If you’re wondering why it’s been unusually cold outside this week, this post from DotEarth’s Andy Revkin explains that it’s the Arctic Oscillation making life unpleasant for folks in places across the northern hemisphere.
It could be a good resource if you’re getting questions from skeptical visitors or program participants about why, if global warming is real, it’s so cold outside.
The Clim’Way* event at COP15 was a success, with participants from Museum of Science, Boston; COSI, Columbus, Ohio; Cap-Sciences, Bordeaux, France; and Experimentarium, Hellerup, Denmark and panelists Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, Vice-Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; Ned Gardiner, Data Visualization Expert at NOAA; Eric Gorman, Cap-Sciences; David Noble, 2DegreesC; Bjørn Bedsted, Danish Board of Technology; and Hans Gubbels, President of the Ecsite Executive Committee.
Walter Staveloz, Director of International Relations at ASTC served as moderator.
We’re working on getting the video up, but in the meantime, here are a few photos from the event, courtesy of Ned Gardiner, NOAA. The first is Walter Staveloz and Jean-Pascal van Ypersele; the others are of our panel.
*This is the new less catchy, more legal name of Clim’City.
During the planning phase of last week’s transatlantic conference between the Museum of Science, Boston, and Cité des Sciences et de L’Industrie, Paris, organizers struggled over how (and whether) to address the “ClimateGate” scandal (the email accounts of researchers at the University of East Anglia were hacked and posted online; excerpts from these emails have been used by skeptics to “bolster” their denial of anthropogenic climate change).
If you’re also struggling with questions about this, these two articles might be worth reading:
This one from Nature has a good run-down of the implications:
“A fair reading of the e-mails reveals nothing to support the denialists’ conspiracy theories. In one of the more controversial exchanges, UEA scientists sharply criticized the quality of two papers that question the uniqueness of recent global warming… and vowed to keep at least the first paper out of the upcoming Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers.”
It’s worth reading the entire article, particularly if your audience tends toward skeptical. And, if you’re interested in what IPCC Chairman Rajenda Pachauri and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had to say on the matter, check out this IPCC post from last week.
If you find all the goings on in Copenhagen to be a little confusing, you should take heart that you’re not the only one. As BBC Environmental Reporter Richard Black points out on his COP15 blog, there’s an often overwhelming flurry of activity (and acronyms) surrounding the negotiations. If you’re looking to make sense of it without spending hours studying up on the UN or climate science, Black’s blog is enormously helpful and updated daily.
Sunday is a pretty slow day at COP15 (the main site at the Bella Center is shut down until Monday) but Saturday was packed, with representatives from the 937 observer organizations here this weekend lined up for hours to pick up credentials for the NGO exhibition and side events.
cc photo by Matthew McDermott
These included organizations most of you are familiar with and some of you have worked with before – like ICLEI and 350.org – and large universities like Stanford. But because the booths were assigned free of charge to the first 200 NGOs to request one, it was a great opportunity to hear about some smaller projects, like the Ithaca College Public Opinion Poll.
A group of students from Ithaca College turned their class project into a public opinion website, with participation from nearly 1000 individuals from around the world. Among other questions, the group asked whether the conference would produce a meaningful treaty (54% were optimistic that it would) and if allowing carbon emissions to rise above 350 ppm was dangerous (though a strong majority said yes, check out this Gallup poll to see how views on the dangers of climate change vary around the world).
If the students you work with are looking for organizations to partner with or maybe just for a good example of young people doing relatively high profile work, you might encourage them to explore some of the other pages on the site, which also highlights other youth-oriented organizations participating in the conference and working on environmental issues.
Just as a reminder, you can watch the Clim’City event we’ve organized with NOAA online starting Monday at 8:15AM EST.
The European Commission’s Directorate-General for the Environment sends out weekly Science for Environment Policy news alerts that are also available on its website. You can find this week’s climate change-focused alert on-line, but there were a few points I wanted to make special mention of.
Three of the six short pieces highlighted in the alert (one on uncertainty, one on framing, and one on the effect of fearful imagery) speak directly to C3’s goal of engaging the public on climate change, and largely reinforce the project’s underlying philosophy that global effects of climate change should be tied to local changes. They emphasize some of the same points as Tony Leiserowitz’s Six Americas study, suggesting that “information should be tailored to different public groups according to their beliefs and attitudes.”
“Fear is not the answer to communicating climate change” includes some advice that might be useful to those of you thinking about how to build on the powerpoint presentation Jennifer Shirk gave in Fort Worth, particularly when selecting images:
“However, [images of large and extreme impacts such as melting icesheets, visions of rising sea levels and intense heat and droughts] also tend to enhance the sense that climate change happens somewhere else, to somebody else. Some individuals react to such images with a fatalistic attitude, feeling they are unable to do anything to help. Others deny climate change, rather than experience the discomfort of its reality.
“While the dramatic images were judged to be the most personally important, they were also considered the most disempowering. Enabling imagery… were seen as least personally important, yet made people feel more able to do something about climate change.”
The article was based on work presented in the Paper “Fear Won’t Do It”: Promoting Positive Engagement with Climate Change through Visual and Iconic Representations by O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole, which doesn’t seem to be freely available online, but you can read the abstract and, if you’re so inclined, buy the entire thing here.
Katie Levedahl of Sciencenter, Ithaca, New York, organized an activity and demonstration session at this year’s ASTC Conference, and the activities she and a handful of other C3 partners presented are now available online.
You can find all of the handouts on SlideShare, but here’s a quick look at “Climate Change Food Station”, shared by Leon Geschwind from the Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii:
Results are in from the Danish Board of Technology’s World Wide Views global focus group project, in which both Museum of Science, Boston and Cité des Sciences et de L’Industrie, Paris participated. They’ve set up a pretty easy-to-use tool that lets site visitors look at results by country or region, control for economic output, and create basic crosstabs.
