Communicating Scientific Climate Knowledge

Communicating Scientific Climate Knowledge With Action in Mind

By Jackson Howarth

Volume 27, no. 1, Rethinking Science Communication

Image credit: NASA

 

During a 2019 visit to the U.S. Congress, Greta Thunberg was asked why we should “trust the science” that underpins our understanding of climate change. She replied with characteristic incredulity—the answer apparently self-evident—“it’s just something everyone should do, this is not political opinions, this is science.” Still, today many people continue to doubt, dismiss, and deprioritize scientific climate knowledge, and corresponding action is noticeably lacking.

Improving communication is one obvious lever available in this paralyzing polycrisis. So many people have now become part-time climate communicators, stomaching a conversation with a family member here, reeling off a post there. Still, most of us tend to rely on largely unconsidered and often ineffective techniques when communicating climate relevant knowledge (including, as we shall see, “diffusion deficit” assumptions and methods), which can intensify miscommunication and ultimately, disengagement. Surely, we should communicate more intentionally and take the time to more carefully understand various eco-audiences, using the latest psychosocial research (long leveraged to grease the wheel of consumerism).

Though we might often lack the channels to persuade those who wield disproportionate power, effective climate communication can shape the political context in which recently emboldened Western climate skeptics and their fossil-capitalist allies operate.1 With the right strategies, we can more effectively influence public opinion, wooing those who deny or distrust, facilitating necessary behavioural changes and support for climate-positive initiatives, as well as encouraging people to challenge fossil-energy projects and other harmful endeavours. Targeted engagement should also aim to draw climate believers further into the fold; to ward off fatigue as we continue to engage and understand new developments; to increase relevant knowledge; and crucially, to encourage, facilitate, and inform effective action.

Scientific Climate Communication and the Deficit Diffusion Model

It’s worth clarifying the kind of knowledge communication that will be the focus of this article. Knowledge is difficult to define. There are many ways of knowing, all of which tend to have some basis in experience (questions of innate knowledge aside).2 There is our seemingly personal, blurry, introspective awareness of thoughts and feelings. There is knowledge inferred from our senses. Knowledge, or knowing, is not only embodied, but emplaced in culture, space, and time.3 This article will focus on scientific climate knowledge. Specifically, the evidence, theories, models, and predictions that underpin climate action. The type of knowledge inferred from the aggregated experiences of so many experts, which are critical in the face of a crisis so much bigger than one human experience can hold.

Science communication theory says much about the way we conceptualise scientific knowledge, its transmission, and how this shapes audience engagement. When communicating the scientific why of climate action, we often uphold a “deficit” or “deficit diffusion” model. Despite being  spurned by many science communication theorists, this model continues to be used by many scientists and science communicators and accepted by the public.

On one level, the deficit diffusion model describes an understanding of the way scientific knowledge is produced, transmitted, and received. It says that scientific knowledge is produced exclusively by scientists and diffused in a linear, one-way manner to be received by a passive, homogenous public. In this model, the public  is seen as having a “deficit,” because they immediately lack the newly created knowledge in question.

The deficit diffusion model argues that scientific knowledge spreads because it is uniquely capable of lining up with objective reality (i.e., it has epistemic privilege). The public are considered ignorant but rational actors, who will accept rational knowledge when they encounter it. If scientific knowledge is dismissed, this model argues that audiences were inadequately exposed to it, that careless communicators (“popularizers”) diluted the knowledge, or that the audience lacks the prerequisite knowledge (or intelligence). In the 1980s, a series of studies found the public to be illiterate with regard to scientific words and facts, processes, and policy issues. The proposed solution was yet more exposure (i.e., education and communication).4

On another level, the deficit diffusion model can also be used to describe structures for communicating that reinforce this set of assumptions. For example, the way that scientific knowledge can be seen as “diffusing” from the scientific realm first through journals, conferences, and teaching; then trickling down to the public via the mainstream media such as newspapers and television or social media.

These assumptions and structures continue to define the communication of scientific climate knowledge, maintaining a one-way, deficit diffusionist character.5 Frequently identified as boring, uninspiring, and fatiguing, deficit diffusionist styles and tones continue to be the predominant method of climate communication. This style often manifests as cold, repetitive content, punctuated by decontextualized statistics, jargon, and equations. For example, the new hottest temperatures or lowest sea ice levels, as well as messaging that reflects an authoritative position that science must be trusted with no further explanation, as argued by Thunberg above.

