a confidence that both the process and the outcome will exhibit fairness, competence, and efficiency (Lofstedt, 2003). Ignoring the experiential knowledge and values of the community creates a regulatory system that works well in terms of technical and economic efficiency but is trusted less (Alaszewski and Brown, 2007).

The issue of trust

Trust is an important factor of climate change communication. Lowe et al. (2006) found that audiences of The Day after Tomorrow appeared to believe that the kinds of extreme impacts portrayed in the film were science fiction and thus deemed more unlikely, as expectations in terms of type and delivery of information of a fiction film are different to those of a documentary. Therefore, extreme climate change representations of the dramatized documentary The Age of Stupid appeared to have authority and legitimacy, the disaster framing of the film would be interpreted differently, and as Howell (2011) demonstrates, the film has been perceived as realistic.

Trust is connected with legitimacy and, as two fundamental sources of scientific legitimacy are disinterestedness and the promise of objective and reliable knowledge (Pellizoni, 2005), it seems that the legitimacy that characterizes popular, celebrity-spectacle-oriented documentaries may have a role to play in reinforcing existing environmental behavior. Research suggests that audiences of An Inconvenient Truth and of The Age of Stupid who were already very engaged with the climate change issue either persisted with behavioral changes they made (Howell, 2012) or expressed higher support to high-cost climate mitigation public policies (Morisson and Hatfield-Dodds, 2011).

However, while trust entails legitimacy, the opposite is not true (Pellizoni, 2005). Despite the perceived legitimacy of documentaries in climate change communication, the impact of their persuasive attempts is not always the expected one, as messages trigger resistance to persuasion when fear is used as communicator.

Fearful framing

Science consultants who work on disaster films are motivated by a belief that the scientific issues on which they are working are so important to the future of humanity that it justifies calling attention to these issues by any means necessary, such as apocalyptic narratives or exaggerating the impacts of cinematic disasters (Kirby, 2011).

The science-based question has moved beyond whether the climate is changing, carrying with it the responsibility to create space for both the “yes” and “no” side (Boykoff and Boykoff, 2004), to science-based discussions of “what will be the effects of an already changing climate?” (Good, 2008), and in this regard, science consultants advocated the use of fear and catastrophe narratives to represent climate change consequences, a strategy commonly used in the field of climate change communication (Doulton and Brown, 2009; Hulme, 2008; Moser, 2007). However, as it appears from previous studies (Lowe, 2006; O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole, 2009), it is difficult to sustain fear in the long term, so fear-based climate change representations are unlikely to have long-lasting impacts.

Protection Motivation Theory (Rogers, 1983) reports that fear appeals need to be combined with solution messages in order not to trigger maladaptive defensive responses, but both the mixed success and short-lived effects of An Inconvenient Truth indicate that fearful framing is not the most appropriate method for engaging people with climate change, even if individuals are encouraged to adopt specific behaviors. Fear of a climate disaster seems greater than feelings of agency. Also, fear is not a powerful motivator when used as primary framing in other media. Research in US news media coverage of climate change indicates that the dominant framing of impacts and actions included threat information about climate change, following the structural biases of journalists that favor drama and conflict, making it unlikely that this coverage will motivate public engagement (Hart and Feldman, 2014).

Fear as a communicator carries a risk of disengagement. On one hand, less informed US viewers who were unaware of the harmful effects of climate change, disaster framing of The Day after Tomorrow increased their concern and likelihood that they would take action to mitigate climate change. This finding is consistent with moral norm activation theory (Schwartz, 1977), which suggests that information about the negative impact of a behavior can lead a person to change the behavior, especially when the issue is not already salient to the target audience (Obermiller, 1995). On the other hand, increased information taken from An Inconvenient Truth, along with other powerful and fear-inducing interventions at the time of screening, caused less engaged members of the Australian public to disengage (Morisson and Hatfield-Dodds, 2011).

