Warm spring weather and global warming: If only scientists could be so persuasive

Gah. What an unconvincing piece of tripe, which is too bad, because the message itself has a lot of merit.

It’s true that the recent warm winter weather has softened the American public’s stance on global warming, and that a colder winter has/will make them more reluctant to accept. This shows the lack of scientific literacy, in the form of a basic scientific disconnect between weather and climate, that the average person has. It’s also true that scientists should do more in the form of outreach. It’s too bad the article doesn’t connect how the latter would affect the former.

Generally, those who know the most about climate – and other important scientific fields – are locked up in their university ivory towers and conference rooms, speaking a language only they can understand.

And they speak mostly to each other, not to the general public, policymakers, or business people – not to those who can actually make things happen.

This is dangerous. We live in an age when scientific issues permeate our social, economic, and political culture. People must be educated about science and the scientific process if we are to make rational and informed decisions that affect our future. Indeed, a well functioning democracy requires it.

But instead, the relative absence of academics and academic scholarship in the public discourse creates a vacuum into which uninformed, wrong, and downright destructive viewpoints get voiced and take hold.

There are several scientists who are quite vocal in explaining climate change. And what do they get for their trouble? The get verbally attacked and threatened with violence, they get their emails hacked, and the people who have already decided that global warming is a fraud or hoax go right on believing so. The denialist camp can trot out a few “experts” to counter anything that is said in support of climate change, and the discussion is couched in language that subverts the process of science (such as the implication that having any level of uncertainty is a failure, or that because we don’t know everything that we know nothing) The press is complicit in this when they present a false balance to the story by presenting both sides of the issue, giving the impression that the scientists are split equally.

Scientific literacy through general education is another requirement that scientists can’t directly affect, either. You can lead a horse to water, and all that — if you don’t speak the language, any effort to explain details is wasted, but that’s not to say that the attempts aren’t being made. A big problem here is that the average (scientifically illiterate) person can’t tell if it’s shit or shinola — they see or hear some word salad and they think it’s the real deal. And they aren’t motivated to go and learn anything. That, however, is one avenue where outreach can help — getting people excited about science, and getting them to want to become literate.

Which means that people have to make an effort to meet scientists halfway, and improving that requires a very broad effort. It’s not something you can simply blame on scientists residing in their “ivory towers”. But that’s an uphill battle, because if parents don’t value education and scientific literacy, it probably means their kids won’t get the exposure that they need.

Here’s a typical example. After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh argued that “The ocean will take care of this on its own if it was left alone…” In fact, the spill created extensive damage to wide ranging marine habitats as well as the Gulf Coast’s fishing and tourism industries. Long-term impacts are still unclear as scientists continue to monitor underwater plumes of dissolved oil that lie along the bottom.

Scientists have absolutely no control over what Rush Limbaugh says, so I don’t see how this is a “typical” example of any kind of scientific failing. That his followers accept his view on matters scientific is quite sad, but they aren’t likely to listen to a scientist anyway, if s/he said something that contradicted him. They listen to frikkin’ Rush Limbaugh!

To show how infrequently scientists communicate with the public, consider these findings. In news stories about the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2010, only 4 percent of the individuals quoted were scientists. This is according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford in England.

Similarly, only 9 percent of commentary pieces and letters to the editor in major US newspapers and magazines were written by university-based scientists in 2007, 2008 and 2009. The study was reported in the academic journal Organizations & Environment.

Another study finds a dearth of articles about climate change in business, sociology, and political science publications.

That sounds like a failure of the media to me. Scientists don’t control who gets interviewed by a reporter, or whose letters-to-the-editor get published or what stories get written up by the publications that were surveyed. Show me that scientists aren’t writing letters, or refusing to be interviewed. Both could be true, and that’s the information that will support the thesis.

Scientists limit involvement in such “outside” activities because tenure and promotion are based primarily on publication in top-tier academic journals. And the metric of quality in a large number of such journals is more about theoretical rigor and contributions to scholarship, not empirical relevance to society.

Writing for the broader media, turning out books for the commercial press, and even serving on government panels are often discouraged as “anti-intellectual” at worst and an “impractical” waste of time at best.

Here is a valid point. When outreach is not regarded as important or even thought of as a detriment to one’s career, scientists may avoid it.

To be useful, academic work must link directly to real-world problems rather than only extending a theory. This work must break down the silo-nature of academic scholarship and bridge the breadth of scientific disciplines, while also taking into account the economic and policy implications of its conclusions.

At best this is naive, that you can concentrate research on areas that apply to “real-world” problems, because you need to do basic research before you can do applied research, and you don’t know where that will lead (an example of which we recently saw). Ignoring inquiry into the underlying areas of science will cause applied research to dry up — not immediately, but some years down the road.

At worst, the writer doesn’t understand what theory means in science.

Limiting research based on economic and policy implications is a recipe for disaster. This has the widest implications in biology, though there’s always a chance that someone might object to relativity experiments. Precisely because you don’t know what you are going to find, you could be barring the path to some wonderful discovery. Given the current political attitudes in the US regarding women’s reproductive health issues, and it’s not hard to imagine some policy makers deciding that certain research should not happen, which is but one reason that science research should be based on the quality of the science, not politics.

After mentioning some programs to improve outreach, the article concludes

Surveys have shown that the percentage of conservatives and Republicans who believe that the effects of global warming have already begun to happen declined from roughly 50 percent in 2001 to about 30 percent in 2010, while the corresponding percentage of liberals and Democrats increased from roughly 60 percent in 2001 to about 70 percent in 2010.

This doesn’t logically follow, since it was already proposed (and is mentioned again in the next section) that simply experiencing warmer weather will do the same thing, and this past decade is the hottest one on record. This may simply be a case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc (happened after, therefore was caused by). Without knowing the details of the survey, we don’t know.

What we need are universities eagerly producing academics along the model of the late Carl Sagan, who popularized the study of the universe with his 1980 TV series “Cosmos” and his novel “Contact,” which was turned into a movie of the same name. America could use thousands of these Sagans, people knowledgeable about science who will share their knowledge in newspapers, on the Internet, in the local Kiwanis club, bowling league, and town-hall meeting.

Yes, we could use thousand of Sagans. (or, a microSagan of Sagans). Easier said than done, I think. There was only one, like there was only one Feynman. Today we have a handful of great science communicators (Neil deGrasse Tyson jumps immediately to mind) and some very good ones, but I suspect they were not produced by some university program. I think it’s more likely that these people were molded by experiences when they were younger and instilled with a passion for science and communication, and I think you have to acknowledge that true excellence in both science and communication is going to be a rare combination, and that it’s not solely the result of what’s added in school — there is innate talent with which you must start. Find these people, yes, and encourage them. Remove the obstacles, but don’t expect that you are going to get a slew of Carl Sagans as a result, and don’t think that this will solve the problem.