 Just to say, what you all know is complicated, and complication poses a certain conundrum from a communication point of view. It is difficult to share the important things that you know almost in direct proportion to how complicated those things are. The more complicated what you know is, the more difficult it is for you to share it, and thus I find this dictum of Einstein's to be really appropriate, not only to, it speaks to me not only as a scientist, because he's clearly speaking to his science colleagues, and it works for physicists, it works for atmospheric chemists, it works for social scientists, but it also speaks to me as, particularly as a communication scientist, because this really cuts to the heart of the idea I want to share with you, that if we want, if we know important things that are worthy of sharing with other people, then we have to find ways of making it as simple as possible, but not simpler. But not simpler caveat means, obviously, we can simplify to the point of what we're sharing is doesn't come through. It isn't meaningful, we've lost the essence of why what we know is important. So we need to find ways of making it simple, but not too simple. In my world, and in your world, because I spend most of my time now in your world, I'm a public health scientist by training, I got my doctoral dissertation, I did my doctoral degree in the field of communication science, because I quickly realized as somebody involved in public health how important it is to get the communication right, to effectively communicate what we know, share what we know with others. Sometimes in public health, we do that because we want to help people make better decisions. Colin, my dear friend and colleague Colin Ackerman, I think you warned me that he would be showing up, but it's a surprise nevertheless. Often people conflate the desire to share what we know with the objective of changing people's behavior. Communication in and of itself is not necessarily enough to influence people's, to influence population behavior. So I don't know to what degree any of you ever think in terms of changing people's behavior. I know all of you think about sharing what you know more effectively, but in terms of sort of the broader community of scientists, I often find that these two ideas get conflated. They're distinct ideas, one has to do with spreading important ideas, the other has to do with facilitating behavior change. So what I'd like to do in my talk today is deconflate these ideas, separate these two distinct challenges because they really are distinct and moreover, for each of those two challenges, I'm going to offer you a guiding heuristic, a simplifying way, a simple way to think about how to mount the challenge, the challenge of spreading your important ideas and the challenge of influencing people's behavior. Not necessarily one on one, but more influencing people's behavior at the population level. So the first heuristic, the heuristic for spreading important ideas, is simple clear messages repeated often by a variety of trusted voices. At lunchtime today, we had a wonderful conversation and we parsed this heuristic and we decided this heuristic is every, really you could say this heuristic is a perfectly adequate definition of what propaganda looks like and it's true. This is the basis of effective propaganda, but this is also the basis of effective science communication and public health communication and really every other form of public communication that you could ever want to think about. So it isn't that this is inherently a force for good or inherently a force for evil, it has been used for both to advance noble causes, to advance evil causes, but this heuristic is important because everything we know and much of almost all that I know has come to us from the field of public health, but in the field of public health we have a 50-year head start over in terms of finding what works in terms of sharing important ideas than you all have in atmospheric science, meteorology, climate science, et cetera. You are, you and I put myself in your group now, we are relative newcomers to the field of science communication. My colleagues in public health, we are sort of the original foot soldiers in the battle for educating the public, sharing with the public important ideas that will help them make better decisions and will help us create a healthier society, a society where we can all enjoy better health. So let me break down that heuristic. It's a simple statement, but it really does have three discrete parts to it, so I'd like to break those three parts out and just share my thoughts about each of them. I made Tim, Tim and I went running this morning and I told him I wouldn't say the first thing about any social science theories today, and I'm going to, he will see I'm going to keep true to my promise. But why is it important that our messages are simple and clear? It's important because this is a truism of the human brain and human communication, the more we say, the less we are heard. End of story. Say more, you will be heard less. If that is true, and trust me it is true, plenty of science proves it to be so, the axiom or the important corollary of that statement is we've got to choose what we say strategically. If we can only, if the more we say the less we're heard, we've got to be really smart in terms of picking the most important things to say. And by most important, my definition of what is most important to say is saying the things that will have the most value for members of our audience in terms of us achieving our communication objective. If we know something about the changing climate and we want members of the public or we want our elected representatives to understand what we know, we've got to be very strategic in saying primarily the things that will have most value in helping them understand the situation in an appropriate way. They will never understand the situation in the way experts