ClimateBites
a climate communication toolkit
Make Your Climate Message Stick 
ClimateBites offers metaphors, soundbites, quotes, humor, cartoons, stories and graphics for everybody who talks about climate change and wants their message to stick.
Tobacco executives testifying
Oil executives testifying
My gracious host during the AGU in San Francisco was a veteran of the tobacco wars, so we had some interesting chats. Many people consider the tobacco battle won, but it’s actually just shifted to new fronts.
There are many lessons to be learned from the fifty-year battle with Big Tobacco, Continue reading
I’m on my way to I’ve now arrived in SF for the annual tribal gathering of earth scientists. I am still amazed that I was able to blog in flight. If progress on climate change mitigation advanced at 1/20th the pace of telecom technology, we’d have licked this problem long ago. Continue reading
Note to self: When discussing climate, forget about far-off predictions. Focus on what’s already arrived: extreme downpours and drought. Record-breaking droughts are making dry places dryer, with wildfires following right behind. Meanwhile, record-breaking rains are making the wet places wetter, causing flooding. Among the first victims: Continue reading
After watching this little clip* I can’t get the image of black CO2 balloons out of my mind. Now that’s sticky messaging. Try it.
We usually stop dumping waste into our air and water only when we can see it or — better yet — smell it.** Continue reading
Here’s NASA’s Dr. Gavin Schmidt in “The Secret Life of Scientists” (NOVA) revealing how he started juggling in high school to impress girls. . . and how that worked out. The other clips on his PBS/NOVA page are a bit more serious, but equally impressive as models of effective communication: Continue reading
If scientists taught preschool.
“Even if you have reams of evidence on your side, remember: numbers numb, jargon jars, and nobody ever marched on Washington because of a pie chart. If you want to connect with your audience, tell a story.”
“While we will always need hard facts to make our cases, we often fail to realize that the battle for hearts and minds starts with the hearts.”
That’s storytelling guru Andy Goodman, in his Continue reading