Poster from a global climate change strike in 2019. (Markus Spiske via Unsplash)
What role do metaphors play in how we understand the climate crisis, feel responsible for it, or become motivated to act on it?
When a politician says we’re “on a highway to climate hell,” a late-night host compares climate change to “a car speeding off a cliff while some of us are fiddling with the radio,” or an activist poster shows a melting glacier in the shape of a drowning human, these framings do more than grab our attention. They also nudge our brains toward specific emotions, assumptions, and ways of understanding the crisis.
Kimberly Grogan is a PhD candidate in the UBC Department of English Language and Literatures.
Kimberly Grogan is a PhD candidate and cognitive linguist who studies the metaphors and images that shape how people make sense of the climate crisis. Her research spans news media, television, and activist campaigns, exploring how different messages resonate with different audiences.
In her study of newspaper coverage in the US and Canada, she examined how religious metaphors — “climate cult,” “climate prophet,” “sacrificing prosperity on the altar of climate change” — are overwhelmingly used by conservatives to frame climate science as an irrational belief system. She found that liberals, meanwhile, draw on concepts such as “sin” and “hell” to communicate the urgency of the crisis — sometimes reinforcing the very framing they seek to challenge. She is now extending this research to activist campaigns by organizations like the WWF and Extinction Rebellion.
A Climate Storytelling Fellow, Grogan studies what makes climate messages persuasive — and how advocates can communicate more effectively with audiences beyond those already engaged in the issue.
How did you become interested in the use of metaphors in climate change communication?
I’m originally from the United States, where there’s a lot of political polarization around climate change. I became interested in following the different arguments for and against climate change’s validity, as I’ve always been very environmentally conscious. I wanted to understand why certain climate change framing was ineffective, and how people who were arguing against the validity of climate change were doing so in a seemingly compelling manner.
What sources are you analyzing in your research?
My dissertation examines metaphors in both textual and multimodal (image-text) climate communication, with an eye towards the ways in which context, political affiliation, intent and belief shape what types of metaphors are deployed. I primarily analyze news periodicals and climate change activist campaigns. I recently examined how religion metaphors are used by liberals and conservatives in America and Canada to frame climate change. I’m currently working on documenting effective or ineffective metaphors that are used by the World Wildlife Fund and Extinction Rebellion.
Kimberly Grogan presenting work on climate metaphors at the Cognitive Linguistics Conference of North America at UBC Okanagan.
What impact do you hope this research could have in addressing climate challenges?
I hope my research and critique of public discourse and environmental campaigns about climate change can contribute to knowledge about how to create more effective climate change messaging that reaches and connects with a broader audience. Because metaphor is so pervasive in climate change discourse, it has the ability to be a very powerful persuasive tool—if used well.
What’s the one thing you’d like people to take away from your work?
Metaphor isn’t just a decorative literary device, and it can impact conceptualization and decision making about important public issues! This is well known in cognitive linguistics, but less well-known outside of the discipline.
