They’re not going to take it.
.
In the face of probes by a state attorney general, hints of hostile congressional hearings and assaults from critics in the blogosphere, hundreds of members of the American Geophysical Union are forming a rapid-response team aiming to challenge disinformation and misinformation deployed in the policy wars over global warming. The news was first reported by Neela Banerjee of the Los Angeles Times (a former colleague).
I sent a query about the plan to some of the scientists involved in the effort. The first response is from Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of earth science and international affairs at Princeton University and former chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund. Oppenheimer stressed that the “rapid response” effort will be focused on science, not on policy options (a wise delineation):
What’s true is that A.G.U. asked members who among them would volunteer for various outreach activities. This would be about science, of course. Whether it’s 700, I do not know. I only know that I volunteered, and by the way, am on the outreach committee for A.G.U. right now.
There’s plenty of worry about Issa, Barton, Inhofe, et al, but it may be that with the legislation dead for now, these fellows will turn their efforts elsewhere. But it doesn’t hurt to be ready and, in any event, the scientific ideas need to be explained and defended.
In my view, lots of people, particularly the philanthropic community, erred seriously in deciding that the scientific case was firm enough in the public’s and leaders’ minds so that they didn’t need to worry about it. The fact is the science is organic, and so is its opposition. It’s always a weak underbelly because the average person or political leader or business leader doesn’t have a firm grasp on it (in the case of the first category, why should they?) and the science is always evolving, so it’s always easy to generate confusion (see Merchants of Doubt). It will happen again. So what’s needed now is a serious effort to understand how expert information is taken up by the public (and key opinion leaders) and how to best inform them. The professional societies, the National Academies, the [nonprofit groups], the philanthropy community, and individual natural and social scientists all need to do more. Regardless of the particulars of the ultimate policy response, clearer, more reliable, trusted sources of organized information is needed.
I’m on the board of Climate Central, one such effort. We need many in different niches.
In recent weeks I’d been in touch with two of the organizers, John Abraham of St. Thomas University, and Scott Mandia of Stonybrook University, as they pondered various responses to the rightward shift in politics and the intensifying challenges to the vast body of science pointing to a human-heated planet.
Both have already jumped to the public debate, so they know what they’re facing.
Abraham is perhaps best known for posting a long rebuttal to the arguments of Christopher Monckton, a flamboyant critic of climate alarm whose pedigree, style and assertions would make him a great character for a climate-focused variant of the film “Thank You for Smoking.”
Here’s Mandia’s explanation for his activism:
The science of climate change and even the scientists themselves are under attack from a well-orchestrated and well-oiled misinformation campaign. The best defense against this anti-science offensive is to make sure that the correct message reaches a wide audience. Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirshenbaum in their book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future explain that scientists have failed to get their message across for a variety of reasons but mostly because we are not engaging the public on their turf. After reading that book, I became a climate change evangelist with my Global Warming: Man or Myth? Website, this blog, and more recently a Facebook Fan Group called Global Warming Fact of the Day. I have two small children and I do not like the future that I see for them or for their children in a human-driven warmer world. [Read the rest.]
In an appearance last week at Purdue University I was on a panel with Roger Pielke, Jr., of the University of Colorado and Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology exploring the heated state of the debate over climate science and policy. Three questions were posed, one being: “Moving forward, is there a better role for climate scientists in political and policy debates, and if so, what would it look like?”
My answer was that it’s important first to specify the question at hand. There’s a big difference, for instance, between, “Are humans warming the world?” and “How fast should emissions of greenhouse gases be cut?” One is science, the other (because of the word “should”) is policy.
Scientists are wise to explain and defend their science, and if this effort by the geophysical union focuses on that, so much the better. The group has made other moves in this direction, including the creation of a blog network, the AGU Blogosphere.
They can feel free to get into the policy debate, as well, but there it’s vital (to my mind as a 25-year observer of fights over climate policy) to distinguish when one’s wearing the scientist hat and the citizen hat (as parent, homeowner, taxpayer).
This came up when I taught a graduate seminar at Bard College on communication and environmental policy in 2007, the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rolled out its fourth report.
I divided the class into two groups. One had to defend the presentation style of Susan Solomon, the co-leader of the climate panel’s science report team. Solomon rebuffed reporters trying to get her to interpret the findings and said her job was to lay out the science, not discuss how to respond. The other group defended James Hansen, the NASA climatologist who has become a passionate advocate for a quick end to coal combustion.
When not playing their roles, the students nearly unanimously supported Hansen, but after the debate, in which the pitfalls of both advocacy and silence were revealed, they ended up split and somewhat confused.
They should have been. As I said at Purdue, there’s no simple answer for a scientist — particularly a young one — when his or her work becomes deeply consequential.
Richard Somerville, a climate scientist at the University of California, San Diego, provided his explanation for his advocacy here. Jim Hansen did so recently, as well. But they’re both near the end of long successful careers.
If a scientist wants to join the policy fray and retain credibility, a vital step is to distinguish between assertions supported by data and those framed by personal values.
Nobody explained this better than Stephen H. Schneider of Stanford University, who passed away this year after decades of work on climate science, communication and policy.
In a 2006 e-mail message, part of a trove I call my personal “Schneidergate” files, this is how Schneider made the point:
To be risk averse is good policy in my VALUE SYSTEM — and we always must admit that how to take risks — with climate damages or costs of mitigation/adaptation — is not science but world views and risk aversion philosophy.
There’ll be more from my Schneider files on uncertainty and climate down the line.
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