End climate silence: The most important thing you can do to fight global warming

People often ask me what is the most important thing they can personally do bring about climate action. The answer is both simple and hard: Talk about climate change and its solutions with everyone you know a lot more than you are doing now.

The need to have more conversations about an uncomfortable subject is, I believe, one of two crucial messaging lessons the climate movement can learn from the LGBT community. The other is to focus on the immorality of inaction.

The result, according to experts on climate communications at George Mason University (GMU) and Yale University, is a “spiral of silence” in which “even people who care about the issue, shy away from discussing it because they so infrequently hear other people talking about it — reinforcing the spiral.”

I think it’s even worse than that. Humans use many shortcuts to deal with the overwhelming amount of information we must process (see Nobelist Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow).

Read the ThinkProgress story by Dr Joe Romm - “End climate silence: The most important thing you can do to fight global warming.”