Cinematic climate change, a promising perspective on climate change communication.

537028 research-article2014

PUS0010.1177/0963662514537028Public Understanding of ScienceSakellari

P U S

Article

Cinematic climate change, a promising perspective on climate change communication

Public Understanding of Science 1–15 © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0963662514537028 pus.sagepub.com

Maria Sakellari

University of Crete, Greece

Abstract Previous research findings display that after having seen popular climate change films, people became more concerned, more motivated and more aware of climate change, but changes in behaviors were short-term. This article performs a meta-analysis of three popular climate change films, The Day after Tomorrow (2005), An Inconvenient Truth (2006), and The Age of Stupid (2009), drawing on research in social psychology, human agency, and media effect theory in order to formulate a rationale about how mass media communication shapes our everyday life experience. This article highlights the factors with which science blends in the reception of the three climate change films and expands the range of options considered in order to encourage people to engage in climate change mitigation actions.

Keywords cinema, climate change communication, popular culture

1. Introduction Despite scientific discussion about synergies for climate change mitigation and adaptation, there is a long way to go until the lay public fully understands the complexity of the issue. The number of Americans who believe there is solid evidence for climate change dropped from 77% in 2006 to 67% in 2012 (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 2012). The Six Americas survey from the Yale Project on Climate Change found that the biggest shifts occurred among the most alarmed and most skeptical from 2008 to 2010; since then no significant change has occurred (Leiserowitz et al., 2012). A similar phenomenon is also occurring in United Kingdom, where a recent survey indicated that those who believe that the world is becoming warmer as a result of human activity dropped to 43% (YouGov, 2012). The reason for this gap between scientific community and public understanding of climate change can be found in the prevalence of deeper political and cultural forces at play that hinder deep changes in environmental behavior (Gray and Stites,

Corresponding author: Maria Sakellari, Senior Researcher in Environmental Communication, Natural History Museum of Crete, University of Crete, Knossos Avenue Premises, Office N210, GR-71409 Heraklion, Crete, Greece. Email: [email protected]

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2011; Hoffman, 2011). Cultures, values, and world perspectives need to be addressed for a social shift toward climate change to become possible (Hoffman, 2011; Kahan et al., 2011). This article takes up one of the most pressing questions of our time: how do we encourage greater engagement in response to climate change, and addresses this question by examining the potential role that entertainment film may play in raising awareness and generating action at an individual and societal level. This is a theoretical article that performs a meta-analysis of three key films that potentially advance climate change communication, The Day after Tomorrow (2005), An Inconvenient Truth (2006), and The Age of Stupid (2009), in order to formulate a rationale about how mass media communication shapes our everyday life experience, explore how to best use cinema for public engagement in climate change mitigation, and, ultimately, contribute to wider debates within popular culture and public understanding of science.

2. Conceptual background In order to facilitate effective public engagement, science communication efforts should harmonize with audience’s existing values, knowledge and attitudes, their interpersonal and social contexts, and their preferred media sources and communication channels (Nisbet and Scheufele, 2009). Recently, science communication scholars (Besley and Shanahan, 2005; Dudo et al., 2011; Sarewitz, 2010) provided empirical and theoretical evidence that tempers the decades-old “hostile media” assumption that entertainment media effect on science attitudes is negative. But why is it important for entertainment media to encourage their audiences to act toward the mitigation of climate change consequences? Research in social psychology, human agency, and media effects theory indicates how popular culture affects the ways in which our everyday life experience is shaped and, thus, impacts public understanding of science to bring about behavioral and social change. According to social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986), vicarious experience, the positive or negative reinforcement of our behavior when we watch the behavior of those similar to ourselves and of those we would like to emulate, may alter our behavior by changing beliefs about our competencies in successfully performing a behavior and by providing vicarious practice in carrying out a desired behavior. Based on Bandura’s theory, entertainment education, the process of purposively designing and implementing a media message both to entertain and educate (Singhal and Rogers, 2002), is a widely used strategy in health communication (Elkamel, 1995; Steckler et al., 1995; Winsten, 1994). Entertainment education was originally developed in Mexico in the mid-1970s and has been used in many countries (Backer et al., 1992; Nariman, 1993), as the use of entertainment media favors a storytelling approach to health awareness campaigns, in contrast to the dissemination of specific messages or points of view through advertising, news programs, or documentaries (Wallack et al., 1993). Ajzen (1991) incorporated the self-efficacy processes of social cognitive theory in his Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991), the most powerful and predictive model of environmental behavior. Besides our beliefs about our competencies in successfully performing a behavior, in Ajzen’s theory, communication might lead to behavioral change by influencing expectations about the positive or negative outcome of engaging in the target behavior. The Theory of Planned Behavior also suggests that the influence of the community within which the behavior will occur and that the norms of that group may be the strongest forces acting on the behavior, regardless of instruction or other treatment. Both social psychology models are conceptualized within individual cognitive space and rooted in the notion of human agency, which suggests that individuals are proactively engaged in their own development and that they are able to exercise a measure of control over their thoughts, feelings, and


