Where is the sizzle in climate change?

"Don't sell the sausage sell the sizzle" is an old marketing adage. "Good news sells, bad news switches people off" could be another.

The problem with communicating climate change is that the sizzle and the good news can be hard to spot. Much of the media coverage and the word coming from NGOs is of the "we're all doomed" style. It might keep a few people awake at night and scurrying off to buy energy efficient bulbs while dropping off their recycling, but it isn't societal change at the level many believe to be essential. Maybe that is why there is such a difference between the numbers of people who acknowledge the reality of man-made climate change and those actually prepared to change behaviour. Despair isn't usually the most creative emotion.

Maybe it is time to promote the opportunity that climate change presents. The opportunity to bring creativity and change to our individual and collective lives. The burgeoning Transition Town movement seems to be succeeding because it offers creative community-based responses that allow people to reconnect with neighbours and fellow community members to adapt to climate change and peak oil while actually reinvigorating values that many have yearned for over many years. It is the positive, connecting and creative spiral that is the very opposite of the plummet into impossibility that seems to be the subtext of so much communication of climate change.