• Why positive feedback doesn’t necessarily lead to runaway warming – Positive feedback happens when the response to some change amplifies that change. For example: The Earth heats up, and some of the sea ice near the poles melts. Now bare water is exposed to the sun’s rays, and absorbs more light than did the previous ice cover; so the planet heats up a little more. In both of these cases, the “effect” reinforces the “cause”, which will increase the “effect”, which will reinforce the “cause”… So won’t this spin out of control? The answer is, No, it will not, because each subsequent stage of reinforcement & increase will be weaker and weaker. The feedback cycles will go on and on, but there will be a diminishing of returns, so that after just a few cycles, it won’t matter anymore.
• Himalayan Glaciers: Wrong Date, Right Message – Is the AR4 terribly flawed? It is important to note that this is one error in a roughly 3000 page technical document, an error percentage similar to the Encyclopedia Britannica. The 2035 claim was not included in the Technical Summary, the Summary for Policymakers, or the Synthesis Report. Does this error show the IPCC has an ‘alarmist’ bias – a tendency to exaggerate the negative impacts of climate change? In fact, there are far more documented instances of the AR4 being too conservative, rather than too alarmist, on emissions scenarios, sea level rise, and Arctic sea-ice melt. Many of the Himalayan Glaciers are retreating at an accelerating rate (Ren 2006) and roughly 500 million people depend on the melt water from these glaciers (Kehrwald 2008).
• A history of international climate change policy – An overview of the history of international climate policy over the last 30 years, divided into five periods. The article shows (1) the increasing complexity of the definition of the climate change issue from an environmental to a development issue; (2) the inability of the developed countries to reduce their own emissions and raise funds commensurate with the nature of the problem and their initial commitments; (3) the increasing engagement of different social actors in the discussion and, in particular, the gradual use of market mechanisms in the regime; (4) the increasing search for alternative solutions within the formal negotiations—such as the identification of nationally appropriate mitigation actions for the developing world, reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and the use of geo-engineering solutions; and (5) the search for solutions outside the regime—the mobilization of sub-national policies on climate change, litigation, and markets on biofuels.
• Coffee threatened by beetles in a warming world (!) – The Arabica coffee grown in Ethiopia and Latin America is an especially climate-sensitive crop. It requires just the right amount of rain and an average annual temperature between 64 degrees Fahrenheit and 70 degrees Fahrenheit to prosper. As temperatures rise — Ethiopia’s average low temperature has increased by about .66 degrees F every decade since 1951, according to the country’s National Meteorological Agency — and rains become more variable, Ethiopian coffee farmers have suffered increasingly poor yields. Last year was especially bad, with exports dropping by 33 percent. Some have moved their coffee trees to higher elevations, while others have been forced to switch to livestock and more heat-tolerant crops, such as enset, a starchy root vegetable similar to the plantain. Now, there is evidence that a warming climate may be linked to one of the major threats facing the coffee industry in Ethiopia and elsewhere…

