political issue than a scientific one, thereby
necessitating in their view a “balanced” presentation of both sides, notwithstanding
the fact that the overwhelming majority of
scientists understand humans are warming
the planet and dangerously so. Also, increasingly profit-driven media have been abdicating their role in science education. Science
writer Chris Mooney and scientist Sheril
Kirshenbaum offer these grim statistics
in their recent book Unscientific America:
How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future
(2009, Basic Books):
● For every five hours of cable news, one
minute is devoted to science;
● Some 46% of Americans believe that the
Earth is less than 10 000 years old;
● The number of US newspapers with science sections has shrunk by two-thirds in the
last 20 years;
● Just 18% of Americans know a scientist
personally;
● The overwhelming majority of Americans
polled in late 2007 either could not name a
scientific role model or named “people who
are either not scientists or not alive”.
The fate of perhaps
the next 100 billion
people rests with
scientists trying to
communicate the
dire nature of the
climate problem
The lack of scientific messaging
Yet just when the media are abandoning science coverage, many scientists are increasingly reluctant to address politicized issues
like global warming.
Scientists who are also great public communicators, like Carl Sagan or Richard
Feynman, have grown scarcer as science has
become increasingly specialized. Moreover,
the media like the glib and the dramatic,
which is a style that most scientists deliberately avoid. Scientists like to focus on the
things that they do not know, since that is
the cutting edge of scientific research. So
they do not keep repeating the things that
they do know, which is one reason that the
public and the media often do not hear from
scientists about the strong areas of consensus on global warming. And as the physicist
Mark Bowen writes in Thin Ice (2006, Holt),
his book about glaciologist Lonnie Thompson, “Scientists have an annoying habit of
backing off when they’re asked to make a
plain statement, and climatologists tend to
be worse than most.”
As scientist and writer Jared Diamond
wrote in a 1997 article in Discover magazine
on scientific messaging (or the lack thereof),
“Scientists who do communicate effectively
with the public often find their colleagues responding with scorn, and even punishing
them in ways that affect their careers.” After
Sagan became famous, he was rejected for
membership of the National Academy of
Sciences in a special vote. This became widely
known, and, as Diamond writes, “Every scientist is capable of recognizing the obvious
implications for his or her self-interest.”
Scientists who have been outspoken about
global warming have been repeatedly attacked as having a “political agenda”. As a
2006 article in the Bulletin of the American
Meteorological Society explained (87 1025),
“For a scientist whose reputation is largely
invested in peer-reviewed publications and
the citations thereof, there is little professional pay-off for getting involved in debates
that mix science and politics.”
The scientific community must figure out
how to effectively engage the public on this
crucial issue. The physics community in particular must help lead the way. After all, it
was effective at warning the public and policymakers about the dangers of that other
existential threat to the human race – nuclear weapons. We appear to have walked
back from the precipice of global nuclear war
only to face an equally grave threat from our
unbridled consumption of fossil fuels.
I believe that the major scientific bodies
and leading scientists in the US must come
together immediately to develop and quickly
implement a serious communication strategy. We are again at the precipice. Indeed, it
is, as the current Presidential Science Advisor and physicist John Holdren has said
many times, too late to avoid dangerous
anthropogenic warming of the planet. Now
the only question is whether we can avoid
unmitigated catastrophe.
One final point. If the scientific community
is unable to help persuade the public, opinion-makers and political leaders to take the
necessary action now, then the entire relationship of science to the broader world will
change forever. When the US and the world
do get desperate about global warming in the
next decade or two, then the entire focus of
society, of scientists and engineers, and of
academia will be directed toward a Second-World-War-scale effort to mitigate what we
can and adapting to the myriad miseries that
our myopic dawdling has made inevitable. I
do not think that the scientific community has
even begun to think about that.
Joseph Romm is a physicist and
climate expert, and a senior fellow at
the Center for American Progress in
Washington, DC, where he edits the
blog ClimateProgress.org, e-mail
jromm@americanprogress.org
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