Climate communication: Are apocalyptic messages ever effective?

To call Jon Christensen multifaceted overstretches the prefix multi-. He is an adjunct assistant professor in UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability (or IoES), the Department of History, and the Center for Digital Humanities. At the IoES, he is also a journalist-in-residence, a founder of the institute’s Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies, and editor of its LENS Magazine. In addition, he is a senior fellow at UCLA’s cityLAB, a think tank within the university’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design, and a partner and strategic adviser at Stamen Design, which recently won the 2017 National Design Award for interactive design from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

A longtime environmental journalist and science writer – his work has appeared in the New York Times, Nature, and many other prominent print, online, and broadcast outlets – Christensen was the executive director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University before moving to UCLA. In a recent conversation with Bulletin editor in chief John Mecklin, Christensen discussed his communications-related role in a recent report from 50 researchers and scholars in the University of California system, “Bending the Curve: Ten Scalable Solutions for Carbon Neutrality and Climate Stability.” The report argues that lessons learned from the UC system’s own efforts to go carbon-neutral by 2025 can serve as at least a partial roadmap for the world’s attempts to deal with climate change.

Read the Yale Climate Connections story by John Mecklin - “Climate communication: Are apocalyptic messages ever effective?”