Scientists 'must be emotionally charged' about climate change to highlight its dangers, claims expert

Tom Bawden in the Independent (UK): Climate scientists must inject more emotion and personal experience into their communications with the public to underline the dangers of global warming, according to a leading professor.

Chris Rapley, a professor of climate science at University College London, is urging colleagues to ditch “academic, fact-based approaches” to the subject in favour of “charged” narratives. He recently performed 2071, a one-man show giving a personalised account of what climate change means for him, at the Royal Court theatre in London and the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg.

Professor Rapley was prompted to do his show amid a growing realisation that scientists were not communicating the dangers of climate change and the importance of tackling it as well as they could. “There is a growing recognition among the science community that results that are emotionally, ideologically or politically charged need to be communicated using a different approach to the traditional ‘information deficit’ method,” Professor Rapley told The Independent.

“A narrative approach in which the scientist offers  the insights based on their personal experience provides a powerful alternative. But  it is one with which academics, trained to adopt an ‘academic’, fact-based approach, and driven to satisfy professional norms of impartiality and objectivity, find themselves uncomfortable.”

He added: “Not all scientists have to engage with society as communicators or as participants in policymaking, but a sufficient numberneed to do so in order to justify society’s investment in their science,” he said....

A polar bear in Spitzbergen, shot by Jerzy Strzelecki, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Farmers and scientists divided over climate change

A press release from Purdue University: Crop producers and scientists hold deeply different views on climate change and its possible causes, a study by Purdue and Iowa State universities shows. Associate professor of natural resource social science Linda Prokopy and fellow researchers surveyed 6,795 people in the agricultural sector in 2011-2012 to determine their beliefs about climate change and whether variation in the climate is triggered by human activities, natural causes or an equal combination of both.

More than 90 percent of the scientists and climatologists surveyed said they believed climate change was occurring, with more than 50 percent attributing climate change primarily to human activities. In contrast, 66 percent of corn producers surveyed said they believed climate change was occurring, with 8 percent pinpointing human activities as the main cause. A quarter of producers said they believed climate change was caused mostly by natural shifts in the environment, and 31 percent said there was not enough evidence to determine whether climate change was happening or not.

The survey results highlight the division between scientists and farmers over climate change and the challenges in communicating climate data and trends in non-polarizing ways, Prokopy said. "Whenever climate change gets introduced, the conversation tends to turn political," she said. "Scientists and climatologists are saying climate change is happening, and agricultural commodity groups and farmers are saying they don't believe that. Our research suggests that this disparity in beliefs may cause agricultural stakeholders to respond to climate information very differently."

...Focusing on the causes of climate change, however, is likely to polarize the agricultural community and lead to inaction, said study co-author Lois Wright Morton, professor of sociology at Iowa State University. To foster productive dialogue, she said, scientists and climatologists need to "start from the farmer's perspective."...

A 1935 image of a truck garden in Oregon, from the OSU Collections, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr Commons, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license

Experts call for widening the debate on climate change

A press release from the University of Manchester (UK): Environmental scientists are being urged to broaden the advice they give on global climate change, say experts who are also frustrated that decision makers are not taking enough action. Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change, The University of Manchester researchers argue that scientists are expressing a strong desire to fix the problems highlighted by their studies into human-induced climate change.

The authors suggest there are problems with environmental scientists offering practical solutions that can help societies adapt to a fast-changing Earth - one where climatic zones will shift and sea levels will rise significantly. Professor Noel Castree, the lead author of the paper, said: “We are grateful that environmental scientists alert us to the impact that people are having on our planet like shifting climatic zones and rising sea levels. “But knowing how to respond to these impacts requires a broader skill-set than natural science alone provides.. It requires honest recognition of, and mature discussion about, the different values that can guide humans towards a different, better future.”

Today, say the authors, few people doubt that man-made climate change is real. And few of us doubt that climate scientists lack integrity. The problem, they believe, is the lack of action on the part of decision makers and the societies they represent.

Castree, a professor of Geography, and co-author Dan Brockington, a professor of Conservation and Development, ask whether climate change scientists risk over-stepping the mark and trying to shape the political agenda while pretending to r
emain non-political. They argue that the scientists often view the world as presenting problems that, like mechanics, they believe they can fix. They say that recent scientific discussions about 'geoengineering' technologies reflect this view.

