Erik Vance has an excellent, albeit depressing, article up at environment.change.org, Speaking Science to the Public:
Every year, the AAAS meets to share the important science being done around the country. It’s a chance to catch up on astronomy, medicine, and geology while hobnobbing with the press. This year, however, the meeting was dominated by climate scientists scratching their heads and trying to figure out what is going wrong.
Maxwell Boykoff summed it up best when he presented this graph demonstrating that the number of stories on climate change spiked when the angle took a skeptical turn as a result of so-called Climategate. He called it “a different kind of hockey stick.” Both in public and in private, scientists are fretting over the perceived scandal around the leaked e-mails. More than that, though, they are panicked that the American public simply isn’t listening to them.
The dozen or so meetings on climate change denial illustrated two things. One, most of America’s top scientists have no idea how to communicate to the public. Many of the presentations dragged out the same data. Scientists approach the world through data, and they can’t understand why the public won’t finally reach a data-induced tipping point and collectively say “Ooooh, now we get it.”
Here’s a small example of how scientists fail to quash ill-informed, even loony, theories: In a meeting titled “Can Geoengineering Save Us from Global Warming?” a panel of scientists laid out the newest results in human-moderated climate solutions. Unbeknownst to them, it was crashed by activists from a conspiracy theory group that thinks the government is already secretly releasing experimental chemicals from behind jetliners. Afterward, the group peppered the panel with bizarre questions about sulfur cover-ups.
One baffled panelist just repeated the group’s website, suggesting people go there for answers. Another patiently tried to explain that what these people are seeing are vapor trails – tiny ice crystals that form outside a plane and, under the right conditions, can hang around all day.
This did not work. The group immediately podcasted about the government’s continued cover-up while scientists went to the next meeting to discuss how best to communicate to the public.
This has to stop. Scientists are not designed for policy, yet increasingly are being dragged into political fistfights and getting their glasses stolen and their noses bloodied. This has led to a common theme at the meeting with scientists insisting they need to become more like Rush Limbaugh and less like Bill Nye the Science Guy.
Yep. The rules of the “game” have changed, and suddenly scientists are being forced into roles they aren’t trained for and in many cases don’t like. It reminds me all those scenes in movies where some Average Joe or Jane, a bank teller or store clerk or just some random person on the street, is thrust into a terrifying situation and is quickly handed a big honkin’ gun by Joe Action Hero who says something like, “If that guy moves, shoot him. I’ll be right back.” The situation is very far from good, but it’s the best alternative we have.
I know that a lot of people make heartfelt arguments about how scientists “shouldn’t” be turned into “advocates” for any public policy, etc. Well, if they’re the ones who know best what’s going on and what the consequences are of inaction, in terms of sea level rise, ocean acidification, drought, etc., then we need them to step up. And those of us already in this fight who aren’t scientists need to support and help them as much as we can, so that the rest of us can understand the urgency of our situation and help create the world we need.