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• Climate experts agree: Global warming caused unprecedented Russian heat wave – “I agree with Michael Tobis’s take at Only In It For the Gold that something systematic has changed to alter the global circulation and you’ll need a coupled atmosphere/ocean global model to understand what’s going on. My hunch is that a warming Arctic combined with sea-surface-temperature teleconnections altered the global circulation such that a blocking ridge formed over western Russia leading to the unprecedented drought/heat wave conditions. Without contributions from anthropogenic climate change, I don’t think this event would have reached such extremes or even happened at all.”
• Myth of the climate science gravy train: scientists studying Greenland forced to pay their own airfares – One of the more absurd claims made by the denialists is that climate science offers scientists a veritable “gravy train” of funding. I’ve always found it a curious argument: after all do biomedical researchers need to “make up cancer” in order to obtain funding? Do biologists make up evolution in order to get grants? How about those wacky physicists over at CERN who managed to scare up nine billion US dollars to build an atom smasher?  That’s your tax money being scammed by leftist-pinko-scientists who believe in relativity! Did they fabricate quantum physics in order to get some hot grant money? I mean, who has actually seen a sub-atomic particle?
• Lords distance themselves from climate sceptic Christopher Monckton – Monckton argues his use of the portcullis emblem, which has appeared on his letterheads and lecture presentations, does not breach any rules: “My logo is not a registered badge of parliament, and is plainly distinct from parliament’s badge in numerous material respects. The Lords do not use the portcullis at all on their notepaper: they use the Royal Arms within an elliptical cartouche.” A House of Lords spokeswoman said: “The emblem is property of the Queen, and Parliament has a Royal Licence granted for its use.” … In June, following the death of Viscount Colville of Culross, Monckton, as a qualifying hereditary peer, put his name forward as a candidate at the resulting byelection to find the replacement elected peer. However, he failed to secure a single vote among the 29 crossbench hereditary peers eligible to vote.
• RealClimate: Expert Credibility in Climate Change – Having lived through the plate tectonics revolution, I can clearly see the differences between that scientific revolution and this one. In the case of plate tectonics, there were initially few convinced but they kept coming up with exciting new data. When others tried to falsify the idea, they found more interesting observations that got them excited. It really didn’t take long to convince almost everybody, except a few diehards, that the science was right. Meanwhile these diehards (e.g., the Meyerhoffs) continued to publish for decades about ‘problems with plate tectonics’.For all I know, they are still publishing. In the scientific (vs media) discussion of global warming, all the interesting new data points to warming changes in the system… It is no wonder why the Lindzen idea of strong negative feedback is not well regarded in the scientific community–it doesn’t lead anywhere and doesn’t match with the other data available. Nevertheless he will probably keep publishing.
• A dark ideology is driving those who deny climate change – In each case the tactics are identical: discredit the science, disseminate false information, spread confusion, and promote doubt. As the authors state: “Small numbers of people can have large, negative impacts, especially if they are organised, determined and have access to power.” In Britain, links between deniers and big business are less obvious. Yet it is clear lessons have been learned and tactics copied. Consider these examples: the leaking of the “climategate” emails and the wild over-reaction to the mistaken insertion of a paragraph in the IPCC’s last climate assessment, that suggested wrongly that Himalayan glaciers are melting rapidly. Both created a furore with the former revealing “a massive fraud” that represented “the final nail in the coffin” for the theory of global warming, deniers argued. This claim was later shown to be nonsense, though it took three inquiries to establish the point.

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• And yet it works. Adam Corner on ‘ClimateGate’, transparency & peer-review. – “Open access is based on the premise that there are those outside the inner circle of peer reviewers who are competent enough to provide a second opinion on the science. This is indisputably true. But while talk of throwing open the lab doors might be rhetorically satisfying, it would provide only an illusion of democracy. Certainly there are non-academics competent enough with statistics to find errors in a piece of published science. Correcting errors in science would be a valuable service for an auditor to offer. But if several auditors reached conflicting conclusions, then somehow a judgement would have to be made about their respective competence. And who should make that judgement? Presumably a group of suitably qualified, honest individuals with a proven track record in a relevant discipline – in other words, peer review.”
• Climate email inquiry: bringing democracy to science | Richard Horton – “Scientists need to do more to emphasise their uncertainties, not recoil from them. Uncertainty may be uncomfortable, but its admission builds trust. It demonstrates integrity. One of science’s great strengths is its quantification of doubt. Fourth, scientists need to take peer review off its pedestal. As an editor, I know that rigorous peer review is indispensable. But I also know that it is widely misunderstood. Peer review is not the absolute or final arbiter of scientific quality. It does not test the validity of a piece of research. It does not guarantee truth. Peer review can improve the quality of a research paper – it tells you something about the acceptability of new findings among fellow scientists – but the prevailing myths need to be debunked. We need a more realistic understanding about what peer review can do and what it can’t. If we treat peer review as a sacred academic cow, we will continue to let the public down again and again.”
• Economics Behaving Badly – A great NYT article on behavioural economics & its failings, important for climate policy.
• Institute of Physics disbands Energy Sub-Group following ‘skeptical’ ClimateGate submission – Hopefully the end of the embarrassment for the IoP.