“Global environmental change raises profound questions - such as whether humans lack humility and wisdom,” said Castree. “But we are concerned that environmental scientists risk using their authority to convince others that future Earth surface change is no more than a fiendishly complicated alteration to fairly well understood physical systems.”

Castree said: “What is needed is a deeper appreciation that such change will cause fundamental disagreements about responsibilities, rights and duties - among humans and towards nature. We think social scientists and humanists could significantly enrich public debates about how to respond to environmental change.”

Improved communication between experts and the public key in winning battle to curb climate change, claims expert

Tom Bawden  in the Independent (UK):
Scientists need to become more humble and to completely re-think the way they communicate if the battle to curb climate change is to be won, one of the world's leading climate experts has warned. Lamenting what he calls a “mismatch” between the state of climate science and the needs of society, Professor Chris Rapley called on his colleagues across the world to throw off the shackles of tradition and engage in a radically different approach to their discipline.

Climate scientists need to be more critical about their own research, more open to the work and views of other people and to communicate much more clearly with the public, said Professor Rapley, of the University College London. At the same time, they need to defend their work more robustly against climate sceptics and, in a recommendation many may find surprising, rely less on scientific fact and more on narrative techniques such as personal anecdotes, emotion and rhetoric to make their points, he added.

Professor Rapley led a big research project into climate science communication with his UCL colleagues and a number of other universities, including Oxford and King's College, London, which published its findings today.

“My experiences have convinced me that our training and development has left us insufficiently prepared to contribute as effectively as we should both to public policy, and to communicating our results and conclusions to society more generally,” Professor Rapley said.

“We are especially ill-equipped to deal with controversy in the media and to respond to public attacks on our motivations and behaviours,” he added, advocating the creation of a professional body for climate scientists that, among other things, would train scientists to engage more effectively with climate sceptics....

Jose Orozco's 1946 painting, "The Demagogue"

Common ground fosters climate change understanding

Michigan State University Newsroom: Grasping the concept of climate change and its impact on the environment can be difficult. Establishing common ground and using models, however, can break down barriers and present the concept in an easily understood manner.

In a presentation today during the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Michigan State University systems ecologist and modeler Laura Schmitt-Olabisi shows how system dynamics models effectively communicate the challenges and implications of climate change.

“In order to face the ongoing challenges posed by climate adaptation, there is a need for tools that can foster dialogue across traditional boundaries, such as those between scientists, the general public and decision makers,” Schmitt-Olabisi said. “Using boundary objects, such as maps, diagrams and models, all groups involved can use these objects to have a discussion to create possible solutions.”

Schmitt-Olabisi has vast experience working directly with stakeholders using participatory model-building techniques. She uses a model of a hypothetical heat wave in Detroit to illustrate the implications of climate change.

...“The model challenges some widely held assumptions, such as the belief that opening more cooling centers is the best solution,” Schmitt-Olabisi said. “As it turns out, these centers are useless if people don’t know they should go to them.”

More importantly, the model provides a tool, a language that everyone can understand. It is a positive example of how system dynamics models may be used as boundary objects to adapt to climate change, she added....

Detroit's skyline at night, shot by Shakil Mustafa, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license 

Is scientists’ approach to climate change collective madness?

Jan Piotrowski in SciDev.net: According to Albert Einstein, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. This raises the question of whether this 20th century giant would see the scientific community’s current approach to the climate change conversation as collective madness.

I say this not to detract from the huge achievements of scientists to further our understanding of climate change — the 2,000-page tome that is the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is testament to this success.

But the tendency of scientists to remain impartial with the belief that it is necessary to protect the objective integrity of their work is misguided and clearly not working. To expect that more evidence will be enough to convince policymakers to take action, is naïve when you consider the limited change that has occurred in the six years since the previous fact-packed IPPC report made a compelling case for the need for urgent action.

If this did little to change politicians’ minds, then a new report with similar conclusions is unlikely to either. With this in mind, scientists, as those with the greatest understanding of the consequences of climate change, must get better at communicating not just the results of their studies, but their recommendations for action...

