Minnesota officially just had its warmest winter on record. Some residents probably enjoyed the break from shoveling snow, but many Midwesterners found it ominous to comfortably jog outdoors in late January. It could turn out to be a fluke—just a particularly strong El Niño—or it could be a harbinger of things to come, particularly after the hottest global summer on record. Either way, a professor at MIT wants more people to start thinking about climate change in terms of how it will radically alter seasonality as we know it.
In a research paper published in the Journal of Climate, Elfatih Eltahir, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT reframes the impact of climate change into a matter of “outdoor days.” His goal is to draw attention to the diminishing number of future days suitable for going outside in various areas. While Northern cities like Boston, where MIT is located, tend to get more outdoor days in a mild winter, in places like the professor’s native Sudan, the mild year-end weather of usual has gotten more swelteringly summer-like of late, leaving fewer outdoor days for its inhabitants. Eltahir wants people to know that their gain is someone else’s loss—and that, down the line, they too may lose outdoor days.
Eltahir recognized long ago the challenges of communicating climate change to the public. Awareness of the looming crisis reached a point where people generally seemed to have a notion that climate change is real and that it’s going to have an impact on some people’s lives; just not necessarily their own. His recent work has been focused on trying to change that paradigm.
“A lot of people would not accept having a nuclear plant in their backyard, in their neighborhood, or in their city because they would see that as a significant risk that could affect them directly,” Eltahir says. “I think the fact that people don’t see how climate change will impact them directly is a big part of the problem.”
After landing on the concept of outdoor days during a winter walk through Boston, he dove into the data. Together with researchers Yeon-Woo Choi and Muhammad Khalifa, Eltahir used MIT’s access to every general circulation model scientists use to project the future under different scenarios. The data showed some places in the Northern hemisphere redistributing their outdoor days—fewer in summer, more in winter—while most areas in the Southern hemisphere were projected to lose them. The team used this data to create an interactive map displaying the different impacts in different areas. Users choose a location, define what an outdoor day means to them, and see how the annual number of outdoor days is predicted to change in the future.
Although the map could use some tweaks from a professional web designer—and a dumbing down of phrases like ‘wet-bulb temperature,’ which is meant to note humidity—users should come away from it with a greater understanding of some changes ahead at the local level and beyond. They’ll be able to see, for instance, that in the second half of this century, Florida is projected to be too hot and humid for comfortable outdoor days over half the year. If nothing else about climate change moves certain people, perhaps its impact on the tourism economy will.
“Some cultures have evolved around climate and weather that enables only certain activities at certain times of the year,” Eltahir says. “When the climate and weather changes, those cultures will have to adapt. And that’s something people should start thinking about now.”
Will reframing the impact of climate change as outdoor days help spur more people to act? Fast Company spoke with several branding experts, who were generally positive about the approach.
“I’m a big supporter of trying all avenues of communication when it comes to global warming,” says Anchorman and The Big Short director Adam McKay. “It’s such a mammoth and rapidly growing force, there’s no way a one-size-fits-all approach will do the job, besides maybe ‘Holy fu*king hell, we’re collapsing the entire livable climate!’”
McKay has been trying to spur action around climate change both with feature films, such as his 2021’s star-studded Don’t Look Up, and through his nonprofit production shop, Yellow Dot, which creates snappy short-form content on the subject.
Experts like how the concept of outdoor days helps quantify climate change. “The more simply we can correlate data behind everyday things we assume won’t change, the more influence we can have on consumers and leaders realizing the urgency to prioritize climate-positive actions,” says Judee Ann Williams, global head of impact for CAA Sports.
“My knee-jerk reaction is that it feels quite relatable because it’s not a wonky-feeling NGO stat,” says Kriston Rucker, a creative director and partner of the New York-based brand strategy and design firm, Love & War.
Jake Hancock, a brand strategy and naming expert at Lippincott, agrees that relatability is key.
“The best way to increase understanding of the crisis, and engagement in solutions, is by making it personal,” he says. “It’s difficult for the average person to relate to words like ‘carbon’ or atmospheric measures of degrees Celsius that aren’t part of our daily lives. So, in principle, this MIT work sounds like a great idea if it frames the risks in deeply personal and tangible ways.”
Considering that polling from Pew Research Center suggests that some Americans find the language currently used to describe the risks of climate change overblown, perhaps the tonal change of “outdoor days” stands a chance of breaking through on a personal level. Rucker likes the way Eltahir uses a frame that is less aggressive than some of the more imminent-doom calls to action, which tend to leave him (along with many others) feeling hopeless.
“I think taking it out of a more emotionally charged, political-feeling question into a measurable economic challenge is a good thing,” he says. “If you care about behavior, legislation, and other things changing, the more politicized it is, the worse off we probably all are in terms of anything actually getting done.”
However, McKay thinks the stark reality should still be part of the messaging. He believes that after years of government figures either playing down the threats or celebrating micro-incremental wins, people are starved for naked truths—which is why they tend to respond most to Yellow Dot content that stresses the emergency factor.
“We don’t just want to share vital science, we also want to share how we and many others are reacting to the science,” he says. “Without the emotional context, the science loses meaning.”
As an example, Berkeley Earth scientist Zeke Hausfather had a viral moment last fall, when he aired his honest reaction to a record-breaking heat wave, describing recent global temperature data as “gobsmackingly bananas” on X (formerly Twitter). Several media outlets wrote about Hausfather’s findings only because he relayed them through the lens of his shocked personal reaction.
“One of the biggest challenges around getting people to care enough to act—or to endorse policies that might hit their pocketbook—is the lack of urgency,” says Lippincott’s Hancock. “The problem with talking about long-term effects like a coastline that will vanish in 50 years, or the loss of outdoor days in the mid- to far-off future is that it doesn’t resonate with people’s lived experiences today.”
He worries that the “outdoor days” framing might not convey enough of a level of urgency commensurate with the threat. For one thing, it might be too easy to misinterpret the concept as being a positive way to look at climate change—an advertisement for January jogging in Minnesota becoming normalized. Even assuming no confusion, though, why invoke changes in the future when blood-red skies and more frequent flooding are a reality right now?
“It’s less the loss of good days and more the presence of bad ones that make me fearful,” Hancock says.
One potential fix that Love & War’s Rucker suggests is tweaking the concept to make it clear that this framework is meant to highlight the negative aspects of the coming changes in how we spend our days.
“You could measure the flips and just call them ‘indoor days’ or ‘lock-in days,’” he says.
According to McKay, though, no matter how nuanced the message, it ultimately won’t matter unless it reaches the discourse more often, more clearly, and from the largest megaphones available.
“Until the story is told through mass media,” he says, “most people will file dramatic temperature anomalies under the heading of ‘the weather sometimes swings up and down, the same way it always has.’”
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