Adam Corner

Cardiff University | CU · School of Psychology

An integral part of the communications strategy for Working Group I (WGI) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is to support its authors, in all geographical regions, to engage a diverse range of audiences with climate change. Building upon a Communications Handbook for IPCC authors and a bespoke photo library, both produced by C...

This chapter is part of the eleventh edition of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Emissions Gap Report, published December 2020.

Britain Talks Climate is an evidence-based toolkit designed to support any organisation that wants to engage the British public on climate change. Building narratives that resonate with a diverse range of values and everyday concerns is critical for the long-term goal of deepening public engagement (and keeping it there). The research reported here...

The COVID-19 imposed lockdown has led to a number of temporary environmental side effects (reduced global emissions, cleaner air, less noise), that the climate community has aspired to achieve over a number of decades. However, these benefits have been achieved at a massive cost to welfare and the economy. This commentary draws lessons from the COV...

This report summarises topline findings from a nationally representative survey conducted in October 2019 with 1,401 British respondents to examine public perceptions of climate change, its associated impacts, and to map public support for climate change adaptation and resilience building strategies. Available free to download: http://orca.cf.ac.uk...

Climate Outreach is a team of social scientists and communication specialists working to widen and deepen public engagement with climate change. Through our research, practical guides and consultancy services, our charity helps organisations communicate about climate change in ways that resonate with the values of their audiences and builds the soc...

This research presents three case studies, through which a creative approach to developing dialogue around climate change is outlined. By working with three distinct communities and encouraging them to discuss and write poetry about how climate change affects them, we demonstrate how such an approach might be adopted at this level. By analysing the...

This report summarises and synthesises key trends, themes and findings in the field of science communication, with a particular focus on evidence from environmental and sustainability sciences. The report pays equal attention to the study of communicating scientific evidence, and the socio-political context in which science communication research i...

Despite extensive exploration into the use of language in climate change communication, our understanding of the use of visual images, and how they relate to public perceptions of climate change, is less developed. A limited set of images have come to represent climate change, but rapid changes in the digital landscape, in the way media and informa...

This report summarises the topline findings of the European Perception of Climate Change Project (EPCC), a study that gives insights into public perceptions of climate change across four major European countries – France, Germany, Norway and the United Kingdom. Research teams from each country and an International Stakeholder Advisory Panel coll...

Political orientation and ideology are amongst the most significant influences on climate change attitudes and responses. Specifically, those with right-of-centre political views are typically less concerned and more sceptical about climate change. A significant challenge remains to move beyond this ideological impasse and achieve a more open and c...

‘European perceptions of climate change’ (EPCC) is a two-year project, with the central aim of designing and conducting the first ever theoretically grounded cross-national survey of public perceptions of climate change and energy transition in Europe. EPCC is a collaboration between academic teams in four participating nations (France, Germany, No...

Possible measures to mitigate climate change require global collective actions whose impacts will be felt by many, if not all. Implementing such actions requires successful communication of the reasons for them, and hence the underlying climate science, to a degree that far exceeds typical scientific issues which do not require large-scale societal...

Over the past two decades, scholars and practitioners across the social sciences, policy and beyond have proposed, trialled and developed a wide range of theoretical and practical approaches designed to bring about changes in behaviors and lifestyles that contribute to climate change. With the exception of the establishment of a small number of ico...

Many commentators have expressed concerns that researching and/or developing geoengineering technologies may undermine support for existing climate policies-the so-called moral hazard argument. This argument plays a central role in policy debates about geoengineering. However, there has not yet been a systematic investigation of how members of the...

The linguistic frames used to describe new areas of science and technology can have a powerful effect on the way that those technologies are perceived by the general public. As geoengineering continues to attract scholarly and policy interest, a number of frames have emerged in the scientific, political and media discourse. In the current paper, we...

A long history of interdisciplinary research highlights the powerful role that human values play in shaping individuals' engagement with environmental issues. That certain values are supportive of proenvironmental orientation and behavior is now well established. But as the challenge of communicating the risks of climate change has grown increasing...

Combining COIN’s climate change communication expertise with a series of 16 interviews with leading figures from the UK media and civil society – experts on translating the science of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for their audiences – this report asks what the IPCC process would be like if it was designed to catalyse a polit...

Norms—that is, specifications of what we ought to do—play a critical role in the study of informal argumentation, as they do in studies of judgment, decision-making and reasoning more generally. Specifically, they guide a recurring theme: are people rational? Though rules and standards have been central to the study of reasoning, and behavior more...

Tackling climate change is a global challenge and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the organisation charged with communicating the risks, dangers and mechanisms underlying climate change to both policy makers and the general public. The IPCC has traditionally used words (e.g., ‘likely’) in place of numbers (‘70 % chance’) to...

Anthropogenic influence on the climate – and possible societal responses to it – offers a unique window through which to examine the way people think about and relate to the natural world. This paper reports data from four, one-day deliberative workshops conducted with members of the UK public during early 2012. The workshops focused on geoengineer...

