Thinking about talking
It’s a funny thing, trust. Without building a reputation in a community as a trusted source of information, a Sea Grant extension agent is pretty much sunk. And I find that saying I work for SG gains me a little trust, now that I’ve started getting out into the community a bit more. But what happens when you’re a SG extension (or education, or communications) professional whose sole purpose is to provide knowledge about an issue that many of your users don’t trust at all… like climate variability, and even more problematic, climate change? Yep, welcome to my world. And I know I’m not alone; I’ve had a few other SG folks e-mail me about communicating climate to people when it’s become such a political issue – when your scientific assessment of the assumptions made in a study gets you labeled as an alarmist or a denier, when you’re really neither? So I’m having to give a little more thought to how I talk about climate.
There’s an interesting article by John Broder in the New York Times from 5/1 that addresses how environmentalists are repackaging the climate debate. The people interviewed for the article are from a non-profit environmental marketing group called ecoAmerica, and their purpose is to affect a political change, which is different from what we do at SG. However, some of the underlying ideas are the same: namely, that climate scientists use a bunch of terminology that the rest of us don’t understand, and the terms that people do recognize have gotten distorted for political purposes.
As an example of one term that’s become problematic, take “global warming,” (please). Many people interpret the term as a steady increase in global temperature, and so any time the temperature dips below freezing these people take it as evidence that the climate isn’t changing. “Climate change” is a more appropriate term, because we still have natural climate variability. It will still get really cold or really hot sometimes – but over decades, we expect these bumps to even out to a slow increase in the average global temperature (kind of like the economy)! Moreover, the drivers of natural climate variability may change because of human influences – so the patterns of natural variability in the past may not be the same as the patterns of natural variability in the future. But this is a MUCH more complicated idea to explain – you can see how it’s much easier for someone who’s not a climate scientist to say, “global warming, earth gets hotter, right.” And now the funny thing is, if you take a look at some of the public comments on the Broder article, some people interpret teaching about “climate change” instead of the oversimplified “global warming” as an environmentalist conspiracy! What’s a climate extension specialist to do?
