In a Policy Forum article published this week at Science, MIT Professor of Management John Sterman reports on an experiment that shows just how self-defeating it is to continue to overburden the public with technical and science-laden explanations of climate change, especially when the communication goal is to catalyze public demand for policy action.
In the experiment, MIT students with advanced training in either the sciences or economics were asked to read descriptions from the IPCC summary for policymakers that depicted the long term accumulation of C02 in the atmosphere. When asked then to sketch what they estimated to be the emissions path needed to stabilize atmospheric CO2, nearly 2/3 of the elite MIT students erroneously reasoned that greenhouse gas emissions can stabilize even though emissions would continue to exceed the rate of removal from the atmosphere.
The conclusion: When presented with highly technical and science-laden depictions of a problem such as climate change, even our brightest minds with advanced specialized training often lack the required mental frameworks and models to accurately interpret, make sense of, and arrive at correct judgments.
As I've argued in articles at Science, The Scientist, and elsewhere, the problem in waking policymakers and the public up to climate change isn't an absence of science literacy, as so many scientists (and bloggers) continue to bemoan, but rather simply the nature of human cognition and the realities of our media system.
Let's put it this way, if our best students at MIT can't make sense of the IPCC report, how can we expect policymakers or the public?
What's needed is not simply getting more scientific information out there, but rather new methods for communicating about the problem that are adapted to the background of targeted publics, journalists, and decision-makers. In order to figure how to do this systematically, Sterman echoes my past conclusions by urging the scientific community to "partner with psychologists, sociologists, and other social scientists to communicate the science in ways that foster hope and action rather than denial and despair. Doing so does not require scientists to abandon rigor or objectivity."
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Yet another wake-up call for the "more information" people. As if they will respond to this information.
When you said:
Did you actually mean something like: "... erroneously reasoned that greenhouse gas levels can stabilize even though emissions would continue to exceed..."
Was this distinction made clearly in the question originally asked of the MIT students?
Thanks for stating the problem so clearly. I am interested in getting more education in this area. Any suggestions? I'm in the Boston area and completed some undergraduate work in biochemistry at MIT a long time ago, and have been following weather, news, and some technical stuff (as much as I can digest) for the last few years. I participate in blogs and am dismayed by the success of the contrarian community in fogging up the issue, if not with facts, with offside issues such as religion, insults, and criticism of writing style.
Sterman's work is available on his site, I think including the results discussed in the Science article. See also here for some similar work by others.
These ideas have been circulating for a while, and I think plenty of scientists have already drawn the appropriate conclusion:
Humans tend to be poor at understanding and responding to threats resulting from long-term trends (a lack which is compounded when they're asked to do science to learn about the problem), so emphasize the specific changes that can be identified in the present and discuss how they will get worse if sufficient action is not taken.
That it took some time for this lesson to sink in is explained IMHO by the fact that climate scientists and others who are wired and/or trained to understand stocks and flows are pretty well scared pissless by the long-term trends, and of course it's only human to think that others will respond in the same way.
I just now (10/31) listened to a good example of the new approach on the Lehrer news hour, a Climate Central piece focusing on trout in Montana. Apparently Climate Central is producing a series of such things (featuring a climatologist as correspondent), although I haven't looked at their site to see the details.
Let's put it this way, if our best students at MIT can't make sense of the IPCC report, how can we expect policymakers or the public? ?????????
Perhaps the esteemed evaluator, in his bias to promote climate change as a way to de-industrialize America and throw it into cast-system poverty, missed the obvious message.
The best and brightest of MIT evaluated the junk science and found it to be lacking in support of the effects of CO2 on climate trends.
The truth is that though we are being pushed to worship at the altar of environMentalism, climate change is a scare tactic being used to further the goals of the wealthy elite.
Climate change is a farce. Thinking people see this yet they continue to change how we evaluate it in the hope that the outcome will be convincing an undereducated public that they need to abandon capitalism and replace it with corporate servitude.
In our earnestness to drive every industry off shore, all we are doing is fulfilling their prophecy. The industries simply set up shop in BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) or insignificant third world countries and not only rape the environment, but the people of those countries.
Surely manufacturing goods in one part of the world that are consumed in other parts of the world is also comprimising our oceans. But that's okay.
The commodity exchange of carbon credits is making many environmental change proponents very wealthy and yet changing nothing about the environment.
Good job scientists. I had hoped that thinking people who claim to be objective would have more ethics.
Now ask yourself who funded the false environmental studies and why.