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• Will 2010 be the hottest year on record? – it all depends on which data source you choose: GISTEMP (likely) or HadCRU (about as likely as not).
• Climate change is leaving us with extra space junk – Even the space junk is trying to tell us we’re changing the climate. One more independent line of evidence to add to the pile, how many do we need?!
• Black Carbon’s Grey Areas – A brilliant, must-read article on black carbon. Who would have thought it has such broad geopolitical implications? Worth the effort. It’s conclusions: 1. Stop throwing cook-stoves at the problem. 2. Target diesel. 3. Be very careful about comparing black carbon with carbon dioxide.
• Ocean acidification – still happening.
• Arctic climate may be more sensitive to warming than thought – “Our findings indicate that CO2 levels of approximately 400 parts per million are sufficient to produce mean annual temperatures in the High Arctic of approximately 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees F) [19 degrees Celsius warmer than today!],” Ballantyne said. “As temperatures approach 0 degrees Celsius, it becomes exceedingly difficult to maintain permanent sea and glacial ice in the Arctic. Thus current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere of approximately 390 parts per million may be approaching a tipping point for irreversible ice-free conditions in the Arctic.”
• Network Rail study to assess impact of climate change – eco-stealth taxes are being used to… strengthen our vulnerable rail network, oh.
• Troubling ice melt in East Antarctica – it’s losing mass, which is not good. – “It’s too early to know what the ice loss in East Antarctica really means, says Isabella Velicogna, a remote-sensing specialist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “What is important is to see what’s generating the mass loss,” she says. Reductions in snowfall, for example, might reflect short-term weather cycles that could reverse at any time. But thinning caused by accelerating glaciers—as seen in West Antarctica—would warrant concern.”
• Peru inventor ‘whitewashes’ peaks to slow glacier melt – In a remote corner of the Peruvian Andes, men in paint-daubed boilersuits diligently coat a mountain summit with whitewash in an experimental bid to recuperate the country’s melting glaciers. Peru’s Environment Minister Antonio Brack has said the World Bank’s 200,000 dollars in funding would be better spent on other “projects which would have more impact in mitigating climate change.” “It’s nonsense”, he commented bluntly last year.
• Leakegate: A retraction – “It is an open question as to what impact these retractions and apologies have, but just as with technical comments on nonsense articles appearing a year after the damage was done, setting the record straight is a important for those people who will be looking at this at a later date, and gives some hope that the media can be held (a little) accountable for what they publish.”

And finally, on a slight tangent:

• Ben Goldacre: Yeah well you can prove anything with science – “When presented with unwelcome scientific evidence, it seems, in a desperate bid to retain some consistency in their world view, people would rather conclude that science in general is broken. This is an interesting finding. But I’m not sure it makes me very happy.”

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The impacts and extent of climate change is subtle and effects unevenly distributed, a degree for one country such as the UK or the US may not be an existential crisis but for people living in small island developing states (SIDS) is certainly is. These states, drawn from all oceans and regions of the world: Africa, Caribbean, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, Pacific and South China Sea make up 5% of the world’s population and a great proportion of the worlds cultural diversity. It’s no secret that these states are the most vulnerable to climate change but for these countries the numbers that are negotiated literally in no uncertain terms mean the life of death of their homeland, and their culture. At Copenhagen some of the most moving and courageous speeches were made by these states and I would urge you to take a look at the following two speeches by Tuvalu and The Maldives who have fought the corner for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) for a long time.

These are some of the issues such states have to deal with:

• Sea level rise: many islands are only a few meters above sea level with precious little fresh water. Coasts are only able to adapt so slow levels of sea level change.
• Many islands are made exclusively of coral reefs on top of old sea mountains (Atolls). These islands rely on coral reefs for food (Fish) and protection from erosion. When corals are physically stressed they kick out the algae that feed them and die. This is known as bleaching and happens when they are too hot, or don’t get enough light. In addition corals skeletons rely on how acidic the oceans are. Changes in the oceans from increased CO2 in the atmosphere may stop skeletons of corals growing or even cause them to dissolve.
• Many islands in the Caribbean the Indian and the Pacific Ocean lie in tropical storm track (hurricanes = Atlantic, typhoons = Indian, cyclones = Pacific). These storms cause great damage and loss of life, for example in Haiti last year.

For them numbers matter in a big way, the two big ones being 350ppm CO2 equivalent in the atmosphere and 1.5°C. Today I was lucky enough to attend a very interesting side event (A meeting about a topic not directly involved in the UNFCCC talks) by the prestigious Potsdam Institute for climate change. The event was focused on the 1.5°C limit which is largely thought of as the survival limit for small island states as well as for the livelihoods for low-lying deltaic countries such as Bangladesh. This event was amazing because it summarised the latest published and yet to be published research on the feasibility of a 1.5°C limit (i.e. what we can and cannot emit), the economic cost of achieving this world, the impacts of not doing so as well as the current direction of negotiations. Literally a commentary on the future of the home for over 0.3 billion people held in a room with less than 25 people present, mostly NGO representatives and a few members from delegations.