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actions (Bandura, 1986). But agency has to be understood not simply in individualistic terms but also in inter-subjective terms, where part of its function is for the actor to be held responsible for the good or bad things that he or she has done (Barnes, 2000). For constructivist social theorists (Fuchs, 2001; Loyal and Barnes, 2001; Meyer and Jepperson, 2000), the notion of human agency, that is, having “space for action,” knowing about alternative courses of action and participating in decisionmaking (Barnes, 2000; Dennett, 1987), is a construction that emerges from symbolic interaction and communication (Fuchs, 2001). While we conceive of ourselves as volitional, free, and independent agents and our actions as the exercise of our free will, we also act as social agents who profoundly affect each other as we interact and become accountable to others for our own actions (Barnes, 2000). Given the vital importance of their sociability, human beings become progressively dependent on the supply of public meanings and accounts of the world in attempting to make sense of their own (Silverstone, 2002). Thus, specific norms, values, and assumptions, central to environmental discourse, which are circulated by media, are woven into the fabric of everyday life, as media comprise institutionally constrained public forums with which people can engage when developing understandings of environmental science (Hodgetts et al., 2003, 2005; Silverstone, 1999). Mediation, developed in particular by Roger Silverstone, is a fruitful concept that explains the multiple processes through which forms of popular culture transform society. Mediation describes the dialectical process in which institutionalized media of communication (the press, broadcast radio and television, and increasingly the world wide web) are involved in the general circulation of symbols in social life, as that circulation no longer requires face-to-face communication (Silverstone, 2002). This dialectical process involves how the processes of communication change the social and cultural environments that support them, as well as the relationships that individual and institutions have to that environment and to each other (Madianou, 2005; Silverstone, 2005). The main argument underlying the theory of mediation is that encouraging public engagement in response to climate change requires that we understand the multiple ways in which it is mediated. This is a nonlinear process, a dialectical relationship, in which people’s sense of responsibility is not seen as malleable by the media, sensitive to direct influences and long-term ideological management. On the contrary, we need to think about the forms of popular culture and representations that feed into the forms that the mediation of public engagement in climate change mitigation will take. These in turn are met with a varied set of responses, as those who receive and accept the representational characteristics of contemporary media are neither mere prisoners of a dominant ideology nor innocents in a world of false consciousness; rather, they are willing participants in a mediated culture (Silverstone, 2002), and some of those responses influence the media environment in direct or indirect ways. Mediation of popular culture affects the ways in which our everyday experience is shaped. Thus, a renewed understanding of everyday experience through popular culture can provide new patterns of critical thinking and civic engagement much needed for climate change communication.

