Our Earth’s Future is about the science of climate change and how to talk about it. You will learn from scientists in the fields of climatology, oceanography, Earth science, and anthropology who study how climate change is affecting people, populations, and ways of life. Explore the multiple lines of evidence for the human-induced climate change that is happening today, and consider what that means for the future of our planet. At the end of this course you will be able to understand key scientific principles, identify and address misconceptions, and contribute confidently to conversations about climate change.
Communicating Climate Change
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En provenance du cours de American Museum of Natural History
Our Earth's Future
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À partir de la leçon
Climate Change Is Happening: See It
Human-induced climate change is happening. But in order to explore the evidence for this claim, we must first ask two questions: “What is science?” and “What is climate?” Once we understand how science is done and the basic dynamics of the climate system, we’ll focus on how scientists study ice cores, and see how evidence of climate change in the past is fundamental to understanding what lies ahead.
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Debra Tillinger, Ph.D.Instructor
I'm gonna talk a little bit about communicating about climate science,
about climate impacts in a landscape and a situation that is and
can be quite fraught and politicized and nasty.
And I'll try and explain why that has occurred,
what you can do to kind of get around that and how you can still be effective.
So what are the odds that we can have a clear communication
about a subject that people feel very very strongly about even though they know
very little about it [INAUDIBLE]?
The answer is very hard.
Right, you get a lot of miscommunication out there in the public.
You get a lot of disinformation and you get a lot of confused people.
Right, so you get a lot of a what people discuss as storm out arguments,
people kind of putting up caricatures of what environmentalists believe or
what libertarians believe, really just to knock them down.
You get a lot of people, particularly on TV,
doing something that's called the Gish Gallop.
This is named after Duane Gish, who is a creationist.
And so he was very famous for going on TV and
they put up a scientist next to him and he would just not stop talking.
And he would just like go through like 50 different things,
all of which purported to demonstrate that evolution wasn't a thing.
And by the time anybody got around to even rebutting one of them,
you know, time's over.
So that kind of tactic you see a lot in public debates on TV and
things, and we can recognize it for what it is.
But it does mean that actual clear communication is a real
struggle sometimes.
And then you've just got the normal workings of the media.
You know the media take a story, where there is depth, where there is expertise,
and they condense it into a news article.
The news article gets condensed into a paragraph, which is the lead.
That paragraph gets condensed into a soundbite or a headline.
And can that headline ever really reflect all of the nuances and
caveats that were in the original research or a part
of the context in which this science was done or this piece of news was available?
The answer is of course not.
So headlines, they are by their nature, lies.
Right?
They are not the complete truth.
And when people see headlines, and often headlines can be actually quite distorted.
We've seen cases where the actual headlines is 180 degrees
In the opposite direction from what the paper actually said
when they're reporting on a science result.
You know, people will see these things.
They know that the situation is more complicated than is being portrayed.
And they become suspicious, they become untrustworthy, untrust, untrusting
of sources of information, because how can you say that in a headline?
It's far more complicated than that.
And people get frustrated with the mainstream media when they're talking
about a complex subject.
And it isn't just climate science.
I mean, any complex subject.
Social security, Ferguson, any of these subjects.
The context, the nuance, the interesting stuff is completely washed away.
And so you need to find
ways in that are different from the headlines that we just generally see.
What we have in the situation with climate science is that the science itself
has become politicized.
Not the scientists.
You know, if you go to a university lab or you go to a conference you just see people
doing science like they would do any other science.
But the context of that science has become politicized.
Now what does that mean?
It means that when the science goes out into the real world, you're generally
only going to hear about it if it projects onto some kind of hot button issue.
Right, you're not going to hear about the interesting work that people have done on
aerosols coming out of biomass burning in Indonesia.
You're going to hear about I don't know, global cooling.
You're going to hear about, oh my god it's going to be worse.
Or you're going to hear about a hurricane, you're going to hear about the dramatic
things, you're not going to hear about the subtle things, right?