understand the situation. You went to graduate school for a very long time. You invested many, many more years in learning what you know, in learning what we all, you know, in rolling back the frontiers of what we all know. And it is totally naive to think that other people, non-experts, will ever think about the issues in the nuanced, sophisticated ways that we do. But they will still think about the issues in sophisticated ways, just different sophisticated ways. You've got to figure out how to share what we know so that their sophisticated ways of thinking are grounded in the important facts that you all know. My dear friend and mentor, Baruch Fischhoff from Carnegie Mellon University, internationally renowned risk communication expert, he likes to say that we should never lose sight of the fact that people simplify. We all, even experts, we all simplify. Only one of us, if we were to go to our doctor's office today and learn that we had a serious disorder, we would be not necessarily some of us more capable than others, but most of us would revert to simplifying what we learn from our doctor, simplifying what we learn from our information search about what our doctor has told us so that we could make the best decisions we're capable of making. They're all in the same position, so I'm not talking about experts versus laymen. We are all laymen, laywomen, when we are taken out of our realm of expertise. So people simplify, it's just inherent to the human nature. Our job as science communicators should be to help people simplify appropriately. So again, it comes back to thinking strategically about what is it that we know that will help people simplify appropriately. And my science, communication science in specific, but social sciences in general, this is one of the things that we study. How can we identify what kind of information will help people simplify appropriately? It's not just a matter of rolling the dice and saying, oh, there's the message. We actually have a whole science we've developed to identify what simple clear messages will help people simplify appropriately. And this little chart that I'm going to walk you through, this is essentially the result of quite a few years of research from my team at George Mason University, a number of different studies. It's not all our work. We're our work built on other people's work. And hopefully other people's work is building on our work. We do science the same way you do science. It's best to read this chart from right to left, if you will. Because on the right are our value judgments about what are appropriate attitudes and behaviors for people to adopt with regard to climate change. And I freely admit I'm bringing my own value judgments to this, okay? My science is not value free. And yet my understanding of your science is I would like the average American, I would certainly like all of our elected representatives to hold the attitude that to be supportive of a societal response to climate change. Because your research has convinced me that climate change is a problem worthy of response. So I want our countrymen, our countrywomen, and our elected officials to reach that attitude. I think that's an appropriate attitude to have that they should support a societal response. I want them not only to support it in concept, but I want them to support specific climate policies. I don't have a position as to which climate policies they want to support. I think that's exactly the strength of a liberal democracy as we ought to debate different options and come make decisions based on what we, the people decide is best. For me, it's not good enough to support a response in concept, but not support specific concrete actions. And then finally, we feel it's important and it's appropriate for people to be getting personally involved in solutions as in sort of with the two hats that they wear as citizens of this great country. Their first hat should be as a citizen. They should be acting as citizens in a political capacity. They should be letting our elected, their elected representatives know that this is important to them. That they expect their elected representatives to take this seriously and to start getting involved in fashioning appropriate responses. And the second hat that most Americans wear is our hat as a consumer. We use our money whether we're aware of it or not. We're using our money to support certain, I'll call them vendors, certain companies and not others. And to the extent that it's quite interesting, in our research, we've learned that among the Americans who care most about climate change, and that's about 18% of us, 100% of them are using their voice as a consumer. They're engaged in consumer advocacy and only about 25% of them are using their voice as a citizen engaging in political advocacy. I think both are appropriate. So we start our analysis from the assumption that these are the outcomes that we're looking to encourage in society. What we've learned is that there are five simple beliefs that are strongly, strongly associated with who supports a response to climate change, who supports specific policies, and whether or not they are personally rolling up their sleeves and getting involved to advocate either as a citizen or as a consumer in bringing about societal scale solutions. And those five beliefs are, it's real, climate change is happening, it's us, climate change is human caused, it's bad, it's not only bad for things distant from us, distant in space, somewhere not here, somewhere else, distant in time, not yet in the future, and distant in species, clients penguins and polar bears, not people. So Americans who understand that it's proximal to us in space, time and species, those are the ones who are much more likely to be, have those attitudes and be engaged in those behaviors. So that's what I mean by it's bad. They have, people have to believe there's hope, that there are things we can do that will make a