Climate of hope or doom and gloom? Testing the climate change hope vs. fear communications debate through online videos

This article proposes a classification of the current differences between online videos produced specifically for television and online videos produced for the Internet, based on online audiovisual production on climate change. The classification, which consists of 18 formats divided into two groups that allow comparisons to be made between television and web formats, was created through the quantitative and qualitative content analysis of a sample of 300 videos. The findings show that online video's capacity to generate visits is greater when it has been designed to be broadcast on the Internet than when produced for television.

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Abandoned aquariums: Online animal attractions during quarantine

Journal of Environmental Media ◽

10.1386/jem_00026_1 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 1 (2) ◽

pp. 5.1-5.8 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Environmental Degradation ◽

Zoonotic Diseases ◽

The Political ◽

Human Beings ◽

Online Videos ◽

Historical Moment

In this article, I argue that popular online animal videos during the coronavirus pandemic are emblematic of the political stakes of animal documentary in the era of climate change. Conceived in response to James Leo Cahill’s ‘A YouTube bestiary: Twenty-six theses on a post-cinema of animal attractions’, I claim a broad public is currently navigating its hopes and fears over an oncoming posthuman future through differing deployments of what Cahill calls the ‘animal attractions’ of online videos. Comparing several recent examples, I analyse these images as documents of an era defined by interactions between humans and nonhumans (such as zoonotic diseases like COVID-19) and as fabulist visions of a future without human beings. Here, emptied aquariums embody the concerns of our current historical moment, evoking anxieties over environmental degradation and speculation about our unknown future.

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Transformation of the media landscape: Infotainment versus expository narrations for communicating science in online videos

Public Understanding of Science ◽

10.1177/0963662520945136 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 29 (7) ◽

pp. 688-701 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Lloyd S. Davis ◽

Bienvenido León ◽

Michael J. Bourk ◽

Wiebke Finkler

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

University Education ◽

Public Understanding Of Science ◽

Public Understanding ◽

User Generated Content ◽

On Demand ◽

Online Videos ◽

The Media ◽

Good For ◽

Understanding Of Science

Society is undergoing a transformation in the way people consume media: increasingly we are using online on-demand videos, with the fastest growing segment of online videos about science being user-generated content that uses an infotainment style of delivery, in contrast to the traditional expository narrations of professionally generated content. In this study, we produced two otherwise identical videos about climate change to test the effects of an infotainment or expository narration. A total of 870 survey participants (419 English; 451 Spanish) were randomly presented with either an infotainment or expository version of the video. The expository narration was liked and believed more, and this held irrespective of language, age, sex or online viewing habits. However, the infotainment version was liked more by viewers without a university education and, further, viewers were better able to recall information from it, suggesting that user-generated content with infotainment-style narrations may actually be good for increasing public understanding of science.

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Science and Environmental Communication on YouTube: Strategically Distorted Communications in Online Videos on Climate Change and Climate Engineering

Frontiers in Communication ◽

10.3389/fcomm.2019.00036 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 4 ◽

Cited By ~ 20

Author(s):

Joachim Allgaier

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Environmental Communication ◽

Climate Engineering ◽

Online Videos

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Pro-Science, Anti-Science and Neutral Science in Online Videos on Climate Change, Vaccines and Nanotechnology

Media and Communication ◽

10.17645/mac.v8i2.2937 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 8 (2) ◽

pp. 329-338 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

M. Carmen Erviti ◽

Mónica Codina ◽

Bienvenido León

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Empirical Evidence ◽

Scientific Information ◽

User Generated Content ◽

Online Video ◽

Potential Influence ◽

The Public ◽

Online Videos ◽

And Behavior ◽

Attitudes And Behavior

Online video has become a relevant tool to disseminate scientific information to the public. However, in this arena, science coexists with non-scientific or pseudoscientific beliefs that can influence people’s knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. Our research sets out to find empirical evidence of the representation of pro-science, anti-science and neutral stances in online videos. From a search on Google videos, we conducted content analysis of a sample of videos about climate change, vaccines and nanotechnology (n = 826). Results indicate that a search through Google videos provides a relatively small representation of videos with an anti-science stance, which can be regarded as positive, given the high potential influence of this search engine in spreading scientific information among the public. Our research also provides empirical evidence of the fact that an anti-science stance is more frequent in user-generated content than in videos disseminated by other types of producers.

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Averting robo-bees: why free-flying robotic bees are a bad idea

Emerging Topics in Life Sciences ◽

10.1042/etls20190063 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 3 (6) ◽

pp. 723-729

Author(s):

Roslyn Gleadow ◽

Jim Hanan ◽

Alan Dorin

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Computer Simulation ◽

Food Security ◽

European Countries ◽

Plant Interactions ◽

Plant Insect Interactions ◽

Native Habitat ◽

Insect Pollinators ◽

Insect Interactions

Food security and the sustainability of native ecosystems depends on plant-insect interactions in countless ways. Recently reported rapid and immense declines in insect numbers due to climate change, the use of pesticides and herbicides, the introduction of agricultural monocultures, and the destruction of insect native habitat, are all potential contributors to this grave situation. Some researchers are working towards a future where natural insect pollinators might be replaced with free-flying robotic bees, an ecologically problematic proposal. We argue instead that creating environments that are friendly to bees and exploring the use of other species for pollination and bio-control, particularly in non-European countries, are more ecologically sound approaches. The computer simulation of insect-plant interactions is a far more measured application of technology that may assist in managing, or averting, ‘Insect Armageddon' from both practical and ethical viewpoints.

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Modelling ecosystem adaptation and dangerous rates of global warming

Emerging Topics in Life Sciences ◽

10.1042/etls20180113 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 3 (2) ◽

pp. 221-231 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Rebecca Millington ◽

Peter M. Cox ◽

Jonathan R. Moore ◽

Gabriel Yvon-Durocher

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Global Warming ◽

Diffusion Rate ◽

Individual Species ◽

Genetic Evolution ◽

Rates Of Change ◽

Rapid Climate Change ◽

Warming Climate ◽

Intraspecies Competition ◽

High Trait

Abstract We are in a period of relatively rapid climate change. This poses challenges for individual species and threatens the ecosystem services that humanity relies upon. Temperature is a key stressor. In a warming climate, individual organisms may be able to shift their thermal optima through phenotypic plasticity. However, such plasticity is unlikely to be sufficient over the coming centuries. Resilience to warming will also depend on how fast the distribution of traits that define a species can adapt through other methods, in particular through redistribution of the abundance of variants within the population and through genetic evolution. In this paper, we use a simple theoretical ‘trait diffusion’ model to explore how the resilience of a given species to climate change depends on the initial trait diversity (biodiversity), the trait diffusion rate (mutation rate), and the lifetime of the organism. We estimate theoretical dangerous rates of continuous global warming that would exceed the ability of a species to adapt through trait diffusion, and therefore lead to a collapse in the overall productivity of the species. As the rate of adaptation through intraspecies competition and genetic evolution decreases with species lifetime, we find critical rates of change that also depend fundamentally on lifetime. Dangerous rates of warming vary from 1°C per lifetime (at low trait diffusion rate) to 8°C per lifetime (at high trait diffusion rate). We conclude that rapid climate change is liable to favour short-lived organisms (e.g. microbes) rather than longer-lived organisms (e.g. trees).

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