 Centre scientists – not regarded as a sceptic-friendly bunch. John and Dana don’t seem particularly keen on it. That’s fine. I’m not sure the Tamsin question really applies, as she is talking about climate scientists, while I would think of John and Dana as specialist science communicators rather than climate scientists.
Am I interested in communicating climate change more effectively? This is an interesting question, as I have come across a few people who seem to assume that my research is about science communication. I accept that our ‘Making Science Public’ can be interpreted in multiple ways – that’s part of its strength. But *nowhere* in the research aims of the programme or in the detail of the research projects is science communication mentioned at all. (Not that I assume people will spend their time poring over such pages, but want to be clear now). My scepticism project is 2.3 on the second of these links – it doesn’t say anything about scientific communication. It talks about shifts in scepticism, knowledge production and the interpretive space between rational-scientific knowledge and the social-political world. Following Wittgenstein, I have an interest in language, and metaphors were part of my doctoral work, hence my writing this post. Being any kind of scientist involves communication of some sort, but ‘science communication’ as it is typically framed is not a current research interest.
Hopefully this post won’t be seen as being too off-topic!
I’ve just read through the various programme / project description pages you provided links to Warren. A very interesting project overall, and your ‘2.3.’ section specifically.
Reading those pages has brought into focus one or two thoughts I’ve had over the past couple of days about ‘climate scepticism’ and the Making Science Public programme. Putting aside for the time being any considerations of the appropriateness or otherwise of some specific labels, I’d be grateful if you could clarify a couple of things.
Firstly, do you believe that there is widespread misinformation and misrepresentation of climate science and the motivations and honesty of climate scientists, the primary purpose of that misrepresentation apparently being to discredit those findings of climate science that point to potentially dangerous anthropogenic climate change, and so to steer public and policy responses away from taking mitigatory action?
Secondly, if you do accept that, how will you and your co-workers in Making Science Public distinguish misinformation, whether one-off comments of the simply misinformed, or concerted and sustained campaigns or programmes masquerading as scepticism, from genuine scepticism and good science?
I’m not trying to make things difficult here: these seem to be crucial considerations for any study that considers climate scepticism, but I haven’t yet seen a clear explanation of how, or even whether, they will be tackled by the programme.
When Adam “criticise others’ approaches, it is only ever with a view to doing better at engaging people in the challenge of confronting climate change”.
Isn’t this a somewhat frank, albeit unwitting reflection on Adam Corner’s own motivations?
What if, for example, the rights and wrongs of ‘engaging people in the challenge of confronting climate change’ were to be explored, and found wanting? And what if it was discovered that some academics had eschewed the idea that they should try to form an objective understanding of what was happening in society, to use their campuses as campaigning platforms instead… And what if some social scientists wanted to comment on that, fairly significant transformation of the role between the academy, the public, and politics?
To what extent is is the researcher’s role and responsibility to ‘engage’ the public in a political project? And how can such a researcher demand that others give a full account of their motivations — seemingly to make sure that they are sufficiently pure?
What is particularly striking about Adam’s question is that it seems to imply that Warren’s criticism of the Hiroshima analogy isn’t aiming towards progress in the debate. Indeed, criticising the absurd hyperbole that emerges from the SkS project might give the wrong people an edge in a political debate. But that surely would be progress, if it had led to a better argument emerging, even if it wasn’t the Cook tribe who benefited from it.
Is the Hiroshima analogy wrong simply because it’s the wrong strategy? Doesn’t its wrongness, consistent with the wrongness of other pseudo-academic studies to come out of the SkS project recently, reflect a deeper problem with the thinking going on in its author’s heads?
As far as I can see, it started with an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, which incorrectly attributed it to ‘climate scientists’, when in fact it came from Mr Cook.
Here’s a selection of tweets about it from climate scientists, that can be added to the opinion of Victor above.
like. Just don’t compare climate change to A-bombs, will you? Its not!
As I think I have said before, cheerleaders like Dana and John damage the credibility of climate science and give fuel to the sceptics.
The metaphor doesn’t do this, at all. It does nothing to tell people why, even though “our planet continues to build up heat,” they don’t see anything that suggests it is true. It does no more to address that issue than simply saying, “The planet is continuing to warm.” There is no connection between the metaphor and the stated purpose!
According to John Cook, he’s using a scary metaphor that has no connection to the issue he wants to address. That’s about the worst condemnation of the metaphor one could offer.
The ideas expressed by Cook and his associate express considerable naivete, even allowing they only seek to communicate magnitude of a heat quantity by this Hiroshima exercise. It has been widely argued in the climate social sciences literature that employing catastrophe to produce intended effect, though may appeal to the communicator by appearing “sticky” (call it what you will), has a host of effects that eventually negate the approach. This, when referring to the use of weather-related imagery and actual weather disasters, which though may have severe problems with attribution, are at least superficially plausibly related to the phenomenon of climate change.
The Hiroshima bomb, in turn, has nothing to do with climate, and the only reason for it to ‘stick’ in anyone’s mind is the devastation it wrought on the city. In other words, the power of the bomb, that correlates with the heat quantity, is “sticky” only by virtue of its mass murder. This simple fact could not have missed Cook.
Cognitive research is not carried out in a vacuum, leave alone a moral vacuum. Several times, it functions in a retrospective way, identifying what factors might have lead to easy acceptance of a given fact. To abstract such points and use them prospectively to justify gratuitous and violent imagery, as Cook as done here, constitutes malpractice.
As humans emit from breathing around 8% of what they release from fossil fuels etc, is John Cook claiming that by the mere act of living, humans are exploding one Hiroshima bomb every 3 seconds?
The answer to that question is no. The question itself reveals a lack of insight into the nature of the climate change problem.
The CO2 humans (and any other respiring organism) breathe out has only recently – generally within the past year or two – been removed from the atmosphere, via photosynthesis and thence into the food chain. It is entirely different, in terms of impact on carbon concentrations in the atmosphere, from ‘fossil’ carbon.
That’s very interesting Jeremy. Is CO2 produced from human breathing of a fundamentally different nature than “fossil” CO2? Does it not behave like a GHG, perhaps?
I don’t think even John Cook goes as far as claiming that. But there is alway time to learn something new.
Maurizio, there’s a fundamental difference between short-term cycling of carbon from and back to the atmosphere via, for example, photosynthesis -> food chain -> respiration by humans, and the release of carbon that was last in the atmosphere millions of years ago.
Nice interesting article, thank you. Since I’m tired of converting between toes, twhys, boes, btus, mcfs and all the rest of them, let alone hiroshimas, I’d agree with commenters suggesting watts, joules and meters as the units of choice.
What might make more sense and has something tangible to it, is how this energy would affect the OCEANS, since they oceans have such a great ‘buffer’ capacity from a heat standpoint.
So, over 1 year, how much would this ‘hiroshima bomb’ energy warm the oceans? I haven’t done the math, but I might suspect that it is a small fraction of a degree...
.. which that then wouldn’t be ‘scary’ enough; thus they way it is presented in ‘hiroshima bomb’ equivalents...
How many thousandths of a degree C (unmeasureable) in ocean warming, does this decade’s missing 0.2 degree C of global air surface temperature represent?
Let alone that 0.9C in 55 yrs number is just guess work built on assumptions, with very sketchty data. And it mentioned those issues in the report!
SkS’ only link to fame is their ability to dress up irrelevant half-truths as scientific-looking blathering, thereby fooling the unsuspecting readers just as they fool their “4 Hiroshimas” audiences. It’s all true but there is no discernible reason to care about it.