A 1947 portrait of Albert Einstein by Oren Jack Turner

Satellite coverage strengthened over Africa

Richard Downden in AllAfrica.com via American Arguments: ...From a couple of miles away, the rocket looked like a distant steeple glistening peacefully in the sun. ... Then the countdown began. As it reached "Two ... .One", a vast explosion of smoke roiled out from the base of the rocket. A painfully bright tongue of flame spurted downwards and the silver tube rose, then shot towards the clouds with terrifying acceleration.

...This all took place at the launch of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Ariane 5 rocket from the ESA base at Kourou in French Guiana. Part of Ariane 5's 9.6 tonne payload was Alphasat, a satellite built by Inmarsat - a company that provides 'global voice, data and IP communications solutions' - that could have a revolutionary impact on the availability of satellite communications services to African countries At 6.7 tonnes, Alphasat is the biggest satellite built by Inmarsat so far. Two and a half times more powerful than any of the previous Inmarsat satellites, it will come to rest 22,500 miles up, somewhere over the middle of Congo. So far the mission has gone well - something that is not taken for granted among its creators.

...Its communication satellites are now used by organisations ranging from governments to aid agencies and from ship owners to mining companies. Inmarsat is also used by airlines across the world, by journalists reporting from remote regions and anyone outside the range of mobile or fixed line terrestrial telecommunication networks. ...This new satellite - Alphasat - will cover the whole of Africa, the oceans each side and most of southern Europe, the Middle East and West Asia.

But looking at the back-lit digital wall map, it is clear that while in Afghanistan, Iraq and other stressed places, usage is very high, there are almost no calls or communications in vast swathes of Africa. And these are also the areas that are not economic for mobile phone companies to build transmitters in. Despite the explosion of mobile phone use across the continent in the last decade, these areas are not covered and satellite communications have been far too expensive. This, says Rupert Pearce, CEO of Inmarsat, could change soon, as the price of sat-phones and satellite communication may be about to fall dramatically. "The cost per bit is coming down enormously as we become more efficient and more effective with investment in new technology. Sat-phones that once cost $2000 dollars now retail at $500."

...Africa has the world's fastest growing numbers of mobile phones per capita. The bank on your phone and other major innovations in mobile telephony also started in Africa. With a relative lack of infrastructure and very few landlines, Africa has been able to jump a generation faster than most developed countries. Could this new satellite provide even cheaper telephone calls and especially broadband for all in Africa, even in the remotest places?...

A model of Alphasat, shot by  Guy Lebègue, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Could radio help mitigate climate change in the Congo Basin?

Babatope Akinwande of CIFOR in Thomson Reuters Foundation: Climate change is hitting the Congo Basin region hard and while communities there and in other parts of Africa struggle to adapt to rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns, scientists are trying to help — using radio to spread the word.

For those living in urban areas, getting information is easy. But for forest dwellers, who are the most likely to be affected, it is more difficult because they are isolated by poor road infrastructure and a lack of such basic amenities as electricity, telephones and Internet access, said Anne-Marie Tiani, a senior scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research and coordinator of the COBAM project (Climate Change and Forests in the Congo Basin: Synergies between adaptation and mitigation).

“Radio remains the most dominant, affordable and accessible mass medium in Africa,” added her colleague, Denis Sonwa, explaining why the team decided it needed to find new ways to share research findings, rather than relying on text. “We wanted as wide an audience as possible,” he said. “And in the Congo Basin region, radio is still the most effective way to reach local communities.”

The radio program builds on CIFOR’s previous research activities on livelihoods and governance. The COBAM project covers Cameroon, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Democratic Republic of Congo and Republic of Congo, aiming to provide policymakers and local communities with information to help implement policies and projects for adaptation to climate change and reduction of carbon emissions in the forests.

It covers livelihood activities, local institutions and trends in forest degradation and deforestation. It also analyzes with local communities the impacts of potential REDD activities on livelihoods and associated risks, opportunities and needed institutional changes....

NASA image of the Congo Basin

Conservatives can be persuaded to care more about the environment, study finds

Yasmin Anwar in the UC Berkeley News Center: When it comes to climate change, deforestation and toxic waste, the assumption has been that conservative views on these topics are intractable. But new research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that such viewpoints can be changed after all, when the messages about the need to be better stewards of the land are couched in terms of fending off threats to the “purity” and “sanctity” of Earth and our bodies.