“Damned by faint praise” is the phenomenon whereby weak positive information leads to a negative change in belief. This seemingly conflicts with normative Bayesian predictions, which prescribe that positive information should only exert a positive change in belief. We argue that the negative belief change is due to an inference from critical missin...

Increasing concerns about the narrowing window for averting dangerous climate change have prompted calls for research into geoengineering, alongside dialogue with the public regarding this as a possible response. We report results of the first public engagement study to explore the ethics and acceptability of stratospheric aerosol technology and a...

This chapter discusses responsible innovation in relation to geoengineering as a practical example, through the examination of empirical work derived from an upstream engagement exercise on the topic of geoengineering with members of the public. The chapter details what geoengineering is, very briefly, what public attitude and engagement work has a...

Inspired by the principles used to market physical products, campaigns to promote pro-environmental behaviour have increasingly emphasized self-interested (for example, economic) reasons for engaging with a self-transcendent cause (that is, protecting the environment). Yet, psychological evidence about values and behaviour suggests that giving self...

‘Scepticism’ in public attitudes towards climate change is seen as a significant barrier to public engagement. In an experimental study, we measured participants’ scepticism about climate change before and after reading two newspaper editorials that made opposing claims about the reality and seriousness of climate change (designed to generate uncer...

Proposals for geoengineering the Earth's climate are prime examples of emerging or 'upstream' technologies, because many aspects of their effectiveness, cost and risks are yet to be researched, and in many cases are highly uncertain. This paper contributes to the emerging debate about the social acceptability of geoengineering technologies by prese...

Despite the overwhelming body of evidence showing that human activity is altering the global climate, debates about climate change are characterised by an enormous amount of uncertainty. Some of this uncertainty stems from the science itself: important questions about the extent and impact of climatic changes remain unanswered. More uncertainty ari...

Geoengineering—the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change—is receiving an increasing amount of attention from academics, policy and civil society stakeholders, and members of the general public. This article reviews the available literature on perceptions of geoengineering, includ...

During early 2010, the first series of major UK public engagement events on geoengineering took place – and were described in a report titled ‘Experiment Earth?’ The events were designed to provide an opportunity for members of the public to engage with these emerging technologies at a very early stage...This working paper reflects on the framing,...

Social marketing is the systematic application of marketing concepts and techniques to achieve specific behavioural goals relevant to the social good. Social marketing approaches are becoming increasingly popular among governmental and non-governmental actors seeking to engage the public on climate change. The effectiveness of social marketing in a...

Verbal probability expressions are frequently used to communicate risk and uncertainty. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for example, uses them to convey risks associated with climate change. Given the potential for human action to mitigate future environmental risks, it is important to understand how people respond to these ex...

Argumentation is pervasive in everyday life. Understanding what makes a strong argument is therefore of both theoretical and practical interest. One factor that seems intuitively important to the strength of an argument is the reliability of the source providing it. Whilst traditional approaches to argument evaluation are silent on this issue, the...

Public debates about socioscientific issues are increasingly prevalent, but the public response to messages about, for example, climate change, does not always seem to match the seriousness of the problem identified by scientists. Is there anything unique about appeals based on scientific evidence-do people evaluate science and nonscience arguments...

Damned by Faint Praise" is the phenomenon whereby weak positive information leads to a negative change in belief. However, in a Bayesian model of belief revision positive information can seemingly only exert a positive change in belief. We introduce a version of Bayes' Theorem incorporating the concept of epistemic closure. This reformalization is...

In a recent article in Argumentation, O’Keefe (Argumentation 21:151–163, 2007) observed that the well-known ‘framing effects’ in the social psychological literature on persuasion are akin to traditional fallacies of argumentation and reasoning and could be exploited for persuasive success in a way that conflicts with principles of responsible advoc...

How well we are attuned to the statistics of our environment is a fundamental question in understanding human behaviour. It seems particularly important to be able to provide accurate assessments of the probability with which negative events occur so as to guide rational choice of preventative actions. One question that arises here is whether or no...

Slippery slope arguments (SSAs) have often been viewed as inherently weak arguments, to be classified together with traditional fallacies of reasoning and argumentation such as circular arguments and arguments from ignorance. Over the last two decades several philosophers have taken a kinder view, often providing historical examples of the kind of...

Recently Oaksford and Hahn (2004) proposed a Bayesian reconstruction of a classic argumentation fallacy -Locke's 'argument from ignorance.' Here this account is extended to what is probably the most well-known of all argumen-tation fallacies: circular reasoning or 'begging the ques-tion'. A Bayesian analysis is shown to clarify when and where circu...

The slippery slope argument (SSA) is generally treated as a fallacy by both traditional and contemporary theories of argumentation, but is frequently used and widely accepted in applied reasoning domains. Experiment 1 tests the hypothesis that SSAs are not perceived as universally weak arguments. The results provide the first empirical demonstratio...