Here’s the gist of what I heard.

Currently the Copenhagen Accord fails to come close to the 50% chance of achieving the 2°C target agreed in the document (see previous post). It’s hard to see how this will get better if a bottom up approach to emissions reductions (countries set their own targets) is adopted in the long-term as advocated by the USA and other Annex I (developed) countries.

The Potsdam Institute has been working on global emissions pathways that would enable small islands to survive, they call these the 1.5°C/350 scenario and the Star Wars-like ICP-3pD scenario (soon to be published in the Energy Journal). The first will peak at 1.5°C with 350ppm in the atmosphere some time after 2100. The second is slightly higher, in the 400′s. What they found is that the only way these are possible is using negative emissions. That’s right, actually sucking CO2 from the air before the end of the century. This may sound silly but its possible if we burn plant material then place it underground using CCS (see this free paper for more detail) and its thought this will be technically possible, think I-phone technology curve or jet engines. Another example is the rapid development and spread of the wind industry by the Danish Government, current world leader in the sector. In fact they did the maths and found that these carbon negative scenarios would cost economies roughly 1-2 years growth in 100 years. Less than the occasional banking crisis! However for this to be possible emissions must peak before 2020 and then fall on average 3-4% per year, still perfectly doable you would think.

However, no matter how many times AOSIS puts 350ppm or 1.5°C into the negotiating text, developed countries remove them using the argument that they are unfeasible or impossible or too costly (Ahem… Johnathan Pershing of the USA). Now this is where it gets interesting, who’s doing their modeling? Well their own research institutions of course (Stanford). Today we were told otherwise by top scientists and economists, we were also told that in fact the models quoted by the US government were designed not to be able to incorporate negative emissions, i.e. the model limits make it physically impossible to evaluate 1.5°C. That’s not the same as 1.5°C being physically impossible or too expensive as the US and company like to claim. Maybe they are just naive, however I think not, this is a clear example of the battle over scientific information affecting the negotiations. In other words who’s scientific advice is better? Academic Imperialism might be another description. In our interviews for FIG so far we have already heard about the lack of research institutions in developing countries being a problem. It seems here that science and the results of research institutions are being exploited in a partisan way, which although hardly unexpected is rather sinister considering that it is being used to justify the wiping of so many peoples livelihoods from the earth. Here is another rather glaring information gap, an inequality in scientific advice and for that matter scientific institutions. It’s important that this counter message gets out, it can be done and it is affordable but only if we act now with global emissions peaking before 2020. 1.5°c and 350ppm are the only desirable targets with the added benefit that the European 2°C target would then have a 95% probablility of being met.

Here’s the possible future for SIDS without it:

2C: Corals may no longer grow. Hurricane numbers drop but strength increases. El Nino increases and so does the economic ruin it causes.  Sea level rises of 2-5m by 2300, 1m by 2100. Changes is ecosystems etc etc.

You get the picture.

When you are here and you speak to individuals, the sometimes inaccessible, unemotive numbers suddenly have gravity. They can make you heart heavy and your stomach drop. Today upon asking a female delegate from Micronesia how she felt she replied in a horribly resigned manner “I think we are pretty screwed” the sad thing is that about sums up the situation. Academic inequality (the knowledge gap) is taking 1.5C off the negotiating table and it’s just not on.

Sam writes for UNfair Play a collection of climate campaigners who volunteer for the most vulnerable and under-represented nations at UNFCCC conferences. Read more about their experiences at UNfairPlay.info.

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• A large majority of people think the climate is changing (78%)
• A large majority of people are concerned about this (71%)
• A large majority support the use of tax revenue to fund low-carbon policies such as investment in renewables (68%)
• A large majority of people say they are willing to reduce the amount of energy they use in order to tackle climate change (65%)

If this doesn’t sound like the findings you saw reported, or your impression of public attitudes towards climate change, then go and look up the results which are publicly available. The picture in the US is slightly different, but not drastically so, with large majorities agreeing that climate change is happening and expressing support for developing low-carbon energy infrastructure.

Large majorities agree that climate change is happening and express support for developing low-carbon energy infrastructure

But what about belief in whether humans are causing climate change? Isn’t that the crucial measure of scepticism?

Intriguingly, given that the public are frequently portrayed as teetering on the brink of abandoning climate change altogether, one of the US polls recorded an increase in the number of people who believe that human activity is changing the climate (the other had no previous survey to compare with, but found that 75% acknowledged human influence on the climate).