A UC Berkeley study has found that while people who identified themselves as conservatives tend to be less concerned about the environment than their liberal counterparts, their motivation increased significantly when they read articles that stressed the need to “protect the purity of the environment” and were shown such repellant images as a person drinking dirty water, a forest filled with garbage, and a city under a cloud of smog.

Published today (Dec. 10)  in the online issue of the journal Psychological Science, the findings indicate that reframing pro-environmental rhetoric according to values that resonate strongly with conservatives can reduce partisan polarization on ecological matters.

“These findings offer the prospect of pro-environmental persuasion across party lines,” said Robb Willer, a UC Berkeley social psychologist and coauthor of the study. “Reaching out to conservatives in a respectful and persuasive way is critical, because large numbers of Americans will need to support significant environment reforms if we are going to deal effectively with climate change, in particular.”

Researchers conducted a content analysis of more than 200 op-eds published in such newspapers as The New York Times, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, and found the pro-environmental arguments were most often pitched in terms of moral obligations to care about the natural environment and protect it from harm, a theme that resonates more powerfully with liberals, they added, than with conservatives....

Dirty water spilling from a jug, shot by Ildar Sagdejev (Specious), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Public acceptance of climate change affected by word usage

Timothy Wall in the University of Missouri News Bureau: Public acceptance of climate change’s reality may have been influenced by the rate at which words moved from scientific journals into the mainstream, according to anthropologist Michael O’Brien, dean of the College of Arts and Science at the University of Missouri. A recent study of word usage in popular literature by O’Brien and his colleagues documented how the usage of certain words related to climate change has risen and fallen over the past two centuries. Understanding how word usage affects public acceptance of science could lead to better science communication and a more informed public.

“Scientists can learn from this study that the general public shouldn’t be expected to understand technical terms or be convinced by journal papers written in technical jargon,” O’Brien said. “Journalists must explain scientific terms in ways people can understand and thereby ease the movement of those terms into general speech. That can be a slow process. Several words related to climate change diffused into the popular vocabulary over a 30-50 year timeline.”

O’Brien’s study found that, by 2008, several important terms in the discussion of climate change had entered popular literature from technical obscurity in the early 1900s. These terms included:

• Biodiversity – the degree of variation in life forms within a given area
• Holocene – the current era of the Earth’s history, which started at the end of the last ice age
• Paleoclimate –the prehistoric climate, often deduced from ice cores, tree rings and pollen trapped in sediments
• Phenology – the study of how climate and other environmental factors influence the timing of events in organisms’ life cycles

Not every term was adopted at the same rate or achieved the same degree of popularity. Biodiversity, for example, came into popular use quickly in only a few years in the late 80s and early 90s. Other terms, like Holocene or phenology, have taken decades and are still relatively uncommon....

A word sculpture in Potsdam, shot by Bruno Girin from London, United Kingdom, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

A fatal gap between science and policy?

David Dickson in SciDev.net: little more than 30 years ago, a major UN conference on science and technology for development held in Vienna, Austria, ended on an upbeat note with an agreement in principle to set up a US$250-million fund to finance capacity-building projects.

Sadly, the heady optimism among delegates, which I remember vividly, was short lived. No major donations were received and science slipped off the international aid agenda for the next two decades, during which time the gap in scientific capacity between rich and poor nations grew larger.

The latest negotiations, COP 18, ended in Doha, Qatar, earlier this month with a similar agreement to establish a mechanism to transfer money from rich to poor nations to compensate for the "loss and damage" caused by rich countries' addiction to carbon-based fuels. Judging from media reports, this decision was met with an enthusiasm similar to that at the 1979 Vienna conference.

But there is no binding commitment, and the possibility of significant money becoming available looks remote given that rich nations have so far failed to act on the 2010 promise to raise US$100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing nations cope with climate change.

The otherwise disappointing outcome of COP 18 reflects the growing gap between the science and the politics of climate change. While the scientific case for action hardens, the ability politicians to act appropriately — by replacing the soon-to-terminate Kyoto Protocol, for example — appears to be diminishing, creating a scenario for global disaster.