And the things that get out there are a function of what the editors and
the bookers perceive to be the big questions.
Now they're very confused.
And so they have no idea what the big, scientific questions are.
All they know is what the big questions are in the wider public,
in the political discourse.
And so if you have science that projects onto the political question
Then, bang, it gets swept up and you can be famous for a day.
If you do science that's just as good, but on a slightly different topic or
nobody really sees how it projects onto that other political question,
it won't ever see the light of day.
The politicization comes about because people perceive the science
to be threatening, somehow.
Right? It's not just a question of what is out
there in the world or how we understand something out there in the world.
People think that the science is threatening something that they hold dear.
So in the case of, of evolution, you know, that's a religious viewpoint that
gets threatened in the case of genetically modified food particularly in Europe.
It's the sense, somebody's sense of [FOREIGN] and
their attachment to their local food and to their local way of life.
These things are not necessarily rational, but they're perceived as being threats.
And when people are threatened they put up barriers, and
when there are barriers people don't listen anymore.
Now there's a kind of flip side to that, which is the scientization of politics,
where you see politicians and talking heads and
lobbyists using sciency words and quoting things that were in nature and
science and papers that people wrote, as if they understood what those papers said.
And then, they're using them to kind of bash their political opponents
over the head with them.
So you'll see two lobbyists talking about tree ring
reconstructions from the 15th century, as if anybody in the whole world
has ever decided anything in politics based on a 15th century tree ring.
It's never happened.
But why are they talking about it?
They're talking about it because everybody likes science.
Science is all powerful and is obviously right.
So if you have science on your side, then your politics must be right.
There's some very confused logic there, but people perceive it.
People perceive that science speaks louder than my opinion.
If I can say that science says something, that's better than if I say something.
So, people jump onto the idea that if they can get science to say something for
them They don't have to explicitly say what they are advocating for, right?
So you see this sciencitized politics which is like scienciness.
It's science words, science concepts, but
it's got nothing to do with an impartial search for truth and understanding.
It has to do with cherry-picking results that fits with
somebody's preconceived notions about what it is that they want.
Now there are some good consequences and bad consequences with this.
So a good consequence is that if your science actually has something to
say about the big public debate of the day,
Then that's a [NOISE] an express lane to nature and science and
the proceedings of the National Academy and being interviewed on NPR.
And that's great.
And I think all of us should work on that.
People care.
People really care about my work, my contribution.
Of course, they don't care about you.
They don't care about your work.
You're just fodder in a much bigger argument.
And so you're kinda like road kill in a political discussion.
And if you think that it's about you, the reason why you got on to NPR or the reason
why you're talking to John Stossel on Fox Business News, you're in for
a rude awakening as soon as you see what they actually want to talk to you about.
With all of this attention comes some Bad Consequences.
What you find is that because you're just being used,
people will have no compunction about misquoting you or
misrepresenting what you think or what you've found.
And so you get abused, your science gets abused as well as
you get quoted out of context quite a lot it turns out.
And because this is much more of a political issue then a scientific issue,
it turns out that people are not as nice as you think that they should be, right?
And the weird thing is that a lot of people think that they're gonna,
I'm just gonna communicate, because people need to know stuff and
they don't often examine very carefully what it is
that they're trying to communicate, why they're communicating.
Why them? Why are you going out and
doing these things as opposed to somebody else.
Something is is impelling you personally,
what's your personal motivation to do these things.
And then once you decided what it is that you, why it is you wanna communicate.
You have to think about how you're gonna communicate.
Where are you gonna do this?
Are you gonna stand on a street corner and shout at people?
Not very effective. Are you gonna stand on the internet and
shout at people?
Also not very effective.
[LAUGH].
I started off writing letters to the editor.
My first letter to the editor was to a journalist on New York Press,
which is one of the free newspapers that used to be quite popular.
And they'd written an article about, climate change and
they were basing it off a paper that I actually knew quite well, and
they completely misinterpreted what this paper showed.
Totally, they thought that something was observations when it was a model.