Informing Climate Communication with Contemporary Models

More recently, communication has come to be seen as central to scientific knowledge making. Adopting a “Knowledge in Transit” model, James Secord argues that we “need to think about knowledge making itself as a form of communicative action.”6 Theorists such as Secord contend that a claim cannot become scientific knowledge unless it is communicated and upheld by an audience.

Consequently, knowledge production is no longer seen as the sole purview of scientists working in a vacuum, scientists and science communicators no longer solely preside over its transmission, nor is the public painted purely as a passive receiver of knowledge.7 Production, reception, and transmission begin to blur, reframed as part of a wider participatory communicative process. Scientific knowledge is constantly produced and reproduced, interpreted and reinterpreted. As it moves between actors, its meaning changes as people engage.

Here, the idea of reception undergoes a dramatic reconceptualization. The public becomes neither a passive receiver of information, nor a rational actor. Abandoned is the argument that the audience fails to understand or support certain knowledge claims because of non exposure. Instead, closer attention is paid to the audience itself.

Knowledge engagement (rejection, assimilation, reconstitution, and reproduction) must now consider people’s values, their capacity to engage, their experience with relevant framings and narratives, other “collectively constituted discursive resources,” and a range of other factors.8 For example, a range of political positions and priorities guide climate engagement and compete with corporate efforts to manufacture uncertainty.

Science communication theory converges with other areas of study. Psychosocial communicative research aims to identify and group audience segments according to climate-related attitudes (the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication is a good example).9 Segments might include children in school and people who have somehow avoided much climate messaging; those who are looser and less polarized in their opinions; those who are unsure about, dismiss, or deny anthropogenic climate change; those who believe in climate change, but view it as distant or not particularly serious; and those who are alarmed.

Research suggests that bespoke, segment-tailored messaging often proves more effective than non-tailored communication. Though compelling messages and strategies for communicating and framing scientific knowledge may sometimes overlap across segments, messaging that brings one person closer to action might simultaneously push another away.10 This becomes especially relevant given the proliferation of online echo chambers, opening avenues for customized, albeit often one-way, communication. For example, when communicating the why of the climate crisis, preliminary research suggests uncommitted individuals respond favorably to messages “that focused on preventing losses and had strong emotional content,” while “alarmed” audiences favor a “local focus and collectivist framing”.11

We must think about how to better communicate scientific knowledge within a climate justice framework. This is generally less challenging when engaging audiences who are already “pro-climate,” given a closer alignment with broader political values. However, using justice-oriented messaging to frame climate issues remains value volatile, with the potential to polarize.12 There is a tendency within activist circles to want to say the right thing no matter the audience. Yet what proves effective may well vary. Here, we might consider employing a ‘stepping stone’ approach to framing messages and narratives. In another leading exploration of climate-audience segmentation, Hine et al. argue that although segmented communication can exacerbate polarization, when performed with care, segmentation can still be used to coalesce  audiences around potentially polarizing topics, like climate justice.13

We sorely need more research that applies a theoretical lens to better understand effective segment-specific audience engagement. Research that applies a range of psychosocial theories could help us better understand the interplay of different combinations of audience positions and test and guide what messages, framings, and methods  work best to change opinions and behaviors.14 Even back in 2008, Andrew Darnton compiled more than 60 social-psychological theories and models that relate to audience engagement  and behavioral change, an early addition to a growing treasure trove of material about theory-driven audience segmentation research.15

To these ends, we should champion alternative, non-deficit diffusionist knowledge transmission structures. Evidence suggests that non-linear, non-hierarchical, participatory, or discursive setups make it easier to align conceptual messaging frameworks with audience values. This could make for more effective climate engagement, especially as we come to understand how our audiences respond to messaging around behavior change.16 Settings including citizen science, community meetings, citizens’ assemblies, and community gardens could prove useful for effective audience engagement. It is important to remember that these venues are also vulnerable to being captured, guided, and defined by neoliberalism.17

Even if assumptions about public knowledge deficit are abandoned, some top-down diffusionist thinking in climate communication may be inevitable. Audience engagement is time-constrained, and communicators must often act within persistent diffusionist media structures. Moreover, persuasion remains an unbalanced communicative act; even within participatory communicative structures, the climate communicator hopes to engender support for claims and framings regarding priority and what constitutes effective action. Still, we must not let urgency or frustration impact our ability to better understand and engage with the public. However we communicate, we can make an effort to avoid deficit diffusionist thinking and associated styles.

