17 December 2010
Communicating climate change: How to win over the public
Posted by mohi
An overflowing room of AGU Fall Meeting attendees learned they must lose their jargon and have a clear message to most effectively communicate about climate change science. The Tuesday workshop, organized by AGU’s Public Information Office, featured author Chris Mooney, climate communications trainer Susan Joy Hassol, and climate researcher and professor Richard Somerville.
To understand how to get people to listen, it helps to understand why they reject or accept some arguments but not others. Mooney explained that people are more or less inclined to believe information if it fits with what they want to believe; it’s not a matter of intelligence. For example, he highlighted survey data that found college-educated Republicans are less likely to believe that humans are causing climate change than less-educated Republicans. In addition, most Americans don’t know scientists or how science works, which leads most of them to get an F when it comes to climate knowledge. For instance, Mooney cited research by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, which reported that “large majorities incorrectly think that the hole in the ozone layer and aerosol spray cans contribute to global warming, leading many to incorrectly conclude that banning aerosol spray cans or stopping rockets from punching holes in the ozone layer are viable solutions.”
To combat these problems, Americans need to hear about climate change from a variety of sources, including scientists. But scientists will be misunderstood if they speak to non-scientists using the use same words they use when they speak with colleagues, Hassol said. Jargon like “antropogenic” and even “greenhouse gas” are stumbling blocks (people may think greenhouses are the problem, instead of “heat-trapping gases”), but there are also words that mean different things to the public than they do to scientists. For instance, Hassol said, “scientists frequently use the word ‘enhance’ to mean increase, but to lay people, enhance means to improve or make better, as in ‘enhance your appearance.’ So the ‘enhanced greenhouse effect’ sounds like a good thing.”
There are dozens of words common to climate change research that have the same problem, she said: error, values, risk, uncertainty – even “aerosol,” which means a small atmospheric particle to scientists, but means “spray can” to many other people. Hassol published some additional examples in this Eos article.
Having a clear, simple message that is repeated several times will help listeners absorb the information, she said. Scientists can use metaphors to make processes more clear, and relate large numbers to something concrete that people are familiar with. She recommends practicing as much as possible, especially before doing media interviews.
Somerville, who has himself given many interviews and lectures on climate change, listed examples of how those who promote the idea that climate change may not be happening use common denial tactics. They include using fake experts, cherry-picking data, and using logical fallacies and misrepresentations.
Science, on the other hand “is self-correcting, given time,” he said. “It does not work by unqualified people making claims via the media.” Scientists should get to know the common climate denialist arguments so they can be prepared to answer them effectively, he said.
While speaking out on any topic carries some risk, particularly for those who don’t yet have tenure, he said, it is necessary to improve the public’s understanding of the problem and so society can more effectively respond to climate change.
–Kathleen O’Neil, AGU Science Writer and Public Information Specialist
Inherent in the type of modeling that is used in all Global Climate Models (approximation of initial conditions and time-step progression with approximate application of physical laws) is that the longer the program runs, the greater the uncertainty in the results. Although the GCMs are pretty good at predicting weather for up to a few days they are useless for predicting climate for years. This has been demonstrated in the total failure of GCMs to predict the flat average global temperature (agt) trend since about 2001 while atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased by 21.8% of the increase from 1800 to 2001.
Thus the so-called global climate models are actually global weather models. It is woefully naïve to believe that all that is needed to turn a global weather model into a global climate model is to run it longer.
I wonder how large the measured separation between the rising atmospheric carbon dioxide level and not rising average global temperature will need to get before some begin to realize that climate related papers that have been published in what have been called reliable sources are not reliable and that so-called peer review of climate related papers has been de facto censoring. The public is becoming aware that they have been deceived.
A simple equation, with inputs of accepted measurements from government agencies, calculates the average global temperatures since 1895 with 88% accuracy (87.6% if increased atmospheric CO2 is assumed to have no influence). See the equation, links to the source data, an eye-opening graph of the results and how they are derived in the pdfs at http://climaterealists.com/index.php?tid=145&linkbox=true (see especially the pdfs made public on 4/10/10 and 6/27/10).