Guest post by Lee Tryhorn
The average person who wants to be informed about climate change can find themselves bombarded by contradictory information from sources that appear to be equally valid. This is as true for someone working in a government organization as it is for a member of the general public. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has recognized this issue, and consequently has been working hard to improve the climate literacy of its representatives.
The latest effort has involved a series of workshops designed to increase the capacity of NOAA representatives to communicate current climate change science. I was fortunate enough to participate as a speaker at two of the workshops. The most recent workshop, Climate Literacy for Extension Educators, was held August 3-4 in Ithaca, NY. The participants in this workshop were predominately from Cornell Cooperative extension, NOAA Sea Grant, and the National Weather Service. For those that are unfamiliar with these groups, Cooperative Extension is an educational program implemented in the United States designed to help develop practical applications of research knowledge. The service is provided by designated universities in each state and tends to focus on agriculture, natural resources, community economic development, and youth programs. Similarly, Sea Grant is a nationwide network (administered through NOAA) of university-based programs that work with coastal communities. These people are often the point of contact for the general public and the media for many scientific issues.
Major themes of the workshop were communication of climate change, the current state of climate science, and use of climate change information in extension outreach programs. Many previous climate change communication efforts have focused on increasing the understanding of climate science and the scientific facts are assumed to speak for themselves. Of course, it has been shown many times over that presenting an audience with a graph of increasing global temperatures is not overly successful in motivating action on climate change. With this in mind, rather than asking the participants to learn every single aspect of how a climate model works, a large theme of the workshop was focused on techniques for finding reliable information, and reframing and communicating that information, including techniques for dealing with the media and climate skeptics. We devoted a session to the top 10 skeptics arguments and what the science says using material from this site.
Climate change discussions have become so polarized that many of the extension educators reported finding conversations with the public stifled. I know exactly what they mean, as when I say I’m a climate scientist, I sometimes have people assume that I will look down on them for using a dryer or others will ask me what I think about the Gulf oil spill. Like other controversial issues, climate change has been divided into two distinctive camps. These two camps continue to dominate the media and are in some ways intractable. At the workshop we discussed the need to restart the conversation in a more meaningful way. We really need to move beyond the crippling polarization and promote discussions of alternatives and solutions. In order to achieve this we need to start talking about climate change in ways that resonate more with what the general public already values or understands. For example, we can talk about climate change in terms of economic development, morality and ethics (a responsibility to take care of the Earth), and public health. The US military for one, is talking about climate change as a national security issue.
Of course, a series of workshops are not going to change the world, but we’re hoping that this is at least a better approach for equipping those on the ground with the communication tools they need.
Posted by ltryhorn on Friday, 10 September, 2010
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