3. Cinema and the climate change issue By the 2000s, climate change started featuring in films; Hollywood’s climate change disaster film The Day after Tomorrow (2004) and high-profile, celebrity advocacy, climate change awareness films such as Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and British dramadocumentary The Age of Stupid (2009) seem to have been extremely successful in attracting the public’s attention to climate change issue. The Day after Tomorrow was a summertime blockbuster disaster movie, an international box-office success directed by Roland Emmerich, which depicted a new ice age on the Northern hemisphere. Two years later, Al Gore, one of the most recognizable celebrities conservationists, was able to condense the climate change issue into a


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film that was exceptionally well received by popular film reviewers and audiences. The Oscar winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth highlighted the detrimental effects of global warming and led to Gore being awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. The Age of Stupid is an independent film, funded entirely by small contributions from public investors. It stars Oscar-nominated actor Pete Postlethwaite, and depicts what could become of our world if we continue to ignore the warning signs of climate change, combining elements found in The Day after Tomorrow and in An Inconvenient Truth, mixing fictional and documentary strands. All three climate change films are narrative, emotion engaging, celebrity-spectacle-oriented films, which received increased mainstream media attention and had great commercial success in their categories. Despite their similarities, in many ways, the three films are also quite different. They cross two completely different genres which already pre-dispose them to different responses both by critics and audiences. The Day after Tomorrow is a fictional Hollywood blockbuster, An Inconvenient Truth was firmly in the traditional documentary mode, although it also shared features with the concert film genre. The Age of Stupid is a drama-documentary, which tried to bend genres with its fictional interludes, but still fits snugly into the documentary genre. A number of different and often conflicting views can be found in the literature about the differences between fiction and nonfiction films (Aumont et al., 1992; Nichols, 1992; Renov, 1993). However, our enjoyment of fiction film, that is the knowledge that what we see is fiction, is missing in our reception of documentaries; therefore, our cognitive and affective responses to a given documentary film depend very much on this assertion of actuality (Weik von Mossner, 2013). Among others, this difference impacted audience’s trust in the truthfulness of the depiction of climate change in the three films, discussed later in this article. The huge success of the three climate change films triggered an increased interest in how dramatized climate change depictions in popular, narrative films influence audience perceptions of climate change. The article discusses the literature on the reception and the effect of the three films and from there formulates a suggestion about how to best use cinematic climate change in order to encourage public engagement toward climate change mitigation.

The Day after Tomorrow Until The Day after Tomorrow was released, the ascendance of environmental struggle as a key position on the social and political landscape was largely unreflected in popular science fiction films (Podeschi, 2002). Thus, entertainment movie The Day after Tomorrow makes use of global warming in a specific way, where climate plays “a role” in dramatic action and a new relationship between society and the environment is provided. The film makers suggested that the film might increase awareness about climate change among an international audience. As Kirby (2011) demonstrates, the main science consultant of the film, Michael Molitor, had little concern over the accuracy of the scientific knowledge, but was instead primarily interested in using the film to raise awareness of the issue. Scientific community responses to the film were mixed. Hart and Leiserowitz (2009) focused on the increase of information seeking behavior about climate change fostered by the theatrical release of the film and concluded that the film created a teachable moment of heightened interest and concern. Von Burg (2012) demonstrates that the scientific commentary surrounding the film shapes new, productive avenues of public scientific discourses. However, much has been said with regard to the fear-inducing representations of climate change (O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole, 2009), and the exaggerations and false scientific facts of the film (Murray and Heumann, 2009; Reusswig et al., 2004). Although The Day after Tomorrow conveys a strong political message regarding politicians’ responsibility for climate change inaction and the film’s depiction of global warming’s