Science communicators in general — and science journalists in particular — have a key role in bridging this gap. We must present scientific evidence to politicians and the public in a way that means such evidence becomes the basis for sound decisions....

Reading a newspaper in Addis Ababa, shot by Terje Skjerdal, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr,  under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Tackling the climate information void in developing countries

IRIN: Services to inform communities about the climate are available in higher-income countries, but are not reaching the people most in need of them in developing countries due to lack of government investment and a disconnect between experts and communities facing extreme weather. 

“Those parts [that] are worst covered are some of the most disaster prone regions where the most vulnerable live,” said Jan Egeland, deputy director of Human Rights Watch. “There is a big disconnectedness between [scientists] who know and those who need to know. [They are] the farmers, the health workers, the water managers [and] the vulnerable communities.”

In May 2011 the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) endorsed the Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS) to increase and improve interactions between climate service providers - those who research, gather, interpret and diffuse information about the climate - and those who make use of the information.

The goal is to boost “tailor-made” climate services, especially for the most vulnerable. Initial priority will be given to food security, water management, disaster risk reduction and health sectors.  If the people most vulnerable to the dangers of climate change are not provided with information to prepare, natural disasters will claim more lives, warned Egeland.

One way is for governments to boost investments in services that provide information on climate variability such as satellites, high-speed telecommunications, supercomputers and other scientific innovations....

A mobile phone ad in Uganda, shot by futureatlas.com, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Climate scientists and African communities can learn from each other through mediated dialogue

Arame Tall in SciDev.net:  African countries face a growing threat of hydro-meteorological disasters such as droughts, floods, pest infestations, water-related epidemics, storms and cyclones. Whether correlated with anthropogenic climate change, a result of increased human vulnerability or merely the outcome of better disaster reporting, the number of reported hydro-meteorological disasters in Africa has been rising since the mid-1990s. [

African policymakers can make informed decisions about climate-change adaptation if climate researchers can provide them with the relevant data, including an explanation of the uncertainties inherent in climate and weather forecasting. But such substantive dialogue between climate scientists who produce forecasts and warnings, decision makers in government planning agencies, and vulnerable communities will not happen in a vacuum.

Several barriers prevent available climate and weather information (forecasts) from filtering down to potential users. They include scientific jargon, inadequate dissemination channels to reach the most vulnerable people, and poorly formalised institutional frameworks at a national level.

In 2009, I began to work with the Red Cross/IFRC and the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction to test a novel participatory approach to establish a substantive dialogue at the national level between climate forecasters and Red Cross disaster managers in Senegal. The Early Warning, Early Action workshop consisted of a three-day facilitated dialogue.

...At the heart of the workshop was the belief that the two communities had a tremendous amount to learn from each other, but had to come to that realisation by themselves so that they could develop a 'thirst' for additional interaction and sustained communication....

Picture of the painted table placed in the Great Hall of Winchester Castle, representing the Round Table of legendary King Arthur. Photo by Martin Kraft, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Time for Zimbabwe to start preparing for the worst

Wisdom Mdzungairi  in News Day (Zimbabwe):  It's time to start protecting people from the impact of severe-weather events as the climate change conversation is shifting. This was disclosed at a meeting of environment stakeholders in Harare last week, a precursor to the launch of Zimbabwes 3rd State of the Environment Report in Harare today to coincide with the World Environment Day (WED) on June 5. The theme for WED 2012 is Green Economy: Does it include you?

But, in the discussions, one thing which came out clear was that political attacks have made environmentalists cautious with respect to how they convey the information generated by their models and empirical studies.

For example, when environmentalists urged government to rethink its decision to permit the construction of a massive hotel on a wetland near the National Sports Stadium, they were attacked left, right and centre.

The implication was that we cannot keep the open area just for frogs. I may not be a scientist myself, but ecologically these play a huge role in terms of purifying our drinking water instead of using the nine water purification chemicals to treat water.

...Nhema told guests the ongoing trend analysis and findings of Zimbabwe Environment Outlook (ZEO)s state of the environment, has shown that rural to urban migration is a major driver of urban environmental challenges....