True, the number of people who agree that climate change is largely the result of human activity is significantly lower (in the UK and the US) than it was three years ago. But given the four consistent findings outlined above, the big question has to be ‘so what’?

Consider the BBC poll conducted in February, routinely cited as the most damaging of the public opinion polls in the UK. The statistic that was widely reported and repeated was that only 26% of the public agreed that:

“Climate change is happening and is now established as largely man-made”

Seems pretty damning doesn’t it? But a further 38% agreed that:

“Climate change is happening, but not yet proven to be largely man-made”

Even in the BBC poll, at the height of everything-gate, a healthy majority accepted that the climate was changing. In the very same poll, only 11% reported being any less concerned about the risks of climate change. The BBC results are completely consistent with the fact that a majority of people are concerned about climate change – anthropogenic or not – and want something done about it.

That significant numbers of people feel confused about whether human influence is responsible for climate change is unsurprising – a great deal of effort has been expended in trying to confuse them. The parallels between the strategies of the tobacco industry in the 1960s and the tactics of ideologically driven climate sceptics today are now well documented. The tobacco companies knew that if they could create enough uncertainty around the link between smoking and lung cancer, then people would continue to consume their product. But as opinion poll after opinion poll comes in, it is starting to look like the link between belief in human-caused climate change and support for low carbon policies is nowhere near as direct.

There is no escaping the fact that there is a major disparity between the level of certainty expressed by climate scientists and by the general public about the basic facts of climate change. It seems counter-intuitive that people dispute anthropogenic climate change, but are willing to modify their behaviour to prevent it. It seems bizarre that 73% of the BBC poll respondents who had heard about ‘climategate’ and IPCC glaciers error claimed that their views about climate change had not been altered. But this is what the polls are telling us.

The merchants of doubt will soon run out of steam – for all the uncertainty they can generate about human impact on the climate, public support for mitigating climate change remains high.

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• Sustainability: Choices, choices, choices – great piece by the BBC’s Richard Black.
• Matt Ridley and the Holocene Optimum – Matt Ridley making elementary mistakes again, you’d think he has some sort of wider agenda. Oh, he has.
• Could global brightening be causing global warming? – short answer: unfortunately not.
• A brief update on hurricanes & climate change – was Al Gore right to focus so much on hurricanes?
• Some excitable climate deniers just don’t understand what science is – “The essential problem is that the public — the media very much included — generally doesn’t understand science. Most of us think science is a list of absolutely certain facts that are not open for debate. If a theory is on the list, it’s not debatable and we should act on it; if it’s not, it is debatable and we should not act on it. As a result, scientists often find it hard to communicate scientific conclusions to the public. If they speak scientifically, they have to acknowledge that even though most scientists have come to a conclusion they are reasonably confident is true, there is continued uncertainty and debate. But if they do that, people will think the conclusion isn’t yet a scientific fact — and we shouldn’t act on it.”
• Massaging the Climate Message: New Political Conditions Bring Shifting Strategies – how the climate discourse is shifting, in the US at least.
• Only mother nature knows how to fertilize the ocean – more research needed, but yet another reason not to heavily rely on bio-sequestration.
• Investors step up climate change demands – follow the money.

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The respected BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin has published an original but controversial piece criticising the Royal Society, which concludes: “If the great science academies can’t find ways of including the best experts from the blogosphere in their deliberations they may find themselves badly left behind.”

Harrabin draws particular attention to well known “climate sceptic”, Steve McIntyre. He writes, “He has taken on the scientific establishment on some key issues and won. He arguably knows more about CRU science than anyone outside the unit – but none of the CRU inquiries has contacted him for input.”

But I disagree with Roger because the kind of ‘scepticism’ which is the meat and potatoes of bloggers is qualitatively unlike the organized scepticism which questions, refines and replaces theories about how the world works – i.e. it is unlike science.

What most ’sceptics’ do (and I include the benign ones here) is to look for ‘proof’ that confirms their preconceived ideas, looks for inconsistencies in data, bad referencing, sloppy language etc, and in doing so builds up enough of a ‘list of mistakes’ to give themselves and their friends the comforting illusion that they are doing the same as the climate scientists, only better.  But they are not.  They are extremely efficient proof-readers, who mistake book-keeping for an informed understanding of climate science.

