As the science editor for The Atlantic, Ross Andersen struggled for years to find stories about climate change that readers would pay attention to. “Maximally apocalyptic headline and framing was the only way to get people in, and even those didn’t perform in huge ways,” he told me. But about eight months ago, that changed. The stories stayed basically the same. The readers, however, were suddenly paying a lot more attention. …
Americans are just more interested in climate change, in general, than they used to be. Polls suggest that in the past two years, the American public started to believe more in climate change — and worry more about its impacts.
So what gives? Big natural disasters probably have something to do with it, but both the journalists and the sociologists I spoke to think there’s another factor at play. As Slate’s science editor, Susan Matthews, put it: The urgency of climate change was one thing before President Trump’s election and something else entirely after. CONT.
Maggie Koerth-Baker, FiveThirtyEight