If newsrooms want climate science skeptics to read and share news about climate change, researcher Renita Coleman recommends they do this: Leave the terms “climate change” and “global warming” out of their coverage.
“Research seems to indicate those are trigger words for skeptics,” says Coleman, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “This is what we found would trigger them to stop reading and instantly become hostile, [believing] ‘Oh, that story is biased or that media organization is biased.’”