ABSTRACT

Research findings in climate science have become hard to ignore, and yet most people tend to know very little about them. In part, this is a problem of cognitive framing. Unless they are directly confronted with a major hurricane, scorching heatwave or other environmental disaster, people find it difficult to engage with the findings of climate science on the visceral and emotional level. In order to address this affective problem in climate change communication, the past few years have seen multiple attempts to translate scientific findings into the language of popular culture. At the same time, the producers of so-called ‘cli-fi’ often use catastrophic climate scenarios as hooks for dystopian storytelling. Journalists and scholars alike tend to conceptualise this popular ‘dark side’ of climate change communication as deeply problematic, if not debilitating. This essay examines some of the ecocritical and psychological research on the matter and relates it to a number of cultural texts that deliberately employ emotional darkness in their popular translations of climate science. It argues that the feelings evoked by such ‘dark’ translations must not necessarily be bad or painful, nor must they lead to apathy or despair.