Also, via Colin Johnson, retired CEO of TechniQuest in Cardiff, South Wales, several climate change resources from the Met, the UK’s national weather office:
This is the most recent in a series of guest posts by leading climate scientists, science writers, policy makers and others involved in the ongoing debate about climate policy. We’ll be hearing from these guests regularly leading up to COP15 in December.
Latest U.S. Climate Assessment Flags Impacts Ongoing Today
by David Herring
Having served for more than 17 years as a science writer, editor, and public speaker for two U.S. science agencies, I spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to communicate effectively about science. So it is with some chagrin that I call attention to the highly effective communication campaign that various “dismissive”* entities have been waging to sow seeds of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) among the public regarding climate change.
“FUD” is a shorthand term coined by marketers and public relations experts to refer to a particular communications strategy. It’s a strategy that is well understood and widely used to influence public opinion. Sadly, it’s a strategy that works, and we’re seeing it used a lot today in public forums about science policy topics facing our nation (consider health care insurance, stem cell research, and evolution as recent cases in point).
For practitioners of FUD, the rules of the game are simple: question everything your opponents say and seek to prove nothing. Invoke uncertainty if you can; exaggerate, obfuscate, or even outright lie if you can’t. Objectivity isn’t the objective; winning is. You win at FUD if you can prevent your opponents from successfully enacting any public policy action that would change the status quo.
Thus far, the practitioners of FUD have been winning the climate “debate.” Mind you, theirs isn’t a scientific debate; it’s a rhetorical one. And witness: no national or international public policy has been enacted to significantly address the roots of the climate change problem. Study after study on public understanding and attitudes about climate change reveal a growing majority of Americans are convinced that “climate change is real” and represents “a serious problem.” Yet there also remains a lingering, false public perception that climate scientists are “uncertain” and that there’s still some debate among scientists about what’s causing our world to warm. This is precisely the false perception fomented by the proponents of FUD.
To help to put that lingering perception to bed, please note that in June 2009 the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) issued the last in a series of 21 major climate science reports (available here: http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments). Together with the IPCC Climate Assessments, these USGCRP reports represent the best information that our nation’s best climate scientists have learned about climate change.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) led the development of the latest report, titled “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States.” The authors of this report are from multiple climate science agencies and academia. The reports state that global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced. Specifically, the “Impacts” report reads: “Global temperature has increased over the past 50 years. This observed increase is due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases.” The scientists amply cite their evidence and invite others to examine the data for themselves.
The report’s authors warn that the impacts from climate change aren’t abstract, far-off, far-in-the-future, or undefined things. On the contrary, they say, “Climate change is apparent now across our nation.” The report cites melting Arctic sea ice and permafrost, increased occurrence of wildfires, increased stress on fish populations and coral reefs, more intense heavy rain events that happen more often, rising sea levels, and larger storm surges hitting coastal communities. They cite increased risk of heat waves, increased impacts to water and energy utilities, greater adverse impacts to farmers, and increased health risks. All these documented impacts are among the mounting, mountainous scientific evidence that climate change is being observed and felt today.
At this point, some readers may speculate that I’m engaged in a FUD campaign of my own. My reply is simple: what do the scientists’ climate data show, and what explanation best fits the observations? Each and every observation published in the IPCC and USGCRP reports has been documented and verified by multiple science teams independently from one another. Because those observations line up very well with scientists’ understanding of how the climate system works, and with climate models’ predictions of past and future climate conditions, scientists are increasingly confident that they understand the main root cause of climate change: human emission of carbon dioxide. The case has been made by leading climate scientists, both in the United States and internationally.
So now the stage is set for the next match between proponents of climate science literacy and proponents of climate FUD—the December 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Already I can hear the propaganda machines revving their engines. I don’t know whether or not our policy leaders in Copenhagen will reach an agreement to limit humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Whichever way the climate policy negotiations go, I hope our policy leaders will give primary consideration to three important facts: (1) we have ample scientific evidence that human-induced climate changes are underway today and are projected to grow; (2) widespread climate-related impacts are occurring now and are expected to increase; and (3) while there will be economic costs associated with any given climate policy, there will also be economic costs associated with a failure to act. Climate scientists warn that, in the long run, the economic costs of inaction will likely prove to be far greater.
In the end, I believe (I hope!) proponents of truth and scientific objectivity will prevail. But if they fail to adopt new policies to address the global warming problem, I hope our policy leaders will have the courage to admit that it’s simply because they didn’t get it done, and not because of some bogus claim of scientific uncertainty. As the late, great physicist Dr. Richard Feynman observed: “Reality must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled.”
*My use of the term “dismissive” refers to the 7% of the U.S. population who are “very sure that global warming is not happening” and are “actively involved as opponents of a national effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”—as measured and defined by Ed Maibach, et al., in their 2009 reported titled “Global Warming’s Six Americas.”
In March 2008 David Herring joined NOAA’s Climate Program Office, where he serves as Communications Program Director. Before coming to NOAA, David worked for 16 years as a science writer, editor, and project manager in the Earth Sciences Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
The recording from Rick and Jennifer’s July 28 Citizen Science webcast is now available. We weren’t able to edit out the technical glitches, but I think they were few enough and far enough between that it’s still very watchable.
Those of you who weren’t able to join us for the interactive session should feel free to let Jennifer know if you have any follow-up questions. And let me know if you run into technical problems.
The documents referenced in the webcast are available for download on Basecamp. If you don’t have access to Basecamp, email me (kcrawford@astc.org) and I’ll get them to you.
