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EMOTIONAL RESCUE
If we're serious about building a society that makes scientifically informed decisions, then science needs to figure out a way to get its message across effectively.
EMOTIONAL RESCUEClimate change is being called the "perfect moral storm," and scientists may need to throw the public a lifeline.
Finally, at long last, it has happened. As the planet continues to warm, active global warming skepticism has most decidedly become uncool.
The signs were unmistakable in early February, following the release of the policymakers' summary of the latest report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The document bluntly stated that the warming of the climate system is "unequivocal," with a nine in 10 chance that humans are causing it. A few scattered attacks on this conclusion emerged from the usual quarters—right-wing think tanks, The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, congressional crackpots like Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe—but they were few and far between. There was nothing remotely resembling the barrage of volleys that followed the 1995 and 2001 IPCC report rollouts.
Instead, as newly empowered Democrats pledged to make carbon-emission caps a top priority, the Bush administration tried to erase its own previous stance of global warming skepticism. Two White House officials misquoted the president himself in order to suggest Bush had always acknowledged that human greenhouse-gas emissions are causing global warming. It was a lie, but one that told a deep truth about how the climate issue has evolved over the past several years.
Those concerned about preserving the planet should find these latest developments heartening. In the long run, apparently, reality does indeed prevail. Eventually—and just as with Big Tobacco's campaign to question the health risks of smoking—the active denialists and strategic doubt-generators can be driven into obscurity, if not into outright retreat. Eventually.
That's the good news.
But as I attended the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco in February and listened to the climate-related discussions going on there in the wake of the IPCC report, I heard a less heartening theme being sounded as well. Despite ever-increasing scientific certainty, global warming remains a relatively low priority for the US public: Most Americans worry far more about issues like crime, taxes, war, education, and health care. And while the doubt-creation industry has gone into recession (at least for this issue), an insidious partisan divide still persists on climate change. A recent Pew survey revealed that over 50 percent more college-educated Democrats than Republicans accept that humans are to blame for rising temperatures. Without both acceptance and concern on the part of the public, politics won't move fast enough either. With each day that we fail to cut emissions, we're passing the buck to future generations. Yet we delay, delay, delay.
Ethicist Stephen Gardiner of the University of Washington-Seattle is one of many thinkers who've looked closely at the disconnect between the hard evidence of human-caused global warming and our failure to deal with the problem. He calls climate change a "perfect moral storm" because it uniquely tests our capacity to do the right thing (cut emissions). That climate change is global means we need coordination across societies that have vastly different values, priorities, and technological capabilities. That the most severe impacts won't be felt immediately means we have to sacrifice today to protect generations yet to come. And that there is still considerable uncertainty about future consequences means we can debate endlessly about how bad things are going to get. It's no surprise, then, that decades have passed without a coordinated global response that's adequate to the problem at hand.
But admitting and recognizing all of these hurdles doesn't let anyone off the hook. In fact, I've grown increasingly convinced that scientists and science defenders must realize that they are also responsible, to a significant extent, for failing to communicate the nature of this "perfect problem" to the rest of the public in a way that truly mobilizes action.
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2007/05/emotional_rescue.php
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