Improving Climate Literacy: A State Climatologist’s Perspective
John W. Nielsen-Gammon
Presented at AGU, December 3, 2012
Good morning. I’ll start by laying my cards on the table. <slide 2> I am a climate
literacy heretic. By this I mean the following.
First, I believe that the present level of public skepticism about anthropogenic global
warming includes a widespread belief in some things that are scientifically
incorrect. One such belief is the belief that the Earth is presently in the grip of a
global warming hiatus that demonstrates that carbon dioxide is incapable of causing
temperature to rise.
Second, I believe that public opinion would be more uniform if the public had a
better ability to distinguish correct statements about climate science from incorrect
statements about climate science.
Now, it seems logical that improving climate literacy among the general public
would better enable the public to distinguish between true and false scientific
statements. However, my belief is almost precisely the opposite: improving climate
literacy would have no effect whatsoever on the public’s ability to separate the
wheat from the chaff among the climate science statements they receive.
Climate literacy itself is a very good thing. It would definitely make communication
easier if everyone had a sound, basic knowledge of the climate system. But what it
comes down to is this: climate science is enormously complex. Whatever the
American public’s climate literacy level, it will always be possible to make a
believable but incorrect scientific statement.
Consider a few incorrect scientific statements. <slide 3> The first one is: “The
Earth’s surface gets its heat from volcanoes.” This wrong at a basic level. Though it
doesn’t violate any physical laws, it is demonstrably wrong, in a variety of ways that
are easily understood by the general public. I think most people would come down
on the correct side on this statement. It helps that the statement runs counter to
direct personal experience.
<slide 4> This next statement is the classic misconception: “Summer is warm
because the Earth is closer to the Sun in summer.” Notice, by the way, how the
addition of an authoritative scientific diagram makes any statement more plausible.
Here, knowing a bit of science hurts you, because this statement makes physical
sense. It’s easy to demonstrate that it’s wrong – just note that if this were the case,
the Northern and Southern Hemispheres would experience summer at the same
time of year, and they do not.
People are quite capable of learning that it’s wrong, and learning why it’s wrong, but
it takes an awful lot of work to internalize this knowledge and to “know” that it’s
wrong. Scientific literacy doesn’t really help you much in this one unless your
definition of literacy actually encompasses knowledge of the cause of the seasons.
You can hear the true explanation for the cause of the seasons, believe that it’s
correct, and a year later your brain will still provide you with the wrong
explanation.
<slide 5> The next statement is, “The Ice Ages were so cold because ice reflects
incoming solar radiation.” Now, if you know that ice has a cooling effect on the
Earth because it reflects incoming solar radiation, then you have a pretty high
climate literacy level. It’s not clear that climate literacy actually helps you here…..
Unlike the first two statements, this statement can’t be disproved through appeal to
observable evidence. Scientists know that ice-albedo forcing was less than half of
the direct radiative forcing and maybe only an eighth of the combined forcing plus
feedbacks. But there’s no way for an ordinary person to know this without
consulting a reliable scientific source.
<slide 6> For my last statement, I’ll use one that seems to be making the rounds
quite a lot lately: “Storms like Sandy will become more frequent because of climate
change.” For a statement like this, a member of the public is basically screwed, no
mater what their level of climate literacy.
There are no scientific papers that squarely address this issue. There are no
National Academy panels that have weighed in on this specific question. An expert
scientist could argue that the statement is true because sea level rise will make
storm surges higher. But a preexisting hurricane seems to be a necessary condition
for a storm like Sandy, and the current scientific consensus is that the frequency of
formation of hurricanes is likely to decrease with climate change. So maybe storms
like Sandy will become less frequent. At this point, the scientific question is wide
open, contrary to the impression left by the statement.
There are, perhaps, less than a thousand people worldwide who know enough about
climate change’s impacts on tropical cyclones, extratropical transitions, wind
speeds, rainfall rates, and sea level rise to qualify them to evaluate that statement.
It’s not even clear that I’m one of them! The requisite level of climate literacy is
enormous.
But there’s an important lesson here about how we decide which scientific
statements to believe and which ones not to believe. Those of us who are trained
scientists but who do not have enough personal literacy to independently evaluate a
particular statement do not throw up our hands in despair. Instead, we evaluate the
source and the context. <slide 7>
We scientists rely upon a hierarchy of reliability. We know that a talking head is less
reliable than a press release. We know that a press release is less reliable than a
paper. And so on, all the way up to a National Academy report. If we’re equipped
with knowledge of this hierarchy of reliability, we can generally do a good job
navigating through an unfamiliar field, even if we have very little prior technical
knowledge in that field.
Well, the typical member of the public has very little retained technical knowledge
about just about everything. I claim that it’s an impossible task to raise the level of
climate literacy in the general public to the point where most can tell that the
statement about the ice age is wrong, let alone whether the statement about Sandy
is wrong. And what about all the other fields in which they need to be literate as
well?
<slide 8> The solution to this problem is not scientific literacy, but what I call
scientific meta-literacy. Forget that dream about enabling the public to
independently evaluate scientific claims on their merits – that’s just not going to
happen. Instead, enable the public to distinguish between reliable and unreliable
sources of scientific information.
The current level of scientific meta-literacy among the general public is appalling. I
blame this lack of meta-literacy on three cooperating groups of people: scientists,
reporters, and educators. And if you’re not a member of one of those three groups,
you’re attending the wrong conference.
