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Public response to solar geoengineering: how media frames about stratospheric aerosol injection affect opinions

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Abstract

Global air temperatures continue to rise despite efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Supplementary technological interventions may become necessary to avoid harmful consequences resulting from unabated temperature increases. One such intervention involves the artificial reduction of incoming solar radiation through the release of reflective particles into the stratosphere: stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). The American public is generally unfamiliar with SAI, despite increasing media coverage. We conducted a content analysis of frames in US news focused on SAI between 2014 and 2022 to identify and catalogue the most prominent dimensions that are employed in news coverage. We then use these dimensions to design a two-wave survey experiment evaluating how combinations of positive and negative frames that appear in recent journalistic accounts affect the American public’s beliefs about SAI and support for research. The results demonstrate how exposure to framed communications can exert a powerful and durable impact on the public’s beliefs and general support for SAI.

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Data availability

Replication data are available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KCGQXU.

Notes

  1. Although there are several SRM strategies, we focus exclusively on SAI given the attention this approach has received in reports published by the National Academy of Sciences (2021).

  2. The implementation of SAI does not diminish the need for decarbonization. All major scientific reports and scholarship are clear that SAI (or other solar geoengineering) cannot stand alone (National Research Council 2015; Royal Society 2009; Jacobson 2022, pp. 149-151; Keith 2021).

  3. We acknowledge the wording of H4 deviates from our pre-registered version where we had inadvertently listed a persistent negative effect stemming from wave 1 as opposed to the competing frames “canceling out” at wave 2.

  4. The focus on frequency stems from assumptions that the considerations a person holds toward any attitude-object often depends on the volume of messages received and accepted on any side of an issue (Zaller 1992). However, framing theory shows that such effects depend not only on cognitive “accessibility” processes but also on evaluations of the perceived “strength” or “effectiveness” of any frame (Chong and Druckman 2007).

  5. See Supplemental Appendix F for a full list of these articles.

  6. All supplemental appendices and replication materials may be accessed at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KCGQXU

  7. Two undergraduate research assistants worked with us to code the articles identified from our search of relevant sources. The method we employed allowed coders the flexibility to identify “other” frames that were not initially identified in the coding instrument to include in the final questionnaire, for example, the effects of SAI on “aesthetics” (e.g., “it will change the color of the sky”) and the mention of SAI as a “Plan B” or backup plan “of last resort” in the case of unmitigated climate change.

  8. Respondents are recruited via mail campaigns based on address-based probability sampling, as well as via online ads, and their data have been used extensively in political science. The sample was quota-matched to represent American adults on age, gender, education, Census region, and race. The survey also included an attention check to ensure the quality of the responses. The final N is based on those who passed the attention check and who completed each survey wave in a credible time: respondents who completed either wave in under a minute were excluded. Descriptive statistics for the sample are provided in Supplemental Appendix B.

  9. Our pre-registered hypotheses are available at https://osf.io/k6453/?view_only=dd47ba907d434bc2ade4894e93f246e8.

  10. The treatments are presented as they appeared to respondents in full in the Supplemental Appendix C.

  11. The complete survey questionnaire is included in Supplemental Appendix C.

  12. The use of one tailed t-tests is motivated by our directional, preregistered hypotheses. We are confident that this approach constitutes the most appropriate, simplest testing strategy for our purposes. Statistical significance is determined by p values less than 0.05. However, the significant results discussed herein are substantively identical to results from both linear regression models and ordered logit models, to account for the potentially non-continuous nature of seven-point Likert scales, where the resultant p values are modified in line with directional hypotheses. The results of these complementary analyses may be found in Supplemental Appendix D.

  13. Due to this incongruence in the direction of messaging, we had no a priori expectations as to which frame would exert a greater impact on respondents’ beliefs and attitudes. We therefore revert to two-tailed t-tests to determine the statistical significance of group means when evaluating those respondents exposed to either the negative or strong negative frame conditions at wave 1 and the scientific consensus frame at wave 2.

  14. We also examined the influence of our treatments, both at wave 1 and wave 2, on the previously discussed outcome measures where the collected demographic and other factors were included in the models. We do not observe a meaningful shift in overall interpretation where these variables are included. These results may be found in Supplemental Appendix E.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the Provost’s Office and Urban Studies Institute at Georgia State University for providing funds for this research. We are very grateful to Bonnie Ingram, Damon Ladd-Thomas, Chip Hill, and Jeremy Kopkas for research assistance. We thank James Druckman, Kevin Mullinix, and Justin Bolsen for their insightful comments on the experimental design.

Funding

Funding for the survey was provided by the Office of the Provost, Georgia State University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, Georgia State University, Atlanta, USA

    Toby Bolsen & Russell E. Luke

  2. Urban Studies Institute, Georgia State University, Atlanta, USA

    Risa Palm

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  1. Toby Bolsen
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Contributions

Toby Bolsen: conceptualization, methodology, writing—original draft, writing, review and editing, supervision; Risa Palm: conceptualization, writing, review and editing, supervision, funding acquisition; Russell E. Luke: data analysis, writing, review, and editing.

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Correspondence to Toby Bolsen.

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We complied with Georgia State University’s IRB guidelines and were granted IRB approval for this research. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Bolsen, T., Palm, R. & Luke, R.E. Public response to solar geoengineering: how media frames about stratospheric aerosol injection affect opinions. Climatic Change 176, 112 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-023-03575-4

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