Information flow can help farmers cope with climate change

Maybe it could be called Fieldbook, or MyField. From the Iowa State University News Service: The instant communications technology that nurtured grassroots revolutions in the Arab world could also help farmers cope with climate change, according to Iowa State University researchers.

And so the researchers - Steven Fales, a professor of agronomy; and Gene Takle, director of Iowa State's Climate Science Program, a professor of agronomy and of geological and atmospheric sciences - are organizing a symposium to explore that idea during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Feb. 16-20 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The theme of this year's meeting is "Flattening the World: Building a Global Knowledge Society."

..."This whole climate change debate has gotten to be monotonous," Fales said. "Many of us are saying it's time to forget about the naysayers and go into action, which will require adaptation and resilience."

The symposium will consider an action plan that calls for developing global systems that distribute information about crops and climate change through local networks and cell phones. Fales figures such a system would move information far more quickly than the current system of studying, discovering, publishing and then communicating to farmers via extension systems. "In these unstable climate conditions, the situation can change rapidly from season to season," Fales said.

And when the latest climate model indicates a change in growing conditions, Fales said there should be a way to quickly notify a region's farmers that wheat, for example, may be the best crop for the year.

The researchers also see information flowing back from the farmers: "The farmers' observations could be transferred back to a database so we could see trends emerging," Fales said. "And that could actually happen in the upper Midwest of the U.S. or in Uganda."...

Sunset in a field, shot by Louiza1612, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Communities too reliant on emergency services tech for disaster notifications

Spandas Lui in ARN.net (Australia) reports on a problem that afflicts everyone in a wealthy country hit by a disaster -- what do you do when the communications networks you depend on are wiped out?: Communities are too dependent on emergency services organisations as well as associated technologies for disaster notifications and should learn to be more self-reliant, according to various Government agencies. The Senate standing committees on Environment and Communications held a parliamentary hearing on the capacity of communication networks and emergency services warning systems for emergencies and natural disasters today.

From bushfires to cyclones, Australia has been rife with natural disasters in recent years. Since December 2010, numerous Queensland towns have been affected by floods. In February this year, Cyclone Yasi hit and devastated Northern Queensland. Inevitably, communication network go down during these kinds of disasters. Telstra, Optus and Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) all experienced network outages during the Queensland floods and Cyclone Yasi mainly due to power outages. Generators were swiftly brought in to restore services.

Fixed-line phone calls, SMSes and radio announcements have all been used by emergency services organisations to notify residents in disaster affected areas. The parliamentary hearing aims to explore just how effective these emergency warning systems are. South Australian Fire and Emergency Services Commission (SAFECOM) chief executive, David Place, told the Committee the public have an unrealistic expectation of what Government organisations should do when it comes to emergency situations....

A Federal Thunderbolt Siren, shot by BuknekkidPhoto by Eric Green, Civil Defense Museum, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Communicating uncertain climate risks

National Science Foundation: …"A major challenge facing climate scientists is explaining to non-specialists the risks and uncertainties surrounding potential" climate change, says a new Perspectives piece published today in the science journal Nature Climate Change. The article attempts to identify communications strategies needed to improve layman understanding of climate science.

…."The goal of science communication should be to help people understand the state of the science," he says, "relevant to the decisions that they face in their private and public lives." Fischhoff, a social and decision scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and Nick Pidgeon, an environmental psychologist at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom wrote the article together, titled, "The role of social and decision sciences in communicating uncertain climate risks."

Fischhoff and Pidgeon argue that science communication should give the public tools that will allow them to understand the uncertainties and disagreements that often underlie scientific discussion. He says that understanding is more likely to happen when people know something about the process that produces the conflicts they hear about in the press.

…"When people lack expertise, they turn to trusted sources to interpret the evidence for them," Fischhoff says. "When those trusted sources are wrong, then people are misled." Fischhoff and Pidgeon propose a communications strategy that applies "the best available communications science to convey the best available climate science." The strategy focuses on identifying, disclosing and when necessary reframing climate risks and uncertainties so the lay public can understand them easily.

"All of our climate-related options have uncertainties, regarding health, economics, ecosystems, and international stability, among other things," says Fischhoff. "It's important to know what gambles we're taking if, for example, we ignore climate issues altogether or create strong incentives for making our lives less energy intensive."

