Climate communication increasingly requires scientists to move beyond traditional academic audiences and engage publics across disciplines, sectors, cultures, media types, and borders. Social media offers a powerful but challenging space for this engagement: scientific messages must be accurate, timely, accessible, visually compelling, and action-oriented, often within a highly compressed format. Yet the value of public communication should not be measured only by reach or agreement. Digital engagement also reveals how different audiences interpret, challenge, and contest climate science in real time.
This presentation reflects on my experience using LinkedIn to communicate emerging climate risks to a broad professional audience. One recent post, titled "Global Temperatures Are Accelerating. The Science Got It Right," reached more than 10,000 LinkedIn users and generated 266 social engagements, including 88 comments. The post translated a complex scientific message into a clear narrative: observed warming is accelerating, long-standing climate projections have captured the broad trajectory of change, and society must use improved scientific understanding to prepare for intensifying risks.
The response to the post provides a practical case study in public engagement. The comments included support, questions, and a substantial set of skeptical responses. Rather than treating these skeptical comments as a problem to be rebutted individually, this presentation uses them as qualitative data to understand the recurring barriers that shape public climate dialogue. The comments clustered into several themes: distrust of climate data and statistical processing; suspicion of graph design and visualisation choices; appeals to historical climate variability; challenges to human attribution and the role of CO2; alternative explanations involving clouds, solar activity, cosmic rays, or other mechanisms; skepticism about climate models and IPCC scenarios; resistance to perceived alarmism; and broader institutional distrust of academia, the UN, IPCC, and expert authority.
These themes show that public resistance to climate communication is not simply a knowledge deficit. It is a layered mixture of data distrust, graph skepticism, attribution skepticism, model skepticism, institutional distrust, emotional resistance to urgency, and performative dismissal. For science communicators, this matters because different forms of skepticism require different communication strategies. A clearer graph will not necessarily address institutional distrust; more model detail may not address emotional resistance to alarm; and stronger evidence alone may not overcome suspicion of scientific authority.
The presentation will discuss how scientists can use digital platforms not only to disseminate climate science, but also to diagnose where public understanding and trust break down. It will argue that effective climate communication must combine scientific accuracy with transparency, graph literacy, humility about uncertainty, sectoral relevance, and awareness of the social contexts in which audiences encounter climate information. The goal is not to persuade every skeptic in a comment thread, but to learn from public reactions, improve communication practice, and foster more constructive dialogue across disciplinary, cultural, professional, and geographic borders.