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political elements rang true for scientific observers at the political frontline (Kirby, 2011), Salvador and Norton (2011) argue that the film undermines calls for public action, as it lacks any mention of climate change mitigation and strips from its heroes any linkage to environmental activism or any modeling of communal activity. Five independent studies carried out a pre/post-test survey on filmgoers before and after watching the film in United States (Leiserowitz, 2004), United Kingdom (Balmford et al., 2004; Lowe et al., 2006), Japan (Aoyagi-Usui, unpublished), and Germany (Reusswig et al., 2004) in order to investigate the impact of The Day after Tomorrow on people’s perception of climate change. Overall, the results indicate a plurality of different ‘audiences’, with differences in cultural, social, and political perceptions of risk and climate change, but in more general terms, the film did increase awareness and concern about the potential effects of climate change and had positive, although short-lived, effects on willingness to act. German viewers appear to be the more engaged, with a significant “self-selection effect” (Reusswig and Leiserowitz, 2005). German viewers, also, perceived the film as more or less realistic. On the contrary, UK viewers recognized the film as fiction and not as science, as they do not trust Hollywood films as a credible science information source. The film has stimulated learning effects to German, UK and US viewers about the multiple dimensions of climate change. However, for viewers in Germany, United Kingdom, and Japan, there was uncertainty about the likelihood of such events actually occurring. Moreover, German and UK viewers felt dislocated from the events depicted. It seems that viewers experienced a change in their mental model of climate change due to the uncommon scenarios provided by the film. Only US viewers express an increase of perceived probability of climate change, because the film has reached a less concerned and informed audience (Lowe, 2006). Longevity of respondents’ perceptions of climate change was only measured in the United Kingdom by Lowe et al. (2006) and in Germany by Reusswig et al. (2004). Researchers found that the sense of urgency about climate change had diminished weeks after watching the film. Individual contributions to address climate change appeared weakened and a major role is ascribed to public policy.

An Inconvenient Truth Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is described as a documentary that skillfully frames global warming as a problem we share but can solve together (Murray and Heumann, 2009). Through the use of catastrophic discourse, Gore does not simply report science but presents his personal experience with the severity of climate change and directly gives information about how the viewers can adopt environmental friendly behaviors. Climate change communication theorists and practitioners have long and heatedly debated about the effectiveness and accuracy of the film (Mieszkowski, 2006; Svoboda, 2011). Rosteck and Frentz (2009) argue that by emphasizing scientific accuracy, political polarization, or self-aggrandizement, critics focus on the wrong aspects of the film and, ultimately, An Inconvenient Truth encourages real world action by using an effective combination of personal narrative, scientific demonstration, and political jeremiad. However, it is because of the film’s failure to resolve the issue of truthfulness, that discourse of accuracy becomes problematic (Mellor, 2009), along with a perspective of truth that narrows understanding of the subjective uncertainty of climate change discourse, the diversity of opinions, and opportunities for citizen involvement in climate change policy (Russill, 2011). Still, it seems that critiques of the film do not matter at all in terms of its impacts on scientists, who gave positive evaluations to the film (Farnsworth and Lichter, 2012; Mazur, 2009). This may explain why climate change communication scholars did not examine An Inconvenient Truth’s effects on audience climate change perceptions and reports on the film’s impacts are found in other fields rather than in climate change communication.