Key to effective communications is what the authors call "strategic organization" and "strategic listening." Strategic organization involves working in cross-disciplinary teams that include, at a minimum, climate scientists, decision scientists, social and communications specialists and other experts. Strategic listening encourages climate scientists, who often have little direct contact with the public, to overcome flawed intuitions of how well they communicate. Strategic listening asks scientists to go beyond intuitive feeling and consider how well they communicate by using systematic feedback and empirical evaluation….

Benjamin West's painting, Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky (ca. 1816)

From Katrina to snowmageddon: lessons government should learn

Matthew E. Kahn, a guest blogger in the Christian Science Monitor: … Consider the Nashville Floods of 2010. Source "The National Weather Service failed to warn of major flooding in Nashville in the spring until after it had already taken place, and residents did not heed warnings because they didn't reflect the urgency of the flooding, which killed 22 people around the state, a new report shows.

The report released by the weather service on Wenesday found that the agency's river forecasters ignored two models that showed more accurate flood predictions for the Cumberland River. Instead forecasters favored a model that relied on inaccurate and untimely information from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The weather service continued to use that data despite observations on the ground that proved their flood predictions were inaccurate."

…"The report also criticizes the wording of the flood warnings. On April 30, the weather service's Southern Regional headquarters sent an e-mail to local weather offices reminding them of the option to use "Flash Flood Emergency" in their warnings to the public. But the Nashville office never used the term "flood emergency," despite "the many reports of catastrophic flooding, water rescues, and even fatalities" the report states. And the report found that staffing levels were inadequate for the emergency.

…The assessment notes that progress has been made in interagency communication and cooperation. Haynes also said that high-resolution flood maps are being developed for the Nashville area that will show down to the street level where flooding is expected."…

May 10, 2010, in downtown Nashville, shot by Keith Gallagher, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

The impacts of too much communication

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: Individuals within a networked system coordinate their activities by communicating to each other information such as their position, speed, or intention. At first glance, it seems that more of this communication will increase the harmony and efficiency of the network. However, scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that this is only true if the communication and its subsequent action are immediate.

Using statistical physics and network science, the researchers were able to find something very fundamental about synchronization and coordination: if there are sustained delays in communication between just two or three parts of a system, performance of the entire system will eventually collapse. The findings apply to any network system where individuals interact with each other to collectively create a better outcome. This ranges from a flock of birds suddenly dodging to the right in one unified movement to avoid a predator to balancing load in large-scale computer networks to the spread of a rumor throughout an online social network.

….“When there are no delays, the more you communicate with your neighbor, the better global performance becomes,” said corresponding author for the paper and Associate Professor of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy Gyorgy Korniss. “If there are delays, for a while performance will increase, but even if you work harder to better communicate with your neighbors, eventually performance will decrease until it reaches zero. Understanding the impact of delays can enable network operators to know when less communication effort can actually be more efficient for overall performance.”

…The work … could be extended to real-life cases such a social or economic network. An example could be predicting the response of global markets to the trading of specific stocks, according to the researchers. The equations could someday help network operators to get the biggest pay off from each communication and develop an even stronger understanding of the power of the individual in mass communication.

From the RPI website, a visual representation of the mathematics in this paper

Disasters raising new tests for telecoms: experts

Terra Daily, via Agence France-Presse: Disasters like the devastating earthquake in China have highlighted the need for countries to develop better emergency communications plans, experts say. With indications that the number of disasters may be rising around the globe, nations need to think seriously about how to deliver communication equipment to make rescue operations quicker and more efficient, they say.

Telecommunications were interrupted for more than 30 hours in the areas hardest hit by last month's quake in China, said Wu Guoxiang of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP). He told CommunicAsia, a regional trade show, that there were lessons to be drawn from some of the communications problems that developed as authorities grappled with the scope of the disaster.

The quake killed tens of thousands of people but also destroyed more than 18,000 mobile base stations and nearly 30,000 kilometres (20,000 miles) of cable and optical fibre, he said. But when the Chinese government sent a fleet of emergency communications vehicles with satellite facilities to the quake zone, many could not reach the hardest-hit areas because of landslides and other damage. That points to the most important lesson, he said: the capability for rapid deployment….