Also, a recent study in the environmental psychology field (Greitemeyer, 2013) indicated that climate change skeptic films had a significant negative impact on concern for the environment, but the fear-framed, climate change–affirming films did not have a significant, positive impact on concern for the environment. ² Despite the limitations of the study, the results reveal that reassuring, skeptic films have a relatively stronger impact than distressing, climate change–affirming films. It may be that fear does not trigger consideration, rather apathy toward future consequences of climate change.

Overall, fear and catastrophe framing of cinematic climate change failed to inspire audiences to effectively engage in climate change mitigation, perhaps due to a lack of a deeper understanding of the dialectic process of media effects on society by climate change communicators. This “dialectic” implies that frames, the interpretive storylines that communicate what is at stake in a societal debate and why the issue matters (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989), resonate with the lay-mental model, prevailing social norms, assumptions, and practices (Chomsky, 2002; McChesney, 2008). Responses to those frames are combined with knowledge, attitudes, values, self-efficacy beliefs, personal experience, outcome expectancy, and culture, ending in “bottom-up” alternative frames that may gain greater influence in the debate surrounding issues such as climate change (Nisbet and Scheufele, 2009).

Brulle (2010) argues that a shift to an effective, civic engagement environmental communication campaign implies a shift to the use of Schwarze’s (2006) “environmental melodrama,” along with messaging procedures that involve citizens directly in a broad-based democratic discussion to establish common goals. Environmental melodrama, the circulation of emotional stories illustrating the scope and nature of an environmental issue, is a rhetorical genre, a distinct form of speech, used particularly by Schwarze (2006) and Kinsella (2008) to clarify issues of power and the ways advocates moralize environmental conflicts (Cox, 2012). Melodrama can put the inaccuracy of scientific language on display and highlight its potential blindspots (Schwarze, 2006); melodrama may enable audience members to evolve toward behavior change, through a reordering of public consciousness and a restoration of a moral frame that mediates or affects public understanding of climate change science. Popular, narrative films are powerful tools of this dramatic revelation of moral and emotional truths, as they “go broad,” generating attention and interest among non-elite audiences (Nisbet and Scheufele, 2009) and thus provide opportunities for progressive behavior change at larger scale.

The audience

Research findings confirm previous studies that people who are concerned expect the consequences to be dramatic (Henry, 2000; Lowe, 2006). The more engaged viewers perceive the portrayal of extreme, unlikely impacts of climate change as science, more than a product of artistic imagination. In Germany, Reusswig et al. (2004) report that The Day after Tomorrow reached filmgoers who were already aware of the climate change issue, and the vast majority of them believe that although the film is exaggerated, it is realistic. Similarly, Howell (2011) reports that the engaged and climate literate respondents of The Age of Stupid perceive as real the uncommon scenarios the film communicates. Results are consistent with past research regarding the importance of prior beliefs in reactions to frames (Andrews et al., 2013).

Audiences are not homogenous. Evidence suggests that responses to climate change communication efforts differ from country to country and from less engaged to more engaged members of the public. Effect studies reaffirm media studies literature, which demonstrates that individuals do not passively receive messages (Hall, 1980) but actively participate in constructing the meaning of the stories they consume (Ball-Rokeach et al., 1984) and that audiences’ responses to a film may be very different from country to country because of historical, religious, and social factors (Kitzinger, 2004, 2010). Although effects studies do not investigate gender differences in public responses to global warming films, gender may also be an important factor of film interpretation as women are said to express greater climate change knowledge and concern than men (McCright, 2010).

Although audiences’ responses to movies depend on prior beliefs of either skeptic or engaged viewers, movies also attract increased news media coverage that in turn has a serious influence on individuals’ climate change beliefs (Gavin and Marshall, 2011), film texts interact with other digital, social media texts, and this enables individuals to generate a multiplicity of applications, repurposing and reversioning (Blewitt, 2011), while educational initiatives use movies as valuable starting points to pique students’ interest in complex issues (Saldana, 2009). In this regard, cinematic climate change may offer an attractive set of opportunities for public engagement toward climate change mitigation.