Much has been made this week of the gap between what the public thinks about the consensus among climate scientists over the human factor in global warming and the actual level of consensus. The discussion has centered on a new study reviewing how anthropogenic global warming was characterized in more than 12,000 climate science papers between 1991 and 2011. More than 97 percent of the papers stating a cause for warming, the authors found, pointed to humans. In contrast, surveys consistently show that Americans are pretty evenly divided when asked whether they think scientists agree that humans are causing global warming.?(Read?my e-mail exchange with two authors?for more background.)
The clear message of the team conducting this fresh assessment of the climate science consensus is that it?s vital to close that gap to have a chance of breaking societal deadlock on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. On his Skeptical Science blog, John Cook, the paper?s lead author, put it this way:
Quite possibly the most important thing to communicate about climate change is that there is a 97% consensus amongst the scientific experts and scientific research that humans are causing global warming. Let?s spread the word and close the consensus gap.
Forgotten in much of this is a point made in an e-mail message sent to me and some other science communicators this morning by Dan Kahan, the Yale law professor who studies the cultural filters that influence how people perceive and react to information. Kahan linked to his fresh post reviewing how many times in recent years such studies have been promoted, then asked this:
Climate scientists aren?t the only ones whose message never gets through. The ?science of science communication consensus? that deficits in knowledge & rationality are not the problem ? 99.9999999% agree! ? never does either, & to the very people it should be of value too, viz., those trying to promote constructive engagement w/ climate science.
Is there someone studying that science communication problem???!
He included a link to his 2010 peer-reviewed paper ? ?Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus? ? (here?s the National Science Foundation news release on the study) and one of his valuable, if sobering, talks on this issue: ?Cultural Cognition and the Challenge of Science Communication.?
I?ve spoken quite a bit about how I came late to that body of behavioral science and only slowly disabused myself of the expectation that more or better climate science stories by me might shape public responses to global warming. Yes, I am a ?recovering denialist? in that sense.
This doesn?t mean it?s a waste of time to communicate climate science. But it does mean that communicating the science of science communication matters, too.
For more on the wishful nature of hopes that closing such gaps will matter much, read Keith Kloor and David Appell.
Source: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/17/the-other-climate-science-gap/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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