Issue 18
Talk like a human. Save the world.
This week we wanted to pull back and share a newly published guide to talking about climate change. After almost four years of message testing, our team got together and put our top learnings in one place. It represents years of insights into climate change communication and what truly helps messages connect with real people.
It’s called “Talk like a human.”
Seems obvious enough. We all do it. Most of the day. Every day. We’re ordinary people who talk to our friends, families, colleagues, and people we meet using normal, straightforward language. We try to find connections with one another and we bond over shared values.
But something strange happens to many of us when we start talking about climate change and how to fix it: we stop talking like humans and start dropping in terms like “anthropogenic,” “decarbonization,” and “1.5 degrees.”
That’s a problem, because the kind of urgent, global action that we need to address climate change isn’t going to happen unless ordinary people are motivated to act on a large scale.
Refining climate language is central to this work, helping communicators replace technical jargon with clear, human-centered ways of speaking about solutions.
Our team has run the numbers, and we’ve seen patterns of what works and what doesn’t. Now, we’ve published a guide compiling our latest suggestions for how to communicate the threat of climate change, encourage people to demand action, and inspire them with the progress we’re already making. We’ll keep learning, and so we will also keep updating this.
Here are a few highlights:
- Climate isn’t an adjective. Climate jobs, climate action, climate this, climate that. Regular people don’t talk this way. When you do, you sound like you have a particular agenda to many people.
- No one cares about global temperatures. 1.5 degrees is a small number. When we asked people across the globe how much they thought the UN said was a safe limit, they said 4 degree celsius!
- We care about what we experience. We have found that if within five words of saying the term climate change you always add an actual “felt consequence,” message salience soars. “The climate changing is causing extreme fires.” “The climate changing is reducing crop yields and raising food prices.
Please share this guide.
If part of your job is communicating about climate change, this is for you — and regardless, you can help us get the word out. Read the full guide, Talk Like a Human: Lessons on How to Communicate Climate Change, share our LinkedIn post, or put it on your own networks and help your friends and colleagues do a better job connecting with people about climate change.
Article by John Marshall and Jessica Lu
John Marshall is the founder and CEO of Potential Energy. John advises global leaders on strategies to effectively communicate about climate solutions, and is a frequent industry commentator and speaker. John’s innovative approach to building public support for climate action is informed by his 30+ years of experience advising the leaders of Fortune 500 companies on branding and marketing.
Jessica Lu is Associate Director of Strategy and Analytics and leads Potential Energy’s Insights Lab. She leads teams that execute hundreds of message tests and focus groups and perform in-market measurement analytics to unearth what motivates humans to care about climate change. Jessica graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering.
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