Can Comedy Take Climate Science Mainstream?

Climate change is no laughing matter. Or is it?

A new campaign from the U.K. is translating the complexities of climate science using the sharpest weapon of all: comedy. Taking a profane approach to an often scary subject, the Climate Science Translated project pairs climate scientists with stand-up comedians to strip the physics of global warming down to some essential—if NSFW—messages.

“Very soon, climate scientists are just going to ditch their graphs and point out the window with an expression that says I f***ing told you,” says stand-up Nish Kumar in response to testimony from climate scientist Fredi Otto about rapidly intensifying extreme weather events.

“One-point-three degrees might sound like f**k-all—but in practice, half the world is flooded, while the other half is a bonfire,” warns comedian Kiri Pritchard-McLean, trans lating an explanation from Bill McGuire, a professor of volcanology, on the human-caused drivers of the climate crisis.

With three such video shorts now in the bag, Climate Science Translated doesn’t use the sort of sober language you’ll hear from David Attenborough—but that’s the point, says Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, Imperial College London. “It could reach people we might not reach when we’re talking to the Guardian,” she told Forbes Sustainability.

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Otto makes the point that humanity has all the knowledge and technology that it needs to address climate change, and yet governments and corporations are still moving too slowly. Why is that?

“What’s behind this inaction is, to large degree, the interests of industries that make money from status quo,” she said. “They have been extremely influential, and keep up this narrative that the status quo is the best possible world we could ever live in.”

Or, as Nish Kumar puts it in the campaign video: “The voices who say we can’t realistically replace fossil fuels are the same as those who said ‘you’ll never get rid of apartheid,’ and ‘let’s be sensible ladies, you can’t have the vote.”

The campaign is the brainchild of British entrepreneur Nick Oldridge, who told Forbes the main message is one of urgency. “I just kept being astounded by the number of people I encountered who knew what climate change was, but had absolutely no idea about timescales; they thought it’s something that’s going to happen a long time from now in places far away,” Oldridge says. “Whatever happens next, we’re either going to experience the complete chaos of uncontrolled climate change or we’ve got to do something quite chaotic ourselves.”

As to why he chose comedy as a vehicle for climate messaging, Oldridge said he thought comedians can communicate in ways that simply aren’t available to other people.

“Scientists are cautious; conservative … and I think that’s the essence of our climate communication problem,” he says. “If you have to be sure of everything, you can’t join all the dots together and explain how the world will be if we don’t do what they [scientists] are advising us to do.”

“Comedians can speak much more freely,” he says. “They don’t get shot down like, say, virtue-signalling actors. They can deal with hecklers.”

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As well as a sense of urgency, Otto thought that mainstream discussions of climate change also failed to highlight the upsides of climate action. “In the tabloid press, climate policy is still portrayed as something that is a luxury that will not benefit anyone very much,” she said, pausing, then adding: “Maybe the planet, or some toads. I don’t know.”

Instead, the point of climate policy is that it should improve lives. “It will make your bills go down; it will make you healthier. And that is missing,” she said.

Behind the irreverence of the Climate Science Translated project lies a growing body of evidence to suggest that social and cultural behaviours can adapt to drive change more rapidly than is commonly thought—far more quickly than, for example, technological innovation. In recent years, innovation researchers have shown that behaviour change is a necessary condition for both mitigating the climate crisis and adapting to its impacts. Cultural messaging—from comedy to films, from music to literature—could prove instrumental in enabling societies to respond appropriately to what scientists say is coming.

If polling data are anything to go by, there’s plenty of fertile ground for positive climate messaging. Research carried out in the U.K. on behalf of Climate Science Breakthrough of some 1,600 respondents indicates that three-quarters of the public don’t believe governments are doing enough to tackle climate change, while 71% of people are worried about their children’s future as a result of climate change.

Soberingly, however, 100% of climate scientists surveyed felt governments aren’t doing enough, while 88% said they felt pessimistic about the next 20 years. On the other hand, 92% of climate scientists agreed that society already possesses the knowledge and tools to tackle the climate crisis.

The Climate Science Translated campaign can be found at Climate Science Breakthrough.

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