While the evidence for climate change continues to strengthen, public acceptance of the science keeps declining. Closing the gap could be a question of better communication.
At the commencement of the Garnaut Climate Change Review, I faced the question that confronts all who are not climate scientists and who are required for one reason or another to take a position on the climate science: how do we know if propositions put forward by some climate scientists are right?
By the time I concluded the Review in September 2008, I had read a fair bit of climate science, published by people, including some “sceptics”, with genuine credentials and records of publication in professionally reputed scientific journals. I was exposed to more of the literature through the work of a conscientious team in the Review’s secretariat, and of scientists advising me in various ways.
Few who contributed to the real climate science doubted that the average temperatures on earth were rising, and that this reflected the increase in concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as a result of human activity.
This view was supported by the learned academies in all of the countries of scientific achievement and the overwhelming majority of specialists in the core disciplines contributing to climate science.
As I noted in the Review, there is no genuinely scientific dissent from the main propositions of the physics of climate change that increased concentrations of greenhouse gases raise the earth’s temperature by calculable amounts. The premise on which I worked through the 2008 Review was that the main propositions of the mainstream science were right “on a balance of probabilities”.
When I came update my Review of the science for a paper released on March 10 this year, it was clear that the new evidence strongly confirmed the mainstream science.
Yet, over the same three year period, between work for the 2008 Review and the Update, some polling evidence suggests that an increasing proportion of the public doubts the mainstream science.
There are many factors contributing to this increase in dissent. But two of the more important are communications based.
Mainstream media has often sought to provide balance between people who base their views on the mainstream science and people who don’t – if you like, between scientific authority, and unscientific opinion. That is a very strange sort of balance.
It is a balance of numbers of words and not a balance of scientific authority.
This, in turn, may exacerbate the second communication issue: scholarly reticence. In the field of climate change science, I wonder whether we are seeing the effects of a professional reticence about stepping too far in front of received wisdom in one stride.
In bringing together the best of scholarly thought and the techniques of conventional journalism, The Conversation is well placed to make a vital contribution to bridging the gap between scientific and public knowledge.
This Foundation Essay is part of a series of articles to mark the launch of The Conversation. Others in the series are:
Better connecting the university to the public debate by Glyn Davis
A better formula for science communication By Peter Doherty
What’s the point of universities? It’s the ideas, stupid By Patrick McCaughey
The science of reporting climate change By Brian McNair
How universities learnt a lesson in humility — and are all the better for it By John Keane
The modern university must reinvent itself to survive By Simon Marginson
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Comments (5)
Dana Nuccitelli
environmental scientist (logged in via email @yahoo.com)
It's interesting, the "skeptics" say that catastrophic predictions must be alarmist - why? Because they can't conceive that catastrophic results are possible? I've yet to see any coherent scientifically-based argument why our current business-as-usual path (in the ballpark of 4°C warming by 2100) wouldn't have disastrous consequences.
It seems to stem from the fact that we've had some alarming predictions in the past which didn't result in catastrophic consequences, but in most cases that's because we did something to avoid them. Acid rain - we introduced SO2 cap and trade. Ozone depletion - we phased-out CFCs with the Montreal Protocol. Y2k - we put major effort into fixing the code. Population bomb - we massively increased agricultural yields.
These problems didn't just magically go away, nor will climate change. Unless we take major steps to reduce CO2 emissions, the catastrophic impacts are inevitable.
Barry Calderbank
(logged in via Facebook)
While the conclusions in this article are correct, there's more. The AGW argument has been undermined by some of its own people (so to speak). Some of the more extreme claims are so silly - and without any serious science to back them up. And, of course, all sorts of agendas are being piggy-backed onto the AGW case. This tends to undermine the actual science in the public debate. The sceptics simply target the extremists and, in so doing, look like they are successfully challenging the science…
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Dean Moriarty
(logged in via Twitter)
I've long thought that the denialist view is misunderstood by the climate change community and now, after reading this, I'm sure it is. In my opinion, it's not "climate change" per se that is being denied, it's the effects of climate change.
And that's a really important difference.
To my mind, the majority now just lump "Climate Change" in with other Green movements: ho hum, wildly overstated effects that never turn out to be true and in a few years, it'll all be forgotten about as a newer, trendier Green agenda emerges.
And so, to answer the rhetorical question asked in the heading - the argument is so clouded precisely because the effects are...
Gore's documentary may well be the worst thing to have happened to the pro side of climate change. Will the seas rise 100m or 10mm? That's a pretty big difference.
I think that’s the issue that needs to be resolved in the public’s mind.
Tim Dean
(logged in via Twitter)
I agree there are a number of contributing factors to the decrease in acceptance of climate science, although few of them will be rectified through a 'business as usual' media reporting approach.
There needs to be an awareness of the psychology motivating climate scepticism (as I've written about on The Drum); of the nature of the biases (confirmation bias chiefly among them) that contribute to selective choice of facts; of how many in the public misunderstand the scientific method; of how different aspects of climate change are conflated, such as the scientific, economic and political - with each requiring different means of reporting; as well as finding a way to coax more climate scientists out of hiding by letting them know they'll be fairly represented in the media.
I look forward to seeing how The Conversation will contribute to improving the discourse on climate change.
John Holt
(logged in via Twitter)
People are not convinced by being told that something is true because scientists say so and they get their backs up when they are ridiculed for doubting, especially as many of the public spokespeople are less than succinct, less than convincing or leap on the more extreme possibilities. I find it impossible to have a reasonable discussion with climate change deniers because they go apoplectic with rage at the mere mention of the topic. A major reason for their rage is that they consider that they…
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