They thought that you could integrate that and it would tell you something and
it was totally wrong.
And so I thought well, I know this.
I should help them out cuz they're obviously a little confused.
So I wrote a letter saying, I think you're a little confused.
This is actually showing this, that was actually a model, and
if you do that, [SOUND].
And I thought they would be grateful.
I thought they'd thank me, and say, oh, thank you very much.
We'll know better next time.
But instead they printed my letter, and
then there was like a half page rant about how my agenda was so obvious, and
how I should get back to doing science and leave the politics to the politicians.
What?
No!
You just said it was t to the 4, and it wasn't t to the 4,
it was just t, and I realize that what you think,
what I thought of as neutral information is not
perceived as neutral information to the other people.
So I thought, okay that's not very effective.
I started talking to journalists, people started calling me up.
And that was quite effective.
Occasionally you get a quote, sometimes you'd see that your conversation
with a journalist had changed how they pitched a story.
But four journalists would call you up, and you'd keep saying the same thing,
the same basic context again, again, and again, and that got a little bit boring.
So I thought, well how can we short circuit that?
So we started a blog called Real Climate.
And that was the first time that any group of climate
scientists had really kind of put themselves out in public to interact
with normal people in a kind of widespread way.
Now with Twitter, it's only 140 characters.
How wrong can you be in 140 characters?
I know if you follow Richard Dawkins,
you can see you can be quite wrong, quite often.
[LAUGH]. >> [LAUGH].
>> In 140 characters.
In fact it's an interesting discipline to say something interesting concisely.
And it's actually quite good at helping me be more precise about how I write things.
So I've been enjoying that.
So Twitter is actually really useful.
Most normal people don't use Twitter.
But a lot of people that work in media do.
And a lot of people who are opinion leaders pay a lot of attention to Twitter.
And so one of the ways to get something kind of off the chain so
that it gets talked about in op eds and in columns and
on TV and things, is to help push something along on Twitter and
that's actually quite effective at kind of moving things from people like me who have
virtually small audiences to people who have really, really large audiences.
So, there are some things that people do in science
communications now that are actually pretty much own goals.
So if you think about a doctor's maxim to first do no harm.
If you think back, communicators maxim, right?
Don't pollute the communication environment anymore than it already is,
all right?
Try not to make things worse.
The things that make things worse, oh, when people over generalize.
Scientists say, deniers claim, the lobbyists do this.
And it might be a scientist said that.
It might be a person that did this.
It might a lobbyist said that.
When you generalize the whole groups of people,
you're almost always gonna make a mistake that can cause problems.
There's a lot of naivete around this topic.
When science has a policy component, or has policy implications.
Most people who haven't ever dealt with policy makers actually have no idea
what policy makers do, or why they do it.
And so they're often quite naive about what they mean.
And so, you can spend a lot of time saying, oh, policy
makers are gonna totally change their mind because of this, this, this, and this.
And, if you actually talk to them, you realize that's completely orthogonal
to the things that they actually care about.
So don't talk, yeah I mean so I mean it's a general thing all right.
Don't assume what people need until actually talking to them first, right?
Which is always a good thing when you're communicating, right?
What is it that you're actually interested in, right?
Listen before you communicate.
Which again is often
something that's one should aspire to but you don't always match.
Scientists often complain when we've had like a big story and
it's been misquoted and it's been quoted out of context and it's been abused.
We often complain about how unjust this all is and that we are being harassed.
Sometimes we are being harassed like a law suit is not normal right?
But, often times people just say, well, where's the data, where's the answer here?
And, if we start complaining about, oh you only want my data to show that it's,
that my work is wrong or something.
Well, you know what? Tough.
We have to man up, if we're gonna be there trying to get our
work to be part of that conversation.
Part of that is the cost of doing business.
If you wanna play in those fields, you have to be able to say okay no,
here's what we did.
It's open, it's transparent, do whatever you want to do.
This is a graph, it's quite a pretty graph.
It's got nice shadings, it's got colors.