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Environmental psychology scholars assessed the effectiveness of An Inconvenient Truth as a motivation tool toward the adoption of environmental behavior. Despite the film’s strongly advertized power of altering behaviors, findings showed limited behavioral effects. More specifically, in the United States, Nolan (2010) observed differences between those filmgoers who already cared enough to spend leisure time watching a lecture about melting polar ice caps, and university students who might not otherwise choose to see the movie. Participants in both groups were significantly more concerned and more knowledgeable about global warming after seeing An Inconvenient Truth, and the film led to an increase in their willingness to reduce greenhouse gases. However, 1 month after the initial movie showing, Nolan (2010) checked self-reported behavior of students and found that their increased willingness to act did not necessarily translate into actual behavior. In the United Kingdom, Beattie et al. (2011) used highly informative and emotional clips from An Inconvenient Truth to measure mood states as well as social attitudes and cognitions. Beattie et al. (2011) found that the clips did affect emotion; in particular, they decreased the happiness and calmness of participants, but they also felt more motivated to do something about climate change. However, the study did not examine the longevity of the effects. Based on Ajzen et al. (1996) view that willingness to pay for a public good depends on the quality of the arguments used to describe the good, environmental economics scholars Jacobsen (2011) and Morisson and Hatfield-Dodds (2011) examined the relationship of media and willingness to pay in the context of climate change following the release of An Inconvenient Truth and found, also, mixed results. Jacobsen (2011) tested whether An Inconvenient Truth was effective in encouraging individuals to act toward climate change mitigation by examining one specific behavior, the purchase of voluntary carbon offsets through two datasets, a list of zip codes where the film appeared in a theatre and a record of carbon offsets purchased following the film’s release. Jacobsen (2011) found that the film caused a 50% increase of the purchase of voluntary carbon offsets within a 10-mile radius of a zip code where the film appeared, but the effect did not persist for more than 1 year. Morisson and Hatfield-Dodds (2011) used general population longitudinal surveys to identify the effect of increased media climate change reporting because of An Inconvenient Truth, the Stern Report, and drought in Australia, where public support for action to address global climate change is high. Results demonstrate that after the release of An Inconvenient Truth and Stern Report, increased information caused weakly engaged supporters to disengage and strengthened more engaged respondents to express higher support to high-cost action.

The Age of Stupid The Age of Stupid uses dramatic images, real-life stories, and cartoon animations to engage viewers in climate change mitigation. It received media attention but little academic attention. This may be attributed to the fact that the film did not gain the kind of international box-office success that the other two climate change films did. The film was a hit in United Kingdom and was launched with red carpet premieres in New York, Auckland, New Zealand, and Sydney, Australia. The film, without benefit of large distribution networks, was distributed with great success through a new Indie Screenings Model, which allows anyone, anywhere to buy a license to hold a screening of the film.1 The Age of Stupid addresses viewers openly from the opening credits, appeals strongly to their emotions by mixing documentary images of existing geographical spaces in the present with those of an imaginary and dystopian ecological space in a fictional future, in order to remind them of their ethical responsibility for the cultural and ecological spaces that are still to come (Weik von Mossner, 2013). Similarly to The Day after Tomorrow, drama-documentary The Age of Stupid uses fictional fear-inducing representations of climate change, and unlike An Inconvenient Truth does


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not directly give information about how viewers can respond to global warming. The film was described as a “much sterner and more alarming polemic than An Inconvenient Truth” (Holden, 2009). However, claims have been also made that the film ignores the illogic of human– environmental interaction (Bryant, 2009a) and pushes the complexity of climate change issue into a black and white narrative, while the whole premise of the film implies that people who do not engage in low carbon behavior are stupid (Bryant, 2009b). Howell’s work on the effects of the film on UK audience perceptions of climate change provides evidence of the longevity of respondents’ perceptions, several weeks after the release of the film and a year after watching the film (Howell, 2011). Howell found that the film raised levels of concern and motivation to act, but this was no longer in evidence 10–14 weeks after the release of the film; the actions or behavioral changes in which respondents were most often engaged are those requiring less effort, money, or time; and the engaged and highly educated respondents in this study believe that climate disaster exaggerations depicted by The Age of Stupid could happen. One year later, Howell (2012) provided a follow-up finding that participants persisted with changes made, but there is a question of the reliability of causal self-attributions of behavior.

4. Discussion Research shows that after having seen popular, narrative, climate change films, people became aware of climate change issues, more concerned and more motivated, but changes in behavior are short term. A similar effect is associated with other popular, narrative, environmental films (Bahk, 2011; Sjoberg and Engelberg, 2010). As Lowe (2006) demonstrates, news events, films, and other vicarious experiences may be sufficient to secure a rapidly realized goal, but this has little impact upon deeper drivers of human cognition and behavior. Yet studies do show that long-term change often accompanies textual entertainment media like novels (Appel and Richter, 2007). Literature suggests that people accept information presented to them in fictional stories and use it to answer general questions about the world (Appel and Richter, 2007; Marsh et al., 2003). In particular, models of narrative persuasion (Gerrig, 1993; Green and Brock, 2002) indicate that fictional narratives may exert persistent persuasive effects that are completely independent of critical elaboration. This occurs when, first, narrative comprehension yields an especially strong and stable representation of information encountered and, second, memory for the source, which might serve as a discounting cue, tends to be forgotten over time (Appel and Richter, 2007). Therefore, given the success of visual fictional narratives of entertainment education programs (Singhal et al., 2004; Vaughan et al., 2000), this article argues that other factors, and not the nature of the vicarious experiences, prevent long-term persuasive effects.