difference. When we are convinced that all is lost, we tend to disengage quickly and find other ways of spending our time, spend devoting our energies. So those were the four, first four key beliefs we identified. A little bit later on in our research, we identified this fifth key belief. And we shorten that as experts agree to the extent that the public understands there's a consensus among you all, among climate scientists, that human caused climate change is happening. That is the most fundamental belief that people can hold. Because when they buy into the big lie that is told to them over and over and over again by Fox News and the Wall Street Journal and Breitbart and others, that there's a lot of disagreement among you all about whether or not climate change is happening. It's a wonderful excuse for people to stop paying attention. So this one on the extreme left that experts agree, perceive scientific consensus, we now have taken to calling this a gateway belief. This really is the one most important belief that we need to reshape out there among the public. Opposition opponents to climate action have been working long and hard using simple clear messages, repeated often through a variety of trusted voices to communicate to the public, to convey to the public that you all are in disagreement about the fundamental premise of human caused climate change. We have an important challenge and important opportunity to undo that. So these are the five key beliefs, we call them the big five key beliefs, that lead people to appropriate conclusions and appropriate actions. They are also, if you will, five simple clear messages. It's hard to get any simpler and any clearer than it's real, it's us, experts agree it's bad, but there's hope. I threw in an extra word, but except for the extra word, that's my five. Those are the five simple clear messages that will make up the biggest difference in terms of moving America forward to embrace appropriate attitudes and appropriate actions in 10 words. So why is it important that we repeat these simple clear messages often? We've known this actually since the days of Socrates. Repetition is the mother of learning. It also happens to be the mother of liking and the mother of trust. So with repetition, we get learning, we get liking, we get trust. Without trust, there is no effective communication. There is no successful exchange of ideas. I can give you the neuroscientist explanation of why this is so, but I won't. But I'll simply summarize neuroscience by saying that neurons that fire together, wire together. So I was hearing at lunch that somebody in the room's mother is a big viewer of Fox News and not really buying into her child's understanding of climate science. I won't reveal any secrets here, but I will say that the reason why Fox News has been so compelling, so convincing at convincing this particular parent who loves her child dearly is because of simple clear messages repeated often. And Fox News is the master of message repetition through a variety of trusted voices. So the other side has mastered this formula. We as a community, a community of scientists, we're not actually very interested in repeating ourselves. Some matter of fact, a dear friend of mine from graduate school who remains a dear friend of mine has recently faced public accusations of self-plagiarism. In other words, he's said it in more than one of his publications as if there's something fundamentally wrong with that, as if that he's actually one of the nation's leading scientists in his field. And the accusation is that he's less of a scientist because he's chosen to say it. He's chosen to repeat himself more than once. I would contend that my friend is doing exactly the right thing and should be doing a whole lot more of it, not less of it. It's important when we repeat ourselves, if it makes it more interesting for us, we can elaborate what we say. We can change the words. We can reinforce the words with verbal metaphors. We can use visual metaphors. We can use other kinds of visual imagery to make the act of repetition a little bit less burdensome to us, but we need to do it. We need to do it. Saying it once isn't good enough. I'm not going to read this quote to you, but I do want you all to take a minute to read this very prominent Republican operatives. Diagnosis of why it is so important for us to say it and say it and say it and say it until we just want to rip our own head off. We're so sick of saying it, and that's when our target audience has finally started to hear it. So a variety of trusted voices. Why? Well, I've already sort of foreshadowed the answer to that. Because without trust there is no receptivity on the part of our audience. There's no possibility that they will learn from us, and we will learn from them. The second point, however, is the bitter medicine. You are the experts, but you are not necessarily the most trusted communicators. As it turns out, as a category, scientists and as a category, climate scientists, you all are one of the most trusted communicators in the abstract. I know this because I poll the public incessantly, asking questions like this. And they say climate scientists are their most trusted source of information about climate change, but not one of them. Not one of 1,000 Americans could name any one of your names. And matter of fact, when we ask them to name any living scientist in any discipline, two out of three can't name one. And the one third who are game enough to try to name a single living scientist, most of them name long dead people. So the public trusts you all as an abstraction. They trust the idea of you, but they don't know you. So trust is really a matter of interpersonal relations. To the degree to which they know you or feel they know you, the degree to which they know your name, they know your smiling face, they know that you are a person worthy of their trust, that is the degree to which they really will trust what you