How to get the message across on climate change (science gets clearer, public gets more confused)

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/communicating-climate-change-1027.html

How to get the message across on climate change

As the science of climate change gets clearer, the public gets more confused. Are there ways to fix that?

David L. Chandler, MIT News Office
October 27, 2011

For many scientists working in the field of climate research, one of the most alarming trends has nothing to do with the climate itself: It’s the poll numbers showing that even as scientific projections of global climate change get ever more certain, public perceptions about climate change are getting ever more skeptical.

Why is there such a huge — and growing — disconnect? John Sterman, the Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, says there are specific characteristics of climate change that make it unusually difficult for people to grasp. But the good news, he says, is that there are approaches that can help bridge that gap in understanding.

…

“When experimentation is impossible, when the consequences of our decisions unfold over decades and centuries,” Sterman says, “simulation becomes the main — perhaps the only — way we can discover for ourselves how complex systems work, what the impact of different policies might be, and thus integrate science into decision making.”

Sterman’s analysis was http://www.springerlink.com/content/r47398743j1232j2/">published this month in a special issue of the journal Climatic Change devoted to the subject of how to improve the communication of climate science to the public, the media, business leaders and lawmakers.

…

[Viking12]

1. Here's a earlier article from Sterman that lays out a very similar argument

The strong scientific consensus on the causes and risks of climate change stands in stark contrast to widespread confusion and complacency among the public (1, 2). Why does this gulf exist, and why does it matter? Policies to manage complex natural and technical systems should be based on the best available scientific knowledge, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides rigorously vetted information to policy-makers. In democracies, however, the beliefs of the public, not only those of experts, affect government policy.

Effective risk communication is grounded in deep understanding of the mental models of policy-makers and citizens (3). What, then, are the principal mental models shaping people's beliefs about climate change? Studies show an apparent contradiction: Majorities in the United States and other nations have heard of climate change and say they support action to address it, yet climate change ranks far behind the economy, war, and terrorism among people's greatest concerns, and large majorities oppose policies that would cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by raising fossil fuel prices (1, 2).

More telling, a 2007 survey found a majority of U.S. respondents (54%) advocated a “wait-and-see” or “go slow” approach to emissions reductions. Larger majorities favored wait-and-see or go slow in Russia, China, and India (1, 2). For most people, uncertainty about the risks of climate change means costly actions to reduce emissions should be deferred; if climate change begins to harm the economy, mitigation policies can then be implemented. However, long delays in the climate's response to anthropogenic forcing mean such reasoning is erroneous.

Wait-and-see works well in simple systems with short lags. We can wait until the teakettle whistles before removing it from the flame because there is little lag between the boil, the whistle, and our response. Similarly, wait-and-see would be a prudent response to climate change if there were short delays in the response of the climate system to intervention. However, there are substantial delays in every link of a long causal chain stretching from the implementation of emissions abatement policies to emissions reductions to changes in atmospheric GHG concentrations to surface warming to changes in ice sheets, sea level, agricultural productivity, extinction rates, and other impacts (4-6). Mitigating the risks therefore requires emissions reductions long before additional harm is evident. Wait-and-see policies implicitly presume the climate is roughly a first-order linear system with a short time constant, rather than a complex dynamical system with long delays, multiple

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/322/5901/532.full

[Tesha]

2. People will *ALWAYS* believe a pretty lie over an inconvenient truth.

Why do you think so many people still think taxes are
too high and all government spending is wasteful? The
idea that they might actually have to *PAY SOMETHING*
to maintain the common good is much less convenient than
simply believing the Republican/Libertarian pretty lies.

Climate change is just the same.

Tesha