The deficit model In the films cited here, the processes by which climate change is framed are based on the idea that public ignorance or irrationality is the main reason for the inability to address climate change. In this regard, these particular representations of climate change were shaped by the assumption that given the facts, the public has to accept the message. However, simply presentation of the facts is not in itself persuasive (Appel and Richter, 2007). Many communication efforts are motivated by an approach that has become known as the “deficit” model, that inaccuracies in media, or other information sources erode scientific literacy, and that corrections can bolster public knowledge (Kirby, 2003), but the literature suggests that science literacy only accounts for a small fraction of the variance in how lay publics form opinions about controversial areas of science (Allum et al., 2008; Dunwoody et al., 2009; Sturgis and


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Allum, 2004). Research on environmental behavior suggests that although knowledge is necessary, simply providing the facts will not lead to great behavior change (Hines et al., 1987; Hungerford and Volk, 1990). But “knowledge deficit” is also a “trust deficit” (Alaszewski and Brown, 2007; Stebbing, 2009). Under conditions of uncertainty, public trust in the risk communicator is one of the most important explanatory variables of public perceptions of risk (Slovic, 1999). Trust involves a confidence that both the process and the outcome will exhibit fairness, competence, and efficiency (Lofstedt, 2003). Ignoring the experiential knowledge and values of the community creates a regulatory system that works well in terms of technical and economic efficiency but is trusted less (Alaszewski and Brown, 2007).

The issue of trust Trust is an important factor of climate change communication. Lowe et al. (2006) found that audiences of The Day after Tomorrow appeared to believe that the kinds of extreme impacts portrayed in the film were science fiction and thus deemed more unlikely, as expectations in terms of type and delivery of information of a fiction film are different to those of a documentary. Therefore, extreme climate change representations of the dramatized documentary The Age of Stupid appeared to have authority and legitimacy, the disaster framing of the film would be interpreted differently, and as Howell (2011) demonstrates, the film has been perceived as realistic. Trust is connected with legitimacy and, as two fundamental sources of scientific legitimacy are disinterestedness and the promise of objective and reliable knowledge (Pellizoni, 2005), it seems that the legitimacy that characterizes popular, celebrity-spectacle-oriented documentaries may have a role to play in reinforcing existing environmental behavior. Research suggests that audiences of An Inconvenient Truth and of The Age of Stupid who were already very engaged with the climate change issue either persisted with behavioral changes they made (Howell, 2012) or expressed higher support to high-cost climate mitigation public policies (Morisson and Hatfield-Dodds, 2011). However, while trust entails legitimacy, the opposite is not true (Pellizoni, 2005). Despite the perceived legitimacy of documentaries in climate change communication, the impact of their persuasive attempts is not always the expected one, as messages trigger resistance to persuasion when fear is used as communicator.