have to say. Otherwise, it's a very superficial kind of trust. It's sort of presumptive trust, but sort of the trust would verify kind of trust or Reagan-esque kind of trust. So the point here that I'm trying to make, and belaboring terribly, is that if we aren't the most trusted communicators, the most trusted voices, we would be pretty darn smart to find out who is and to ask them to be the ones who share our simple clear messages. Because yes, we may be the most expert, but we might not be the most trusted. So we have to find the most trusted voices and ask them, will you work with me to share these simple clear messages with your trusted voice? And ideally, really the end game in science communication, the end game for science communication should be when members of our target audience start sharing our simple clear messages with each other. Because the people we trust most in our lives are the people we have the most intimate relations with, the people we know best. So victory looks like when you are in the supermarket and you hear two people having a friendly conversation among neighbors, and you hear your words coming out of the voice of one of those random shoppers to the other. That's what victory in science communication looks like. But that's another reason why our messages have to be simple and clear. Because if they're not, people will not be sharing them with their friends, families, and co-workers. So this is my dear friend and mentor, Baruch Fischhoff. In 2007, he wrote a fabulous article that went by the title, Non-Persuasive Communication About Matters of Great Disturgency, Colon Climate Change. Not necessarily the catchiest title ever. But in that article was one of the most important ideas that I've ever learned. And I've changed the way I work entirely as a result of this. He says, it's not realistic for us to put it all on the shoulders of the content experts, in your case, the climate scientists. Because you all have the content expertise, but you don't necessarily have the communication expertise. And even if you are naturally compelling and sophisticated communicators, you're still just working from instinct. So he said, build a team. The team's got at least three players. The content experts, the social scientists, people like me, who study how people process information and how information can be made most congenial to work with the way people process information. And then, so in the interaction between those first two team members, the content expert and the decision scientist, those two people stand a pretty good chance of getting the messages right to identify the simple, clear message. But it's this third category of person, the communication practitioners. They're the ones who actually know how to get the messages out there into the public domain, into the public dialogue. Because it's not enough to just get the messages right. You have to get the messages out there. That's the repeated often. And they're the ones who can also help us get to the trusted voices. So Baruch said, we really ought to be tackling this science communication challenge in a whole new way by building a team of content experts, social scientists, and communication practitioners. The story, the second part of my story that I'm about to sort of now unfold is completely premised on this model. But first, quickly, let me introduce you to the second guiding heuristic. So the first guiding heuristic, simple, clear messages, repeated often, variety of trusted voices. That's all about sharing ideas that should be shared. But the second challenge is changing people's behavior, because that's a tough challenge. And people don't necessarily want to be changed. People don't necessarily appreciate when we try to change their behavior. Even in your own marriage or your parent-child relationships, you know that your most loved ones in your life push back really hard on you when you try to change their behavior. So what I have taken from my 35-year career as a social scientist, behavioral scientist, is it's better to try to change the behavior than to try to change people. Behaviors are amenable. We can think about behaviors differently. They are amenable to change. People less so. So if we're interested, I know this is a little subtlety, but you'll get it by the end. If we want to change people's behavior, we would be very smart to make the behavior that we are promoting easy, fun, and popular. By easy, well, I'll break that down for you in a moment. But first, let me now put some context around my effort to make a specific behavior easy, fun, and popular. The context is a program that I conduct with Climate Central, my wonderful colleagues at Princeton, the American Meteorological Society, NOAA, and NASA, and my colleagues at Yale. We identified eight years ago now that the public trusts TV weather casters as a source of information about global warming. Interesting, yes. They trust you all more. You all are number one most trusted. Friends and family are number two most trusted. TV weather casters are number three most trusted. Actually, I think I have a slide to show this in a moment. But unlike climate scientists that the public doesn't know one, that's kind of interesting in concept, but not practically all that relevant. Friends and family, that's a tough one to go for, because you can't really get to them directly. But TV weather casters, now that's a group of Americans. There's 2,200 of them. That's a group of Americans who have the eyes and the ears of the public. On average, when we started this project in the late 2009, let's say, TV was still far and away the number one source of information about the weather for Americans. It still tides number one. It's obviously on a perch that's about to fall. But nevertheless, we decided this was really interesting, that TV weather casters were so trusted. So this group of partners and I, we went after them as our target audience. And we learned from them