Translating public concern for global warming into effective action requires knowledge about the causes and risks of climate change. The aim of this study is a theory-guided analysis of everyday and scientific conceptions of global warming. These conceptions will be the basis for the design of communicating strategies in a separate study.

Framed by the model of educational reconstruction, scientific concepts of global warming were compared with everyday conceptions that were identified in interviews and a re-analysis of empirical studies. The analysis of conceptions of climate change based on the theory of experientialism (Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh. The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge To Western Thought, 1999) shows that laypeople and scientists refer to the same schemata: the use of the container-flow schema is omnipresent in conceptions on the global carbon cycle as well as in conceptions of the radiative equilibrium between earth and space. To explain the causes of global warming three principles were found: global warming by (a) an imbalance in the global carbon cycle, (b) man-made carbon dioxide, and (c) natural vs. man-made carbon dioxide. Laypeople explain the processes leading to global warming either through warming by more input or warming by less output.