But if you put that in front of most people, they have no idea what it is.
They don't look at it the way an expert looks at it.
And I'm sure you realize, when you give a graph to a bunch of kids,
how difficult it is to get them to extract useful information out of that graph.
And then you take somebody who's last seen a graph and
looked at it in any detail 30 years ago, and you say, look, global warming.
It's hopeless, right.
So, one of the things that that I spent a lot of time doing is removing things like
this from my slides and replacing them with demonstrations as opposed to graphs.
What does this show?
This shows that the planet has warmed by about a degree centigrade
over the last 100 years.
RIght, and it's been ups and downs, and
every year it's a little bit different, but basically it's gone up, right?
What does that mean?
What does a degree mean?
Nobody has any idea what a degree means.
Right?
How many fractions of an ice age is that?
It's about a fifth.
It's about a fifth of the way to an ice age if we're going the other way.
And that's actually quite a big deal.
If you show people instead, well what was the world like a hundred years ago,
where in some kind of climatic context.
You can go back and you can find these old photographs.
This was taken in 1894.
It's the Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska.
And you can go there now, it's completely different.
Why?
Because the glaciers remember.
They integrate all of that weather, all of that noise, all of that yiddi,
you know very bertie and they remember what the long the long term trends are.
So you can go anywhere where there's ice on this planet pretty much, and
you will find, if you can find old photographs, and then you go back and
you look at it and see what it's looking like now, it's completely changed.
If you look
at how plant species move as a function of
the hardiness index, you will be able to see that plants have been moving north
at about six kilometers every decade, something like that.
They've been moving up mountains about 600 meters every decade.
That's kind of interesting, right?
And you can go any you can measure these things.
And that gets you a sense that the planet is noticing what we're doing
in a way that graph, the significance of it, is completely escapes people.
That notion as science as progress is a very good theme because people
like that as a narrative.
If you show somebody, and talk about their research.
What she's doing is shes counting a liken and
moss species in a square meter in this alpine environment.
And what she's doing is going back every year and
seeing how they're changing as a function of the warming that's going on.
This is the Austrian Alps.
And then you realize, okay,
she's looking at one square meter in this huge environment.
And how many other things is she not seeing, right?
You know, how partial is our information?
And how difficult is it to get information out of the system that you can use,
or to say something about how things are changing?
The challenge that an individual has with their own small piece of research,
trying to fit that into the bigger picture.
That's a great story.
It's a great narrative.
And people really identify with that, because people know how hard it is.
It's a quest story.
People will really identify with that.
So those kind of stories work very well in trying to explain what's going on.
We don't need more Carl Sagans necessarily,
though Neil DeGrasse Tyson is doing a pretty good job.
I think we need a deeper bench.
I think we don't need superstar scientists.
I think we need more scientists, more normal people who are scientists, so
that people know a scientist, and they know that they're just normal people.
So I think we can make a difference, and I think we are making a difference.
There's a lot of noise, and
sometimes it's hard to see that we're making a difference.
But I judge that by the kind of quality of
questions that I get now compared to a decade ago.
Even a decade ago, people would ask me, so is this global warming thing,
is that real?
Do I have to worry about that?
And right now, people ask me questions about,
I don't know, black carbon and extreme events,
and attribution and geo-engineering.
It's kinda interesting questions, and so
things have moved on, right?
Some things have been stuck in the 1980s.
The federal level, they're stuck in a loop that is very hard to break.
But at all the other levels, at the city level, the city is really,
the New York City, is really very good about planning for climate change.
And planning to do their part to mitigate against climate change.
The PlaNYC, I don't know if any of you have seen it, is really a very,
very good document.
So much so that cities up and
down the country are copying it in order to kinda come up to speed.
At the state level, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative
in the northeast is actually pretty successful.
And there's some, you know, despite some people who talk
a particularly strange talk, most people get it.
If you talk to staffers, either at the state level or
at the federal level, they get it.
You talk to people internationally, they get it.
So things have improved.
So anyway, thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
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