Elevating these folk to the same status as professors of oceanography, for example, seems to me completely the wrong reaction to their onslaught.  Proposing to have them undertake reviews and sit in judgment on climate scientists is proposing the death of rational enquiry.  I just don’t think it’s sensible to give people who have no training in a particular scientific discipline, intellectual authority over those who do.  It’s a back-door to censorship by the inter-mob, and to abuse of science by those with a political agenda.

Just ahead of the Copenhagen summit, I wrote in The Times, “Nasa, the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences — once we would have allowed these authoritative, trustworthy, dependable voices to shape those parameters. Instead, the scientists we rely upon have become a target for hackers and death threats. In the face of consumerism, these establishment institutions have been cast in the role of radicals.”

Harrabin would no doubt point out that the Royal Society is now being criticised by some of its own Fellows too, and not just bloggers. But the word is that none of these rebel Fellows are climate scientists, and they’re all refusing to explain publicly why they have doubts. As Bob Ward, the policy director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at LSE, said, “If these scientists have doubts about the science on climate change, they should come out and speak about it,” and Professor Martin Rees has very openly told the doubters, “It has been suggested that the society holds the view that anyone challenging the consensus on climate change is malicious – this is ridiculous.”

The only named rebel is an electrical engineer and a member of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank which refuses to say who funds it even as it seeks greater transparency from scientists, and whose head, Lord Lawson, has explicit links to the fossil fuel industry. Benny Peiser, not a climate scientist but a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University who is the foundation’s director, said in December last year: “We look out of the window and it’s very cold, it doesn’t seem to be warming.”

As the UK’s chief scientist, John Beddington, has said:  “This is just not science, its commentary.”

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• Climate skeptic hides the incline in global temperatures – shock horror.
• Heat stress – setting a limit on what we can adapt to – if you didn’t know already, >7C temp rises will be bad, very bad.
• Migration in the context of vulnerability and adaptation to climate change: insights from analogues – long, but worth the read.
• A financial trick in the familiar biodiversity tale – because it’s not all just about climate change. Shocking stats.
• There’s no right and wrong to tackling climate change – Read this, then read it again, then make notes.

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Multiple surveys show a decline in public concern with climate change and it’s clear that political momentum for policy action has stalled. But there are several likely causes, the direct efforts of the climate skeptic movement just one of them, and probably one of the more minor causes.

These other factors include the economy, confusion over colder weather and other perceptual biases, general distrust of government, climate policies such as cap and trade that are not easily sold as effective or in line with public values, the absence of strong Presidential leadership on the issue, institutional barriers in Congress and at the international level, and the continued belief by some scientists and advocates that public support and policy action will turn on science rather than on a calculation of values and trade-offs.

In light of these many complex factors, for some scientists to angrily and emotionally focus on climate skeptics as the primary source of societal inaction is a major distraction and it reflects their own perceptual biases. These biases are well understood and predicted by past research in communication. They include a tendency for individuals heavily involved on an issue to perceive almost all news coverage as hostile to their goals (even news coverage that favors their position); to presume much larger effects for a message on the public than the actual influence; and to apply a faulty quasi-statistical sense to where public opinion might actually stand on a subject, perceiving public opinion as hostile, no matter what the objective indicators might say.

When scientists and advocates, motivated by these biased perceptions, respond with tit- for-tat attacks on climate skeptics, it takes energy and effort away from offering a positive message and well-planned engagement campaign that builds public support for climate action and instead feeds a downward spiral of “war” and conflict rhetoric that appears as just more ideological rancor to the wider public.

He also suggests ways to move past the ‘rancor’ and into something more constructive:

Alternative positive messages and strategies include re-defining climate change away from just being an environmental problem, to being a national security, public health, and economic problem, with policies that would lead to societal benefits in these areas rather than just perceived economic sacrifice, hardship, and costs. This does not mean replacing a focus on environmental science and impacts with other frames of reference, but rather it means partnering scientists and science educators with opinion leaders from across sectors of society who can speak to complementary dimensions of the issue and who can communicate about the benefits that would occur from specific policies, both at the national and local level.

It means partnering scientists and science educators with opinion leaders from across sectors of society who can speak to complementary dimensions of the issue and who can communicate about the benefits that would occur from specific policies, both at the national and local level.

Go and read the whole thing.

UPDATE: For a striking example of exactly what Matthew Nisbet is criticising, go read Steve Easterbrook’s debate with George Monbiot.

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