For example, scientists actively tell the public that the key indicator of is whether
the science has been peer-reviewed. But they do not practice what they preach.
Scientists themselves know to take a new study with a grain of salt until it’s been
confirmed by further work. So it is that scientists intentionally mislead the public
about scientific meta-literacy.
<slide 9>Likewise, the press is most likely to report a new study if the study is
unexpected and is published in a leading journal such as Nature. However,
scientists know that the more unexpected the results of a study, the less likely it is
for the study to be correct. So it is that the public is told to believe precisely those
scientific studies they should not believe.
Finally, students are supposed to learn science by doing science. Well, active
learning is certainly effective, and students do learn a great deal by being actively
engaged in science, but none of this helps with scientific meta-literacy. In the lab
classes I took at MIT, I learned a lot about science that made me less, not more,
meta-literate. I learned that there were correct answers to every experiment. I
learned that if you don’t get the right answer, you should try harder until you do get
the right answer. Or, if I didn’t know the right answer, the most effective approach
was to start experimenting, rather than first trying to find out what all the scientists
before me had learned about the problem.
What’s worse, these sorts of labs are part of the required curriculum in most
universities, especially for non-science majors. We actively train our undergraduate
students to be cynical of scientific experiments. Except for the best of them, these
required courses broadly destroy meta-literacy across all of science in a misguided
attempt to improve literacy in one or two favored branches of science.
At my home institution, our undergraduate survey course in atmospheric sciences is
taken mostly by non-science majors satisfying part of their core curriculum science
requirement. <slide 10> I therefore viewed the course as the very last opportunity
for these students to learn enough about science to make intelligent decisions in the
real world.
I wanted my students to be able to distinguish good science from bad science,
reliable information from unreliable information. I wanted them to understand the
research funding process, and how that determines what science gets done. I
wanted them to understand the peer review process, and how it only provides a
very limited certification of reliability. I wanted them to understand where to go to
find the most reliable discussions and evaluations of controversial scientific issues.
In support of these goals, I went to Amazon.com to look for a nice, simple book that
taught this stuff, that described how science gets done and how people should
understand the context of scientific results. I wanted a book that, instead of
teaching scientific knowledge, taught about the scientific enterprise and helped the
students with scientific meta-literacy.
<slide 11> Forget about it. No such book existed. Not even close. If such a book
exists now, I’d love to hear about it. And this would be the sort of book that I think
should be required reading for every single college student in America.
The good news is that in non-controversial areas of research, the public can get by
without much scientific meta-knowledge, because most of what they hear is going to
be reliable. But now consider a controversial subject, such as climate change.
When one side has chosen to make science their battleground, the public will hear a
wide range of conflicting bits of scientific information. Most of what they hear will
be from people who are at either extreme of the range of scientific opinion. The
scientists in the middle aren’t doing anything newsworthy, and their points of view
aren’t extreme enough to compel themselves to engage actively in the public debate.
The public receives this mixed scientific-political information, and now how do they
choose what’s reliable? They have very little scientific meta-literacy, so their only
choice is to fall back on their political meta-literacy. From a lifetime of following the
issues, they know which networks, commentators, or political parties they trust and
which ones they don’t trust. Why wouldn’t an information source that’s more
trustworthy than others in political news be also more trustworthy in scientific
news?
What can scientists or educators do for those people who are not scientifically metaliterate, whose knowledge about climate change is strongly driven by the political
sources whom they trust, and which will inherently be one-sided, no matter which
side it falls on?
<slide 11>My answer is simply this: be in perception and reality a reliable apolitical
source of scientific information.
State climatologists are almost designed to fulfill that role. State climatologists
existed long before climate became a hot-button political topic. State climatologists’
very mission is to provide reliable and useful climate information. They get quoted
in the news because they have positions of responsibility, not because they are vocal
extremists. They deal with climate on a local scale, where apolitical adaptation is
much more important than politicized mitigation.
In my own capacity as state climatologist, when I talk to people, I try to tell them
what they need to know. If they care about next spring’s planting season, there’s
very little about long-term climate change that’s going to be relevant to that
decision. If I were to talk a lot about climate change in that circumstance, my
audience will know that I’m advancing a particular agenda, and those who disagree
with that agenda will stop listening. I try to treat climate change with the
appropriate level of emphasis given the context, and hopefully when I do bring up
climate change my audience won’t realize that they’re supposed to stop believing
me.
So let me summarize. <slide 12> What’s the biggest barrier? The politicization of
climate information. What’s the biggest misconception? That climate literacy will be
more effective than climate meta-literacy in helping the public make sound choices.
And where can we make progress? A complete overhaul of our college science
general-education system would help, but on an individual basis we need as many
scientists as possible to be apolitical and reliable, and to not jeopardize the trust
they thereby earn.
Thank you.
Image sources:
http://tabsir.net/?p=506
http://habeshaviews.wordpress.com/2008/07/29/the-land-of-pure-life-volcanoesand-hot-springs/
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/global/global_intro.htm
http://www.labgrab.com/users/jackpayette/blog/arctic-sea-ice-minimum-extentbased-satellite-record_id%3D1382
http://www.queerty.com/east-coast-braces-for-hurricane-sandy-with-a-chance-ofgreased-lightnin-20121026/
http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/On-the-Internet-nobody-knows-you-re-a-dogNew-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i8562841_.htm
http://xkcd.com/955/
http://boredcentral.com/tips-for-a-vibrant-classroom/
http://www.heathervogelfrederick.com/blog/2010/01/new-year-new-page/