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.

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