Communicating Climate Science with Realist and Anti-Realist Framings

One of many understudied elements of effective climate communication, especially when it comes to segmented audiences, concerns whether we present underlying scientific knowledge claims as being absolutely true or scientific methodologies as being capable of telling objective truth.18 If assumptions around the epistemic privilege of scientific knowledge (compared to other kinds of knowledge making) are generally understood to underpin deficit-diffusionist assumptions regarding science communication, it seems reasonable that these assumptions may inform the content and structure of those communications and so impact audience reception.19

Today, scientific realist messaging frameworks in science communication continue to portray our best scientific knowledge as more or less uniquely able to refer to that which is absolutely, objectively real, and thus remain central to shoring up an authoritative perspective in science communication. This faith in the epistemic privilege of science is often underwritten by certain understandings of the scientific method. Early twentieth century verificationist conceptualizations described how a belief becomes knowledge when justified by evidence that proves or “verifies” that a said belief lines up with reality.20 Later, falsificationists argued that empirical evidence can be used to whittle away false theories and so still approach truth. Most contemporary scientists espouse a scientific realist perspective.21 Climate communication tends to do the same—often framing climate knowledge as verified by evidence and absolutely, objectively true. For example, take the popular yard signs visible during the 2024 U.S. presidential election that read: “In this house[…] we believe[…] Science is real.”22

Disingenuous, often politically or economically motivated challenges to scientific findings, including climate research, are also common. However, challenges to scientific realism have also emerged from those who study science and scientists themselves. Scientific ‘anti-realists’ argue that science cannot tell the absolute truth. One popular argument involves highlighting the numerous evidence-backed and productive theories that scientists once upheld that are now considered false and asking whether our current theories are consigned to the same fate.23

Complementary criticisms originated from the radical scientists of the Social Relations of Science (SRS) movement, which emerged in the 1930s and continues today.24 Scientists in the SRS movement stress that scientific knowledge is not merely shaped by the contours of the phenomena that scientists study but by the particular political, economic, and cultural environment where  knowledge is produced. These scientists aim to guide the production of socially beneficial knowledge and subsequent applications. To similar ends, scholars working to repair relations with Indigenous Knowledge Systems increasingly reject positivist, realist framings which enshrine Western scientific knowledge to the exclusion of other ways of knowing.25

There are several perspectives that attempt to reconcile anti-realist and socially-minded ideas with climate science, while upholding or even shoring up confidence in scientific knowledge and preventing a slide into relativism. These may also prove useful for framing science-relevant climate communications. For example, anti-realist instrumentalists suggest that it is impossible to know whether theories align with reality exactly but that scientific theorizing, experimenting, and modelling can still produce useful knowledge within a given context.

For example, scientists make predictions (often increasingly accurate), which in turn result in utility and credibility.26 Scientists and science communicators should propose alternate theories and question evidence, but we must do so wisely. It is important to acknowledge that when proposed theories (including those that challenge major climate theories) cannot account for or predict phenomena with the same power as existing evidence, they should be considered lacking compared to other theories that can.27 Instrumentalism simultaneously recognises that knowledge is shaped by culture and that a theory’s utility is always social, while maintaining that science communicators still don’t have freedom to make whatever we want of reality.

It is worth testing whether instrumentalist messaging frameworks might prove more effective than scientific realist frameworks when communicating scientific climate knowledge to certain audiences. Instrumentalism might encourage communicators to avoid authoritative, circular, realist, deficit-diffusionist claims that science should be believed no matter what, because it is “true,” along with other preachy realist language.  For example, in an instrumentalist framing, evidence might be said to “back up” and “support,” rather than to “prove.”

More broadly, an instrumentalist framework may encourage engagement around how climate scientists produce climate knowledge: how evidence is gathered; why it should be trusted and how to evaluate competing theories, models, and evidence, especially in terms of predictive power.28 It may make sense to move away from outright attempts to persuade, and focus on giving people the necessary tools to be able to come to their own conclusions. Non-diffusionist, participatory communicative structures could prove especially useful here, too.

We might imagine how this could benefit  fledgling students, in particular, and others who rarely engage with climate media, if we present engagement with knowledge, not as something preachy, but as something inviting and contestable that we all take part in and shape together. This may also be a beneficial approach to those audiences who argue that climate change is real but that climate science does not uphold the same standards as other sciences.29 We should similarly explore audience engagement among uncertain audiences and climate deniers, and watch for a reduction in support of scientific climate ideas among traditional climate change “believers.”

