At the rate we’re currently going, the East Coast will be underwater and winter will have ceased to exist save for some small parts of the planet in ice age micro-climates, and Americans will still be “not so sure” about this whole climate change business. Sounds ka-razy! More like Al Snore, amirite! Freedom! And so forth. Not to drag out the bullheaded backwards American cliche, but. . .yeah.So, the thing is that, as science supporting human-caused climate change gets better and more plentiful, the numbers of Americans “believing in it” are dropping. Science is losing the public relations campaign to, uh, save us all from global catastrophe. Right now, less than half of Americans believe that climate change is currently affecting the planet. But why? The situation is about as real as it gets, so what’s it take to get a little fear going, let alone action?That’s the question MIT Sloan School of Management professor John Sterman looks at in the new issue of the journal Climate Change.[Scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), among others, have made an ever-clearer case] that climate change is real, that it's happening now, and that much of it is caused by human activity, [And yet,] in the U.S., at least, more and more people disagree with the science. Despite the enormous efforts and success of the IPCC and scientific community in assessing climate change and the risks it poses, their efforts to communicate those results are not working.It’s weird, that sentence “disagrees with the science,” like science is a point of view or op-ed or political platform. I generally don’t read an accounting of this or that event in the paper and “disagree” that it actually happened. There exist objective facts about the world and that’s what science is concerned with. More and better confirmation of climate change probably isn’t the answer, Sterman concludes. If people can disagree with a load of good science now, they can probably keep doing it until, yeah, we’re living on boats in the subtropical North Atlantic. Sternman adds:These are not disagreements about how we should respond to the risks of climate change. This is denial of the scientific facts. Political ideology, not science, increasingly determines what people believe to be true about the physical world. If you believe that responding to climate change will hurt your industry or increase government control over your life, one way out is to construct a worldview in which it's not happening.The risks need to be made clearer to people, Sterman argues. "You have to start where people are, with how people see the world." A suggestion raised is using simulations. "When experimentation is impossible, when the consequences of our decisions unfold over decades and centuries, simulation becomes the main — perhaps the only — way we can discover for ourselves how complex systems work, what the impact of different policies might be, and thus integrate science into decision making."A major problem is that climate change is just too long-term for people to focus on now. We barely design bridges to last 100 years, and the idea of convincing a voting constituency that only manages to recycle a third of its waste to think about the environment a generation hence is depressing as hell. In any case, the scientific community will keep fighting the good, reality-based fight. Maybe by the time we lose a couple of islands we’ll get up to knowledge-speed with the rest of the first-world.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.Graphic by Christine Daniloff
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