Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

For nearly a decade, the Climate Museum has engaged the general public on climate change through free exhibitions and cultural programming. It’s a space for art, learning, and community. Challenging predominant pessimistic climate narratives, it inspires hope and empowers diverse audiences for climate action. Some of the Museum’s featured work includes an exhibition with a 45-foot-long mural that explored “hard truths about the fossil fuel industry” as well as the transition to a safe and just future and a sculpture and performance in Washington Square Park in New York City that invited participants to explore themes of home, vulnerability, and caretaking in the face of climate change. Based in New York, the Museum will be permanently located near Hudson Yards beginning in 2029. 

Monica Dwight from YPCCC’s Partnerships Program had the opportunity to sit down with Miranda Massie, founder and director of the Climate Museum, to learn more about the organization’s approach to climate communication, the successes and challenges of engaging their audiences to spark climate action, and their partnership with YPCCC.

Monica: To start, how did you get involved with climate work and what led you to where you are now?

Miranda: It was Hurricane Sandy in 2012 that propelled me from doing social justice impact litigation into starting a climate-focused, arts-based museum.

I had pushed climate work away quite consciously for several years, which I always want to underscore, because many people have a sense of shame about not having taken action sooner, and that shame can keep them locked in silence. For example, I had rented An Inconvenient Truth on Netflix, when Netflix used to issue DVDs, and proceeded to not watch the film and also not send it back to Netflix to get the next film in my queue. I was intent on not grappling with the demand of working on climate change—intent on being stuck.

After Hurricane Sandy, I couldn’t put it aside anymore. 

I had been working on a range of social justice litigation, principally on racial justice litigation. It seemed unavoidably the case that climate change was the biggest social justice problem that our species has ever confronted. You couldn’t meaningfully prosecute other social justice issues, even the things that had felt, and continued to feel, deeply important to me, without addressing climate change.

Monica: Which audiences are you most interested in engaging at the Climate Museum? How do you use climate communication to motivate them?

Miranda: Our audiences follow a series of concentric circles, but our greatest focus is on an audience defined in the Six Americas sub-segmentation from Yale and George Mason University: a portion of the Alarmed. They believe climate change is happening, and are interested in supporting climate action, but are not yet doing anything about it. This sub-segment is about 11% of the adult population in the US.

We want to engage and offer something of value to nearly everybody, but with that said we aren’t interested in denialists. In our view, the climate community’s head has often been too easily turned by them, but those efforts are not the best use of  time. There’s a group of tens of millions of people who are super low-hanging fruit, who are most likely to quickly shift the public culture away from silence and toward a robust embrace of civic action on climate. We construe civic action broadly to mean anything from suggesting a book in your next book club to talking to your kid’s teacher at school to striking up a conversation with somebody who’s ordering a drink next to you in a bar. We encourage the whole gamut, including the more conventional and electorally connected moves of calling a representative to either thank them or press them. What’s going to change the fate of humanity is a shift in public will and in public culture. We’re most focused on those who are most ready to make that kind of impact.

Monica: Your website highlights the following phrase: “mobilizing the power of the arts for climate engagement.” What is your relationship with art and how do you think it functions as a motivator for climate action?

Miranda: Art has superpowers for civic action, and specifically for climate action. When people are in the presence of art, either consciously or unconsciously, their entire mindset is opened up to new information and a new sense of possibility. 

We all have a circle of trust and influence, and almost everybody tends to dramatically underestimate their own. We all think of ourselves as being less well-positioned to play a meaningful role than we actually are. Art reminds people how creative and capable of meaning-making human beings are. It’s impossible to test or prove, but it is palpable in a show that’s art-based that people’s sense of what’s possible expands—their sense of their own individual capacity, but also their sense of collective capacity. 

Part of the problem of tackling climate change and embarking on a course of seeing yourself as having climate agency is confronting the scale mismatch between an individual person and this global catastrophe. It feels impossible. But if you understand yourself as part of a group that’s committed, it changes everything. 

Art is built into how humans understand ourselves as being in community in a really profound way. That’s why we see cave drawings on the walls of some of our first communal homes. This all lends itself really well to an organization that’s seeking to remind everyone that when they commit to climate action, they’re doing so within a community of others, and creating a virtuous spiral. At the Climate Museum we have ways of visually representing this, so that feeling is more palpable. The art is critical to supporting that transformation.

Monica: How does the Climate Museum center climate and environmental justice? 

Miranda: A focus on environmental and climate justice has been built into what we’ve done from the very beginning. I don’t think you can grapple with the climate crisis in a way that holds water without understanding it in terms of justice and history. We don’t limit ourselves to a  technocratic approach to climate policy. You can reduce emissions that way here and there, but it’s not the approach we need to move forward, because the climate crisis is rooted in a world economic system that came out of colonialism and its racist hierarchies. So if we can’t find ways to address that fundamental set of dynamics in the moves we’re making, we’re going to be nibbling at the edges instead of making the fundamental progress that we need to make. 

The way we address that at the Climate Museum is by highlighting those issues in the climate justice themed content we present. We’ve created specific exhibits about climate injustice and the birth of the environmental justice movement. 

We also try to be direct and clear about the importance of representation. The guest speakers on our panels, the staff working our special programs, and our full-time team are diverse along many axes; it’s critically important to intellectual depth and clarity to include representative inputs and points of view, and it’s also important to visibly reflect back a vision of America as a multi-racial, ethnically diverse democracy. 