Surely the benefit of framing knowledge making, not as something absolute that scientists create and people should consume, but as a contextual act that we do together is worth exploring. Especially if there is a chance that this process could help preserve confidence in climate knowledge, open the door to other useful ways of coming to know, and shift the focus to action. How should we make, communicate, and act on scientific knowledge? 

On Knowledge and Action

Effectively engaging the public with the scientific environmental knowledge that underpins climate action remains essential for a wide range of audiences, especially climate deniers, the uncertain, and the unexposed. Carefully framing scientific knowledge to align with audience values is vital for bringing those who underestimate the urgency of the climate crisis closer to action. Better science communication tactics are also useful for engaging active and alarmed climate believers. As “doomer” messaging ricochets around green echo chambers, rarely finding its target and likely proving ineffective even when it does), it feels more important than ever that science communications be designed to inspire, to guide, and to emphasize agency. How can we best balance optimism, realism, and urgency? How does mixing different mediums affect engagement? We still have much to learn.

If the production of knowledge is shaped by culture, it speaks volumes that most of the already scarce, behavior-oriented, climate communication research focuses on individualized energy consumption rather than more direct, system-oriented behaviors, including voting, protesting, picketing, and vandalism.

How much research has explored the impact of heavy policing on forms of direct climate action, for example? And if communication is a form of action, is action, too, not inherently communicative? Is it not telling that scientists have yet to explore such questions as how different audience segments respond to anonymous damage to fossil-infrastructure as compared to climate vandalism where activists own up? Where establishment science refuses to act, knowledge gaps may be filled from below.

After focusing predominantly on the core scientific climate knowledge that underpins the why of climate action, it’s important to remember that scientific knowledge can influence climate action in other ways. Improving communication around evidence-based science is one clear example. Still, tug hard enough on questions around why we should act and they unravel further; beyond exploring why carbon emissions heat the planet—who is disproportionately responsible (and vulnerable), what are their methods and their motives, where should we apply pressure? Ultimately, the making of scientific knowledge, like all forms of knowledge, is an active process to be communicated and embodied. It must not merely inform why we should act, but how.

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Jackson Howarth: Jackson Howarth is an environmental writer who specializes in energy, water, and climate communication. He is currently the editor of the award-winning independent climate magazine, It’s Freezing in LA!
Instagram: @jackson.howarth

