Climate Change Communication.

Climate change threatens our very way of life, and yet meaningful climate change policy often lacks broad public support, particularly in the United States. Understanding climate change communication may help advocates convey the risks of climate change and the need for drastic action. This paper examines recent research on climate change communication: public perceptions, media representations, and attitude formation. Where Americans largely regard climate change as a temporally and geographically distant problem, efforts to convey the local impacts of climate change may lead to greater concern, but existing research has failed to establish a causal link between media representations and attitude formation. Future research must employ a rigorous experimental approach to understand the effects of media representations of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]