that they're potentially interested in educating their viewers about the local impacts of climate change. And the idea, the simple, clear message that we wanted them to spread. It doesn't show up here very well, I'm sorry. But the simple, clear idea is that global climate change is changing the weather in your community, and not necessarily in ways you like, not necessarily in ways that are good for you. That's really the simple, clear message we want weather casters to convey. And which required, however, that we change their behavior. Back then, out of the 2,200 weather casters around the country, fewer than two dozen were making any effort at all to teach their viewers about climate change. So we knew we had a behavior change challenge on our hands. This, I simply walked you through that before, so I'll skip that. The way we went about it is we formed a team. So I was the communication scientist on the team. My dear friend and colleague, Heidi Cullen at Climate Central was the climate scientist on the team. And Joe Whitty, who was on air in Washington at the time, and who was the one who paid most attention to that finding in my survey, that he and his peers were highly trusted. He became sort of the core member of our team as a communication practitioner. And the three of us wrote an NSF proposal. We got it funded. The idea in that proposal was to figure out whether or not weather casters would be willing to do this work. And what their barriers were, if they were willing to, why weren't they already doing it? Because we knew at that time they weren't. As I've already suggested, what we really wanted them to communicate is that it's real and it's bad. So we don't necessarily, we got some fair amount of pushback from the weathercaster community back in 2009 and 10. A lot of them weren't on board yet with it being human-caused. We said, that's OK. You don't have to be on board with that. As long as you understand it's real and it's bad for people in your viewing area, you got everything you need in order to, we're happy to support your efforts in teaching your viewers that it's real and it's bad. So of my big five messages that I think are important to get out, we're only asking the weathercasters to really carry two of them. If they want to go deeper, if they want to talk about that it's human-caused and many of them do, that's fine. If they want to talk about solutions, that's fine. If they want to talk about the expert consensus, that's fine too. But really, we were looking for them to carry these two simple, clear messages. So how did we make this behavior easy for them? We did a national survey of TV weathercasters and we found out among those, let's just say, half who said, I would kind of like to do that. That being, teach my viewers about climate change. We asked them, well, what's stopping you? What are the barriers that are getting in your way? And we found out that the most important barriers were time. I don't have the time to do the research. I don't have the time on air. I've only got three minutes every night. So the time was sort of a two-faceted barrier. Second barrier was I don't have access to local data. I'm not going to educate my viewers about global climate change. They don't care about that. That's not my job. My job is to teach them about what's happening in our community. So I need local data. And they said, I don't have that. And I don't have access to experts who can even talk to me about how to even think about doing this. And finally, they said, I don't even have access to graphics or the ability to create my own graphics because the people who create graphics in my station, they're assigned to the anchors and the reporters. I'm a one-man or one-woman operation. I have to do it all myself. So we knew that if we were going to make this behavior easy, we or easier, we had to address all of those barriers. Time, data, and graphics. So we said about building the Climate Matters Program, which fundamentally, all climate matters really does is give weathercasters localized graphics that show local data representations of how global climate change is changing the weather and related climatic events and seasonal events in their community. We hit all of those barriers by providing, doing the pre-production work for the weathercasters. And then another way to make it easy is to show models of what it looks like. Show other weathercasters who were doing the work and so that the other weathercasters could learn from these early adopters. So we set out to, in any way, shape, and form we could, surf shine a light on the first of the early adopting weathercasters, the whole lot of social science theory behind why that's important. I'll simplify it by saying, if we didn't have the ability to learn by watching, we'd all be dead. That happens to be the most fundamental skill that human beings have. We learn by watching so that we don't have to make the terminal error ourselves. So we set about harnessing that capacity for observational learning by shining a light on the first weathercasters who adopted this work. This was a fairly early example of how we make it easy. So this is essentially a screen capture of the email that our participating weathercasters received from us. This particular story localized to the Baltimore media market was essentially about how 2013 was stacking up to the immediate prior years. So the specifics don't really matter. It varies from week to week. There's first frost, bud burst, number of extreme weather, heat events, number of extreme forest fires. Every single week, we're producing a story topic and localizing the data, which will be more relevant in some markets than in others. But the way the weathercasters get it from us is they get it in their inbox. It comes with a broadcast quality graphic. They take it out of the email. They put it into their iPad now or their production system. They go on the air. Boom. They do the story in 30 seconds. I'm