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Notes

  1. More research into engagement via the ‘science-policy interface’ is sorely needed, especially in increasingly polarized political environments, yet our focus here is on engaging public audiences.
  2. For more on this, see Science For the People’s “Ways of Knowing” Issue, 2024.
  3. Even our most ‘personal’ knowledge comes through culturally constituted lenses. You might say “the weather is hot today” which, if overheard, I might understand as being ‘true’ enough. Yet even here, meaning, both intended and shared, is deeply context-dependent—true according to roughly agreed frames of reference (beyond subjective experience, what we mean by weather, heat, and how much is normal has changed much over the last two centuries, for example). Environment: A History of the Idea, Paul Warde, Libby Robin (Sverker Sörlin, 2018).
  4. Molly J Simis, et. al. “The Lure of Rationality: why does the deficit model persist in science communication?” Public Understanding of Science (2016) 401; Jon D. Miller, “Scientific Literacy: A Conceptual and Empirical Review.” Daedalus 112, no. 2 (1983): 29–48.
  5. Brianne Suldovsky, “The Information Deficit Model and Climate Change Communication,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science (2017).
  6. James A. Secord, “Knowledge In Transit,” Isis, (December 2004). 661.
  7. About production: scientific knowledge is also produced by the public, including important forms of local and Indigenous Knowledge, and even when undertaken by scientists, it is shaped by public reception. Where transmission is concerned, Steven Hilgartner argues that it is impossible to gesture to the place where science becomes ‘popularized’ as it diffuses (and so to blame popularizers for ‘failed’ communication) because communication is a continuum and no such place exists. Stephen Hilgartner, “The Dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Problems, Political Uses,” Social Studies of Science 20 (1990): 519–39.
  8. Hunting and “knowledge of the land” were used to frame the impact of an extremely mild winter in two subarctic towns in Canada. Wolf et al. “Values, Climate change, and Implications for Adaptation: Evidence from Two Communities in Labrador, Canada,” Global Environmental Change, (April 2013). 548–562. See also Hanson-Easey, S., Williams, S., Hansen, A., Fogarty, K., & Bi, P. (2015). Speaking of Climate Change: A Discursive Analysis of Lay Understandings, Science Communication, 37(2), 217-239. , (February 2015).
  9. “Yale Program for Climate Communication,” Yale School of the Environment, accessed March 12, 2025, https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/.
  10. Suzanne Moser, “Communicating Climate Change: History, Challenges, Process and Future Directions” WIREs Climate Change, (2010) 31–53.
  11. Hine et al, “Enhancing Climate Change Communication: Strategies for Profiling and Targeting Australian Interpretive Communities.” National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility: Gold Coast, 2013.
  12. Jennifer Carman, “Americans’ Support for Climate Justice,” Yale Program For Climate Communication, (January 2025).
  13. Hine, D. W., Reser, J. P., Morrison, M., Phillips, W. J., Nunn, P., & Cooksey, R. (2014). “Audience Segmentation and Climate Change Communication: Conceptual and Methodological Considerations,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 5(4), 441-459. The authors warn that segmented messaging can increase polarization, and merely encourage ‘shallow’ behavioral change, for example, where purely monetary rewards for climate positive behaviour are emphasised and woven into communication structures (with the potential to simultaneously reinforce capitalistic values that harm the environment).
  14. We might learn from the transtheoretical model of medical communication, for example, which concerns guiding divergent audience segments to common desirable endpoints involving behavioural change, resting upon a foundation of scientific knowledge. Hine et al. (Audience Segmentation).
  15. Andrew Darnton, Reference Report. An Overview of Behaviour Change Models and their Uses,” Centre for Sustainable Development, University of Westminster (United Kingdom, 2008).
  16. James T. Erbaugh et al, “Communication and Deliberation for Environmental Governance,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources, (2024).
  17. Chloë Webster, “Our Community Gardens are Ripe for Radical Knowledge Production,” It’s Freezing in LA!, 2025. Still, citizen science programs can also be designed for greenwash and to outsource research from which value then can be extracted, just as citizens’ assemblies can be used to justify business-as-usual policies. See Philip Mirowski, “Against Citizen Science,” Aeon, 2017, and Kothari and Cooke, “The Tyranny of Participation,” Bloomsbury, 2001.
  18. Raimund Pils and Philipp Schoenegger, “Scientific Realism, Scientific Practice, and Science Communication: An Empirical Investigation of Academics and Science Communicators,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 105, (June 2024), 85.
  19. Brianne Suldovsky, “Communicating Who Knows What in Sustainability Science: Investigating the Role of Epistemology in Science Communication and Engagement,” University of Maine, 2016. Similarly, the power, and resources that the diffusionist approach keeps open to scientists also likely contributes to the persistence of the diffusionist model. Simis et al. p.402 and p.409. From within a diffusionist model, calls for more education and more exposure tend to shore up scientists’ role and position within society.
  20. Most descriptions of the ‘scientific method’ involve a series of repeated steps, such as: hypothesize, predict, observe, and analyse. Still, there is not one agreed scientific method, and scientific knowledge is often produced by breaking these rules. See Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, 1975.
  21. Pils and Schoenegger, “Scientific Realism,” 87.
  22. Signs of Justice, “We Believe Yard Sign,” https://www.signsofjustice.com/products/we-believe-yard-sign, accessed March 12, 2025. Here a common deficit-diffusionist tendency to ambiguously frame science as either a static body of inarguable knowledge, or an infallible practice, simultaneously.
  23. Steven French, “Science: Key Concepts in Philosophy,” Continuum, October 2007.
  24. Robert Maisley, When Science Met Socialism, Tribune, December 2020.
  25. Kavita Philip and Sigrid Schmalzer, “Old Contradictions and New Possibilities in Marxist and Indigenous Praxis,” Volume 26, no. 2: Ways of Knowing, (Winter 2023).
  26. Increasingly accurate predictions don’t necessarily mean science is approaching ‘absolute truth’—we can’t know if we’re getting accurate results for the reasons we think we are. After all, experimental evidence is ‘theory laden’— understood through the lens of existing theory.
  27. Steven French, “Science: Key Concepts in Philosophy,” Continuum, October 2007.
  28. There is perhaps a valid criticism to be made here that this merely shifts the focus from a knowledge deficit with regards to facts and figures, to a knowledge deficit with regards to scientific processes.
  29. Karen Kovaka, “Climate Change Denial and Beliefs about Science,” Synthese, (2019). 2355-2374.