Climate Change #Barriers

One of the most powerful resources of social media is that almost everyone is connected to the world. From the comfort of my couch I can communicate with virtually anyone. What makes social media so powerful is also its greatest weakness. Social media's ease of access  can channel people to seek out information that makes them comfortable, despite the wide variety of views given on many social media sites.

I started my research at Twitter. I searched the #’s: #climatechange, #climatechangehoax, #AlGore (poster boy for Global Warming) and various other hashtags with climate change in mind. Sadly, my fears were correct: both sides of the argument can be found "going at it" by name calling - with little to no dialog in the middle. Displaying charts and graphs of who knows what. The same platform that has sparked numerous ideological revolutions more commonly used to support a group's think and flame across the aisle. People seem to use their selected platform not to learn, but to push their own views on others.

What I found most interesting were how few people I could find that think Global Warming is a hoax or even opposed the issue, despite the numerous anti-climate change posts - which dominate my news feed. A closer look at the actual groups or the “people” sending the tweets, it becomes apparent that it is a small minority who are publicly announcing to the world: “Climate Change is a hoax!” This started my thinking about the “spiral of silence” and how most people may feel the same way about Climate Change but the more vocal minority keeps the majority quiet and less active in the fight for our planet. 

Another issue to social media advocacy: once on the internet these topics just don’t die. I recall a story about a Barbie book going viral a few months ago. The stories online would have led you to believe the book was recently published but the real publishing date was over a year before it went viral.  Once something gets placed on the internet, it just doesn't die. If a partial truth or a good lie or even an outrageous fact attracts the right gatekeepers, the information can be used and the story may be able to gain momentum - making facts from ideas that may have originally been fiction. 

One of the biggest ideas regarding the Global Warming “hoax” that people have latched onto  - like leeches - in their arguments against the cause is the record snow fall data in many parts of the country each winter. When there is an understanding of Climate Change and how the change in climates - warm as well as cold - are all important factors, we can begin to discuss how our weather affects the world. Unfortunately, the original terminology - Global Warming - is keeping most people arguing about the climate as the country and many parts of the world experience long cold winters and hotter summers. But the fact is that Global Warming has melted into Climate Change is a grave concern. Because we have created two terminologies for the same problem, and one is flawed we have created two outspoken oppositions with no solutions in sight. Global Warming has become just another argument. Are we confronting a problem or a definition?

As long as we continue to fight the terminology, we can expect to avoid finding any solutions and only running into a giant barrier.