A new paper of mine, about to be published in the October issue of BAMS (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society), looks at how the common, ancient human belief that the weather and climate are out of human control affects education and outreach about human-caused climate change. I outlined these ideas and my outreach message at a talk earlier this year. An early online version of the paper is available.
The article could really be a book, and, in fact, it may become one in a year or two. It grew out of several years of interdisciplinary research, involving everything from reading history and religious texts, to interviewing religious leaders, to participating in outreach programs, to donning a sulu and attending church in Fiji.
Here's the core argument:
Skepticism about anthropogenic climate change may therefore be reasonable when viewed through the lens of religion or the lens of history. In order to create a lasting public understanding of anthropogenic climate change, scientists and educators need to appreciate that the very notion that humans can directly change the climate may conflict with beliefs that underpin the culture of the audience.
I briefly trace the history behind this argument, and provide some modern evidence for the influence of belief on acceptance of the evidence for climate change. Despite what William Briggs, a critic of the early online release, my argument is not purely about religion, rather it is about the sense that the climate is to large to be affected by humans. This idea that we are small compared to the grand forces of nature and the atmosphere may be encoded in a structured belief system, or it may drive people's desire to climb mountains and stare at the view from the top.
Even in secular communities, a broad sense that forces beyond humans control the climate may partly explain the persistence of the argument that natural forcings like solar activity are the primary cause of observed 20th century climate change despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.
I conclude with two broad suggestions for reforming climate change education and outreach:
Climate change outreach efforts need to address the perceived conflict between the scientific evidence and deeply ingrained cultural perceptions of climate. First, the development of human beliefs about climate should be added to educational materials and lesson plans. Existing education and outreach efforts rarely acknowledge any thinking about climate or climate change prior to the Svante Arrhenius’ 1896 study on atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature....
Second, educators and scientists should take lessons from approaches used in teaching of evolution, another subject where science can appear to conflict with pre-existing beliefs. Pedagogical research on evolution finds that providing the audience with opportunities to evaluate how their culture or beliefs affect their willingness to accept scientific evidence is more effective than attempting to separate scientific views from religious or cultural views.
The paper concludes with a message that I am regularly repeating at scientific forums, and will continue to write about at Maribo:
Climate scientists, for whom any inherent doubts about the possible extent of human influence on the climate were overcome by years of training in physics and chemistry of the climate system, need to accept that there are rational cultural, religious and historical reasons that the public may fail to believe that anthropogenic climate change is real, let alone that it warrants a policy response. It is unreasonable to expect a lay audience, not armed with the same analytical tools as scientists, to develop lasting acceptance during a one hour public seminar of a scientific conclusion that runs counters to thousands of years of human belief.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Can we make the climate a part of the human world?
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Climate change and human rights
I had a nice long interview about different aspects of climate change with human rights expert Darren Thorne as part of a new podcast series Human Rights and Wrongs, hosted by the Mark. As always, feedback and comments are welcome.
[Update] On the podcast, we discuss the pitfalls of Canada relying on the US to determine climate policy. One of the problems is that it may be a long wait. From the Globe and Mail:
Environment Minister Jim Prentice is signalling further delays in imposing greenhouse gas emission standards on the oil sector and other industries, saying Ottawa does not want to lose jobs and investment by driving activity out of the country.
The Conservative government is waiting for the United States to decide how it will impose climate-change regulations before acting here. And the U.S. Congress could take up to two years to pass legislation that sets caps on greenhouse gas emissions, Mr. Prentice told a Senate committee Thursday.
Add the delay to the fact that the whatever US legislation is produced will be tailored to the US economy (i.e. provide loopholes for industries that are more prominent in the US than in Canada), and there's even more reason to pursue a national strategy.
Sunday, September 06, 2009
Communicating climate change in an unscientific world
Greenfyre's has a new post reminding people to take reports of public skepticism about climate change into context, like public literacy on other scientific issues. This is one theme of Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's new book "Unscientific America".
Those of us communicating about climate change with the public tend to forget that the very notion that humans can change the climate is a major paradigm shift. For thousands of years, we believed that climate (or weather, in general, the sky) was something controlled by gods. So to believe that human activity is changing the climate requires a real paradigm shift. This was the subject of an essay of mine in Climatic Change a couple years ago.
One hundred and fifty years after Darwin published the Origin of the Species, many people are still struggling to accept the theory of evolution. The figure above, taken from a recent presentation of mine, shows the fraction of Americans who believe in Darwin's theory is only slightly greater than the fraction that believes in ghosts. The point of showing this in a presentation is not that North Americans are scientifically illiterate - though that may be in fact be the case - but that changing fundamental beliefs can take time. From Climatic Change:
From Galileo to Darwin, science is full of examples where new discoveries challenged traditional beliefs. If history is a guide, it can take decades or centuries for the new science to become the new orthodoxy. The battle over public acceptance of natural selection is still being fought 150 years after the publication of the Darwin’s The Origin of Species. The potential for human-induced climate change may not belong on a list of the most fundamental scientific discoveries of last 500 years. Like those discoveries, however, it does challenge a belief held by virtually all religions and cultures worldwide for thousands of years. This long view of history needs to be reflected in campaigns to educate the public, who do not have the benefit of years of graduate training in atmospheric science, about the science of climate change.
The mistake that's often made in climate change communication is assuming that the science should just intuitively make sense to people. What can help is to acknowledge, really address it, not spend thirty seconds, right off the bat in every presentation, that what we are saying may be hard to "believe" in part because if challenges traditional ways of thinking. That's why we use science to carefully examine whether humans are changing the climate, and the results are conclusive [ed's note: original post mistakenly had "inconclusive"!]