Fearful framing Science consultants who work on disaster films are motivated by a belief that the scientific issues on which they are working are so important to the future of humanity that it justifies calling attention to these issues by any means necessary, such as apocalyptic narratives or exaggerating the impacts of cinematic disasters (Kirby, 2011). The science-based question has moved beyond whether the climate is changing, carrying with it the responsibility to create space for both the “yes” and “no” side (Boykoff and Boykoff, 2004), to science-based discussions of “what will be the effects of an already changing climate?” (Good, 2008), and in this regard, science consultants advocated the use of fear and catastrophe narratives to represent climate change consequences, a strategy commonly used in the field of climate change communication (Doulton and Brown, 2009; Hulme, 2008; Moser, 2007). However, as it appears from previous studies (Lowe, 2006; O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole, 2009), it is difficult to sustain fear in the long term, so fear-based climate change representations are unlikely to have long-lasting impacts. Protection Motivation Theory (Rogers, 1983) reports that fear appeals need to be combined with solution messages in order not to trigger maladaptive defensive responses, but both the mixed


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success and short-lived effects of An Inconvenient Truth indicate that fearful framing is not the most appropriate method for engaging people with climate change, even if individuals are encouraged to adopt specific behaviors. Fear of a climate disaster seems greater than feelings of agency. Also, fear is not a powerful motivator when used as primary framing in other media. Research in US news media coverage of climate change indicates that the dominant framing of impacts and actions included threat information about climate change, following the structural biases of journalists that favor drama and conflict, making it unlikely that this coverage will motivate public engagement (Hart and Feldman, 2014). Fear as a communicator carries a risk of disengagement. On one hand, less informed US viewers who were unaware of the harmful effects of climate change, disaster framing of The Day after Tomorrow increased their concern and likelihood that they would take action to mitigate climate change. This finding is consistent with moral norm activation theory (Schwartz, 1977), which suggests that information about the negative impact of a behavior can lead a person to change the behavior, especially when the issue is not already salient to the target audience (Obermiller, 1995). On the other hand, increased information taken from An Inconvenient Truth, along with other powerful and fear-inducing interventions at the time of screening, caused less engaged members of the Australian public to disengage (Morisson and Hatfield-Dodds, 2011). Also, a recent study in the environmental psychology field (Greitemeyer, 2013) indicated that climate change skeptic films had a significant negative impact on concern for the environment, but the fear-framed, climate change–affirming films did not have a significant, positive impact on concern for the environment.2 Despite the limitations of the study, the results reveal that reassuring, skeptic films have a relatively stronger impact than distressing, climate change–affirming films. It may be that fear does not trigger consideration, rather apathy toward future consequences of climate change. Overall, fear and catastrophe framing of cinematic climate change failed to inspire audiences to effectively engage in climate change mitigation, perhaps due to a lack of a deeper understanding of the dialectic process of media effects on society by climate change communicators. This “dialectic” implies that frames, the interpretive storylines that communicate what is at stake in a societal debate and why the issue matters (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989), resonate with the lay-mental model, prevailing social norms, assumptions, and practices (Chomsky, 2002; McChesney, 2008). Responses to those frames are combined with knowledge, attitudes, values, self-efficacy beliefs, personal experience, outcome expectancy, and culture, ending in “bottom-up” alternative frames that may gain greater influence in the debate surrounding issues such as climate change (Nisbet and Scheufele, 2009). Brulle (2010) argues that a shift to an effective, civic engagement environmental communication campaign implies a shift to the use of Schwarze’s (2006) “environmental melodrama,” along with messaging procedures that involve citizens directly in a broad-based democratic discussion to establish common goals. Environmental melodrama, the circulation of emotional stories illustrating the scope and nature of an environmental issue, is a rhetorical genre, a distinct form of speech, used particularly by Schwarze (2006) and Kinsella (2008) to clarify issues of power and the ways advocates moralize environmental conflicts (Cox, 2012). Melodrama can put the inaccuracy of scientific language on display and highlight its potential blindspots (Schwarze, 2006); melodrama may enable audience members to evolve toward behavior change, through a reordering of public consciousness and a restoration of a moral frame that mediates or affects public understanding of climate change science. Popular, narrative films are powerful tools of this dramatic revelation of moral and emotional truths, as they “go broad,” generating attention and interest among non-elite audiences (Nisbet and Scheufele, 2009) and thus provide opportunities for progressive behavior change at larger scale.