going to show you two examples in a moment. And then they go into their forecast. And here we go. This is Amber Solans from Phoenix, Arizona. Amber is a master at this. And I think you will understand why I say this when you watch her at work. Oops. We need audio. We're in some of these areas. And talking about climate change, it really is making a difference in the extreme precipitation events that we see. So although the drought seems to be getting worse in a lot of spots across the Southwest and although overall trends show a drier forecast for us in the coming decades, in terms of extreme events, like we've seen today, those are on the increase by about 12% from 1958 to 2011. And really on the increase farther to the east across the northeast portion of our country. But that is making a difference in what happens out there weather-wise for us. And right now, we're still on flood alert because we have a flood advisory in effect on 1115 and the light green here. So that's for the valley and stretching down to the Southwest. And then underneath that, an aerial flood watch that is in effect for those same areas. And then some through 5-8. So you could see there was a news hook. They were having an extreme precipitation event, flood advisory. She took the, and I'm sure you all recognize the national climate assessment, third of climate assessment graph depicting the increase in extreme precipitation events. She put it in her system. She queued it up. She told a very compelling story that connected people's first-hand lived experience of what just came from the sky. And she put some context around it. And the beauty of what she did is she said, look, we here in Arizona, we're only getting a 12% increase in this. But if you've got family up in the northeast, they're really getting whacked by this. So it was a beautiful 30-second, simple, clear message delivering the point. And I'm not sure Amber would have thought of it this way, but I certainly do, delivering the point that if you don't think you're being touched by global climate change, you're wrong. This is how it's touching you. Now watch for, I shouldn't use, I'm only gonna show you two examples, but they're both Amber because she does it so well. Could we turn up the volume a little back there? This is really troubling. We have new data tonight from Climate Central, and it shows the amount of wildfires in our state increasing steadily in the last several decades, as well as the amount of what's considered large fires. This huge spark, you're on a spike rather, you see in 2011, that's the wallow fire. And compared with the 1970s, we're seeing five times more large fires that burn 10 times more acreage. Across the Southwest, the burn season about 75 days longer. And Steve, it really looks like this. So what does the average viewer get out of this? Hopefully they got out of that segment. Yeah, my intuition was telling me we've got a bigger fryer problem now than when I moved here 20, 30 years ago. But they didn't have any confirmation of that. They just have an intuitive sense. And so what she just did is she showed them the data that confirms their intuition is true, which will give them greater confidence of sharing what they know with their interpersonal networks. So I would contend that Amber is doing a beautiful job of sharing simple, clear messages that will help her viewers reach appropriate conclusions about climate change that it isn't distant, that A, it's real, that it isn't distant from them. It's happening in Arizona. And it's happening in ways that are actually harmful to them. And that's all really important. I hope you've noticed the research. So that's how you make it easy. Now how do we make it fun? How do we get fun, this behavior, reporting on the local implications of climate change? Well, we make it fun by figuring out what TV weathercasters care about. What are their worries? Well, their worries are they're gonna lose their job. If you haven't noticed, this is a bad time in the news industry. And they're all very job insecure and they're very worried about their, Amber, Phoenix, Arizona, red state. She's got to be worried about viewers who are gonna get all pissed off that she's talking about climate change. So it helped us to understand what they were most worried about. But we also found out what they aspire to. There's only 2,200 of them, I said that already. They aspire to getting jobs in bigger media markets where they will make more money. They aspire to gaining the recognition of their peers because that's a stepping stone to getting a job at a better media market where they will make more money. They'd eventually all like to be Al Roker where they will get the biggest audience of all and make even more money. So I don't mean to belittle these aspirations. These are like aspirations that we all hold in one way or most of us hold in one way or another. And in understanding that, it created an opportunity for us to make this behavior fun by showing that our early adopting TV weathercasters were winning all kinds of accolades from their viewers, from their bosses, and from their peers. So the very first one that we worked with was Jim Gandy, Columbia, South Carolina, another really tough market to talk about climate change in. And Jim Gandy, after we worked with him for a year and showed that his viewers learned more about climate change than viewers of competing stations, we nominated him for AMS's most prestigious award for a broadcaster and he won. He became, you know, he essentially out of 2,200, he came up as number one as the best most accomplished science communicator that year and all on the basis of him doing a brave thing, which by the way, over the course of the years we've been working with him, took their ratings in the news market from number three. Avis was number two and they were trying harder. They were number three, the CBS station. They're now number one. So we didn't drive Jim's viewers away by