As a white leader of an organization doing this work, I think it can be challenging sometimes, especially for white leaders who are older (I’m 58), to be matter-of-fact about this. But in my view it’s really important to assert it plainly as a priority.

Monica: You’ve talked broadly about YPCCC resources being really helpful in the work that you all do. How have you used them? What insights have you used to develop the museum? And which have you found to be the most helpful?

Miranda: This is a really long list! I’ll start by saying that Tony Leiserowitz from YPCCC and Ed Maibach from George Mason University have been on our Advisory Council since the beginning, and that lent an enormous amount of credibility to our efforts back when we had no standing. We’re still a relatively new organization, and it’s very vivid in my mind how meaningful it was and continues to be.

We have created several iterations of wallet cards to encourage climate conversations. The cards summarize YPCCC’s research about the Six Key Truths about climate change:

1. It’s real (Climate change is happening)
2. It’s us (Human activity is causing climate change)
3. Experts agree (There is a scientific consensus about human-caused climate change)
4. It’s bad (Climate change harms people)
5. Others care (Most people are concerned about climate change and support action)
6. There’s hope (Actions can be taken to limit the harm)

We encourage people to use these wallet cards as a kind of cheat sheet. It’s both an identitarian move—relating yourself to being a climate advocate and somebody who talks about climate—and it also has a QR code that links to more resources. It’s somewhat parallel to civil rights lawyers who have a tiny copy of the Bill of Rights in their wallet. Even if you’re just glancing at it, it reminds you of the key points to share with a friend or a family member. Those wallet cards have been an evergreen tool we’ve given to people to move forward and start being climate conversationalists. 

Our exhibition text has often contained citations from Yale and George Mason University’s research because it’s incredibly helpful to tell people that they’re part of a majority in wanting to see climate action. It communicates a social norm. A great piece on false social reality that uses YPCCC research as a starting point lets people know that they’re not alone in supporting climate justice and clean energy policies. In fact, there’s supermajoritarian support. This is one of the most important things that we can impart to our visitors across the board. 

Because of the climate “spiral of silence,” people feel isolated and alone, and believe that they don’t represent a majority viewpoint. That’s part of what causes them to rank climate as a low priority when they’re talking to pollsters around election time. It has a million knock-on effects. But when you understand that you are part of a majority that needs to be activated, it inspires you to work toward activation. We use that research, without hyperbole, all the time when we are relating to the public, whether we’re doing a one-off program, an exhibition, or creating evergreen resources. 

As I mentioned earlier, your research has helped us define our most important audience. We don’t spend any time in our exhibitions explaining that climate science is correct. We assume that the people who come into our shows know that. We can also do that with the confidence of knowing that there are those 11% of people who are the sub-segmentation of the Alarmed: the Willing, those who are silent, and want to not be silent. That’s just gold for us. And then there’s again concentric circles working out from that. It gives us confidence to know this isn’t a tiny niche audience that we’re programming for. It is a huge number of people in the US, even if you’re taking the narrowest slice—and ultimately it’s the large majority.

We also use YPCCC research on social media to educate our followers about where climate opinion lies and sometimes about effective language based on your studies. We educate those within the 11% who have been activated to use the framing that is most efficacious based on YPCCC research. It was really revelatory to me, for example, that “climate crisis” is actually not as effective as “climate change,” because people don’t know what you’re talking about when you say “climate crisis.” So we changed our framing. 

Also, one of your colleagues at George Mason, Nicholas Badulovich, conducted a before and after study of the impact on climate views of our last exhibition, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. This really helped us with program evaluation.

I’d be hard-pressed to identify a body of research that’s more important in an ongoing, palpable, explicit way to the work that we do.

Monica: What is something unique that the Climate Museum does that other climate communicators can learn from? 

Miranda: Something that we do that was once unique, but is now gaining traction, is recognizing the critical role that culture, of all kinds, must play if we are to get the climate policy that we need and deserve. I think that is increasingly understood, but nevertheless still dramatically under-recognized. 

Any cultural and arts interventions, incorporated within and in addition to the advocacy that organizations are already doing, have a huge impact in how the general public can hear them. Again, there’s a bigger role for culture defined both narrowly and broadly than is currently in play. I think that is an urgent problem that needs to be addressed.

Monica: How does your organization remain hopeful and inspired to build public and political will in the climate movement?

Miranda: I’ll tell you a story that comes from our last exhibition. 

It was near the end of the run of the show. There were three exhibition educators in their twenties who were on the floor, and a middle-aged woman full of maternal angst came rushing in, emanating anxiety and dread. She went up to the table, and she addressed our three colleagues, wondering, “Are you guys okay?” They enthusiastically reassured her that, yes, they were okay, before asking how she was. She reported, “Oh, my God! I’ve just been worried about you, thinking about how you’re having to talk about and think about climate all the time. How are you feeling? And is it okay? I knew I had to come to this show, but I’ve been dreading it, and I put it off until the last possible day.”Our colleagues responded calmly: “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you take in the show and then let’s talk after.”

When she exited the show an hour later, she presented as a completely different person: energetic and full of resolve. As she was leaving, she exclaimed, “I’m so glad you guys get to work here. This is great. I’ve got my actions, and I can’t wait to get started.” 

At the Climate Museum, we’re not all about rainbows and unicorns. We tell people the hard truth in our shows, and then we give them ways to act, to address it in community with others. 

Thank you to Miranda Massie and the Climate Museum for their time and their work engaging New Yorkers and visitors from around the world to take action on climate change.