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The audience Research findings confirm previous studies that people who are concerned expect the consequences to be dramatic (Henry, 2000; Lowe, 2006). The more engaged viewers perceive the portrayal of extreme, unlikely impacts of climate change as science, more than a product of artistic imagination. In Germany, Reusswig et al. (2004) report that The Day after Tomorrow reached filmgoers who were already aware of the climate change issue, and the vast majority of them believe that although the film is exaggerated, it is realistic. Similarly, Howell (2011) reports that the engaged and climate literate respondents of The Age of Stupid perceive as real the uncommon scenarios the film communicates. Results are consistent with past research regarding the importance of prior beliefs in reactions to frames (Andrews et al., 2013). Audiences are not homogenous. Evidence suggests that responses to climate change communication efforts differ from country to country and from less engaged to more engaged members of the public. Effect studies reaffirm media studies literature, which demonstrates that individuals do not passively receive messages (Hall, 1980) but actively participate in constructing the meaning of the stories they consume (Ball-Rokeach et al., 1984) and that audiences’ responses to a film may be very different from country to country because of historical, religious, and social factors (Kitzinger, 2004, 2010). Although effects studies do not investigate gender differences in public responses to global warming films, gender may also be an important factor of film interpretation as women are said to express greater climate change knowledge and concern than men (McCright, 2010). Although audiences’ responses to movies depend on prior beliefs of either skeptic or engaged viewers, movies also attract increased news media coverage that in turn has a serious influence on individuals’ climate change beliefs (Gavin and Marshall, 2011), film texts interact with other digital, social media texts, and this enables individuals to generate a multiplicity of applications, repurposing and reversioning (Blewitt, 2011), while educational initiatives use movies as valuable starting points to pique students’ interest in complex issues (Saldana, 2009). In this regard, cinematic climate change may offer an attractive set of opportunities for public engagement toward climate change mitigation.

5. Conclusion Climate change movies provide genuinely new information and plausible cinematic events, and in this way affect climate change perceptions, but lack of long-term changes to behavior and attitudes. This article suggests that the deficit model does not work as an explanatory principle of the observed reception of the films because it considers scientific knowledge in isolation from the rest of culture, whereas, as the findings reviewed in this article show, scientific knowledge blends with a host of other things. This article argues that cinematic climate change does not have persistent persuasive effects because the films cited here tend to miss the point of the individual as a responsible agent and the dialectical nature of mediation and to rest on the conception of the media as able to direct a malleable audience. It is the failure to resolve the issue of trust, along with a fearful framing of climate change, that seems to have prevented viewers from altering their behavior, while responses to filmic representations differ and can impinge upon how each segment of the audience participates in the construction of the meaning it consumes. Entertainment education may offer a new approach in relation to cinematic climate change communication. Acclaimed entertainment education interventions such as The Harvard Alcohol Project, a campaign that popularized the concept of designated driver through a heavy involvement of television networks and Hollywood studios (Winsten, 1994), may offer a paradigm which leads to a radically different kind of practice for climate change communication. Exposure to narrative,


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emotional climate change storylines, inducing a democratic-based and moral framing of climate change, can be a positive tool toward empowering people to address climate change impacts. In this regard, climate change communication theorists and practitioners should be aware of the various factors with which science blends in the reception of climate change films and seek effective ways to address them. Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes 1. http://www.spannerfilms.net/global_premierehttp://www.spannerfilms.net/screenings 2. Participants in the research watched climate change skeptic films The Great Global Warming Swindle (2007) and The Climate Swindle: How the Eco-mafia Betrays Us (2007) and climate change-affirming films Children of the Flood (2008) and Six Degrees Could Change the World (2008).

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Author biography Maria Sakellari, PhD, is a Senior Researcher in Environmental Communication at Natural History Museum of Crete, an affiliated research-oriented institution of the University of Crete. Her main research interests include environmental communication, informal environmental education, environmental behavior and citizens’ participation in the environmental decision-making process, with regard to biodiversity conservation, environmental hazards mitigation, climate change, and sustainable tourism.


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