helping Jim educate his viewers about climate change. We invited a whole lot more viewers in. They're now number one in the news market. So that's how we've chosen to try to make the behavior fun by understanding what weathercasters respond to, by highlighting those benefits when we offer them the opportunity to participate in this program, by doing everything possible to give them immediate positive reinforcement when they use our materials. How do we raise our children? Well, we don't always do this, but our pediatricians always tell us positive reinforcement is a better parenting mechanism than negative reinforcement. That is true for adults as well. So, and if you go to buy a Tesla, you get the immediate positive reinforcement of driving off that lot in a Tesla. So your Tesla dealer knows he can't or she can't ask you to delay your gratification. He or she has to give you immediate gratification. So we don't exactly have that ability, but at least we can give people positive reinforcement. So when our participating weathercasters use our materials, we try to tweet about it, we try to post it to social to Facebook, we call them, we do anything we can to make them feel loved for having done the right thing. And obviously anytime you can literally make the behavior fun, you're way ahead. So when we hold workshops where we train TV weathercasters to use our material, we spend a lot of time figuring out how to make those workshops fun. We want them laughing. Doing silly things. We want them taking risks in a trust-based environment where if they go down in flames, their colleagues will cheer for them for having been brave enough to be so silly. All of those are the mechanisms that we use to make this behavior fun. The single most important thing that we ever accomplished to make this fun was when we launched the National Climate Assessment in 2014, we convinced the White House that President Obama should spend the time that he was gonna devote to the climate assessment launch to giving interviews with TV weathercasters in the Rose Garden. So when some of the rest of us were inside the Eisenhower Auditorium, whatever it's called, doing the launch of the press event for the launch of the National Climate Assessment, which was pretty dry, I admit that freely, Mr. President Obama was with eight of the nation's weathercasters giving interviews. And he did that because he knows that this is a tough issue and he wanted to get directly into communities through trusted voices. He decided even he wasn't necessarily the right trusted voice. Going through local trusted voices is a smarter way. So that was Jim Gandhi, by the way, in his moment in the Rose Garden. Now, what about this making the behavior popular, okay? If it was already popular, we wouldn't have to be trying. Because when behaviors are already normative, the rest of us tend to fall in line rather quickly. Human beings are very sensitive to normative influences. It's what we call peer pressure. We rarely pressure each other, but just by virtue of the fact when the majority of us do something, it puts an influence on the minority who aren't where they feel the need to comply. But when behaviors aren't yet popular, we can use some tricks of the trade. We can publicize the notable people who are already performing the behavior. So when all we had was Jim Gandhi, we spent a lot of time shining a light on Jim Gandhi and showing all of the ways in which Jim Gandhi was advancing his career and feeling really good about himself based on sort of reaching the aspiration of wanting to educate his viewers. So we used one guy and we sort of made him the message. Then we went after other opinion leaders in the broadcast meteorology community. Opinion leaders are the influentials in any social network. Jim Gandhi happened to be one of them, but the next people we tried to recruit were all opinion leaders because once we had them on our side, once we had them participating in our program, we knew that our job was mostly done because if they embraced, if they used their trusted voice and their trusted actions to embrace this new behavior, we knew that they would be much more compelling and persuasive than we ever could be. And as the behavior has truly become normative, it isn't yet truly normative. We have about 400 out of 2200 who work with us, but every time we sort of get to a new milestone, like 200 and then 200 and then 300 and then 350, we make sure that the weather casters know about this because this creates that normative appeal, that normative influence that brings them in from the periphery to wanna be part of this leading edge of the broadcast meteorology community. As a community of practice, these people have changed rapidly. We know this because we've been surveying them since 2010. We actually have a 2017 survey report, I just didn't have time to update this, but what was completely out of the norm, non-normative in 2010 is rapidly becoming normative and it's exerting this incredible pressure, subtle pressure, but a pressure that's making the community of broadcast meteorologists better understand, it's helping them better understand what you all know and it's helping them in large numbers start to share what you know with their viewers. I've already covered all of this, we've got almost 400 of them now in English and Spanish, 119 media markets growing rapidly. The number I'm most proud of on this slide is at the bottom. On between September of 2014 and September of 2016, on air reporting increased by over 550%, that's big. That's really, really big in a very short period of time and it all is a testament to making it easy, fun and popular to report on the local impacts of climate change. So that's what I got for you folks. I went a little longer than anticipated, but I hope we have at least 10 minutes to interact for me to hear your thoughts and if any of you would like to go beyond 230, I'm here for the duration. So let me know what you think.