Communicating science

Elizabeth Kolbert, one of my favorite writers covering climate change, was interviewed by Dave Roberts over at Grist, and they talked about what I’m convinced is “the” issue facing us right now in our linked energy and environmental issues: Communication between scientists and lay people.

A conversation with climate journalist Elizabeth Kolbert:

Tell me about your experiences with the scientific community. Why has the one group of people that’s really taken climate change to heart not been able to break through the public’s apathy?

The norms of science are such that they work against communicating alarm to the public. If you read [scientific] papers on global warming, or generally just talk to these guys, they will tell you, for instance, that discharge of ice into the Atlantic has doubled; but they will never say what the implications of this are — why this is, you know, horrifyingly dangerous. Scientists speak a certain language, they tend to speak mainly to each other, and the norms are such that you’re never supposed to go beyond the data. Their attitude is that the data speaks for itself.

Unfortunately, most people don’t find those data very compelling. They don’t know what the implications are. So you have one community speaking to itself and getting increasingly alarmed, and the rest of the world saying, well, the scientists haven’t really figured it out yet.

And I would add that the norms of journalism also work against communicating this. So when you add those two together, you’re in deep doo-doo.

Complaints about the “he-said, she-said” school of climate journalism are common. As someone who’s seen the inside of The New York Times and The New Yorker, can you explain where it comes from? Surely reporters hear this constant litany of complaints about it. What enforces it?

On one hand there is a very, very clever campaign to turn this into a political issue, as opposed to a purely scientific issue. And I suppose there were once enough halfway credible people making the case against warming that journalists felt they had to go to them.

My hope is that you’ll see that less and less. I think the message is getting out there that this is not a two-sided issue. Naomi Oreskes did a paper looking at the scientific literature, and there just is no debate. I hope that phenomenon will taper off, but it hasn’t ended. I read the papers like everyone else, and I still see quotes from these thoroughly discredited people, and I honestly don’t understand it myself at this point.

Why do you think there’s this immense disconnect between the information available and the level of public outrage?

I grappled with that question, and I still do. Eventually I came to think there are three major reasons.

One is catastrophe overload. The end of the world has been going to come several times, and we’re all still here. So it’s: “Wake me up when the real end of the world is coming.”

Then there’s: “If this were really as bad as you say, I would feel it by now. There’d be water lapping at my first-floor windows.” The problem is that the climate operates on a very long time lag, so if you wait until there’s water lapping at your first-floor windows, you can be sure there’s going to be water lapping at your second-floor windows. I don’t think the message has gotten out: changes 30 or 40 years from now are already inevitable. There is warming in the pipeline already.

And then there is this question of what to do. People don’t like to confront problems they don’t have a clear answer to. And the answers here — to the extent there are answers — are very, very complicated. They’re very hard. We know what causes people to be overweight, and we can’t even stop that! And with global warming it’s not as simple as “eat less, lose weight.” It’s “do a million things.” As the mayor of Burlington, Vt., said to me, there’s not one thing we have to do; there are hundreds and hundreds of things we have to do. And we have to do them on a global scale.

So that’s pretty daunting to people. It’s very much easier to pretend the problem doesn’t exist.

…

There’s some feeling on the right that the left is using global warming to achieve ulterior ends: slowing economic progress, redistributing wealth, etc.

You do find people who say the whole thing is a big lefty plot to destroy our way of life. I don’t know how you respond to that.

It’s very striking: When I went to Europe, I talked to the Dutch minister for the environment. In this country he would have been considered far left. He was a member of the Center Right party. His views were: obviously the industrialized world is going to have to cut its carbon emissions way, way down. The developing world is going to be using a lot more carbon, and how could we say they can’t? After all, our own wealth is based on that.

You thought you were talking to a member of Greenpeace, but you were talking to a member of the Center Right ruling party in the Netherlands.

The politics are just so different over there. We have a level of political discourse here that’s considered by a lot of the world to be just … wacky.

…

On the flip side, do you think the bottom-up pressure that seems to be building is going to do the trick?

I do think it’s having an effect. There are some bills supposed to surface in Congress, and there’s a sense that some Republicans who had opposed them might sign on to them. They’re very watered-down things, but there’s some movement. I think it’s a combination of having taken 10 or 15 minutes to actually look at the science, and hearing from constituents.

Some of the religious groups are in there now; some of the business groups are in there now — really, business is ahead of the Congress at this point. People these guys trust, and rely on, and who have always been supportive, are telling them we’ve got to do something. There might be something percolating up.

What’s your assessment of the state of the climate-contrarian industry?

It’s in deep, deep trouble. Even companies like Exxon, who had been big contributors, don’t want to be seen anymore financing these things. They’re all running ads about reducing their carbon emissions. They don’t want the money trail to be traced to some of these wackos anymore.

So you think overt, socially acceptable climate denial is dead?

It’s been reduced to guys you can count on one hand.

If something seems a bit out-of-sync about this interview, then give yourself a gold star–the interview is dated April 2006.

And yes, you should go read it all. It’s a perfect crystallization of the situation in 2006, and even more so (for the most part) in 2010. (Kolbert did, obviously, grossly overestimate the degree to which we’d moved beyond listening to the incessant droning of the deniers.)

If you agree with me that this communications gap is a problem many more of us should be working to bridge, read The Rochester Project and then contact me.