FIRE!!!

Everyone’s favorite cliche for someone causing harm by being unduly alarmist is, of course, yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. This piece of pedestrian imagery kept running through my head as I read a couple of items floating through the infosphere today.

The first is a posting by Andy Revkin on the NY Times’ Dot Earth blog, Copenhagen Summit Seeks Climate Action:

A three-day conference on climate science and policy that drew some 2,500 scientists, economists, campaigners, dignitaries, industry representatives and journalists to Copenhagen has wrapped up, and organizers have issued a list of core “messages” that you can see at the bottom of this post. Their bottom line, echoing what many climate scientists have been saying with rising vigor for two decades, is that there is an urgent need to curb emissions of greenhouse gases, and “inaction is inexcusable.”

Is this effort, which one organizer described as “a deliberate attempt to influence policy,” likely to change things? There are signs, some scientists warned on Thursday, that overheated descriptions of looming dangers coming out of the conference could actually backfire. More on those warnings is below.

…

Daniel Sarewitz at Arizona State University said this was a classic example of how scientists and the media play down complexity in their thirst for powerful framing that catches attention and might drive action. The problem, he and several colleagues said, is that over-reaching can also lead to distrust and further polarization of advocates threatened or empowered by the controversial finding. (This is the “climate porn” concept I wrote about a while back.)

As is now expected (sad to say), Revkin didn’t list the “final messages” from the scientists gathered in Copenhagen until after this rather curious way of presenting the event, including the gratuitous “climate porn” line. Note to Andy: Leave the incendiary terminology to people like Joe Romm who at least puts his weight into it and has a flair for sounding like he has steam coming out of his ears. In fact, I expect he’ll have a colorful thing or three to say about your comments.

For once, the comments on a Dot Earth entry were more interesting than the item itself, with many people calling out Revkin for this approach to the story. I encourage you to go read them for yourself.

The other item was an interview with an author I’ve come to respect greatly, Elizabeth Kolbert, in A Reporter’s Field Notes on The Coverage of Climate Change:

e360: We’ve talked about journalists and generally the challenges in conveying this issue to the public. But what about scientists? I mean, scientists have a responsibility to get their information out to the public whether it’s through the media or through their own writings and work. How good a job do you think they have done in conveying this whole issue?

Kolbert: Oh, I don’t think they’ve done a good job. They have some of the same problems that journalists have, which is that scientists are interested in introducing something new in their work. They want new results, new information. They want to break new ground. They need to do that to get funding, really. And global warming, the fact that global warming is happening, that is really old news in scientific circles. It’s just a settled question in scientific circles. So scientists moved on to other issues having to do with climate change…

e360: But not whether it exists?

Kolbert: No, absolutely not. That would be considered — you’d just be laughed at in a scientific discussion. But that message really never reached the public, and you could argue that that’s the journalists’ fault, and I do fault journalists for that. But I also fault scientists because they sort of have just left things to the journalists. And now that we’ve sort of moved to a new stage of the debate, a policy debate, they’re not going to be involved in that either. They’re going to leave that to the economists or to the political scientists.

…

e360: There have been scientists who have been out there — James Hansen, most publicly and most notably — trying to get the message out in every way they can. But when this message does get out, there is some public reaction that these scientists are like Chicken Little — you know, the sky is falling.

Kolbert: Right.

e360: If you turn on the TV news, the weathermen are making global warming jokes, saying, “This isn’t global warming. Hey, who said anything about global warming? It’s cold today.” There’s still this reaction, even when the facts are presented to them.

Kolbert: Absolutely. This is a total system failure, okay? We’re not talking about an isolated little problem, and that’s the problem. It’s a total system failure that we’re in this situation and it’s a total system failure that we can’t seem to steer away even when the evidence is absolutely overwhelming that we better do something.

It gets back to this issue of whether the public believes in science, which, to be honest, we do not. You can still find a lot of people who don’t believe in evolution, okay? So we’re talking about a country that has a very lax relationship to science. And what you need in order to grapple meaningfully with global warming is to believe that this is not a speculative thing. This is the way geophysics work, and we have established that very clearly both in a laboratory setting and on the ground — and we need to take very seriously these predictions.

It’s a longish interview and one I highly recommend. I also recommend Kolbert’s book, Field Notes From a Catastrophe.

It’s become very fashionable for the deniers of the world to point a quivering finger and shriek “Alarmist!” at anyone saying that climate chaos is a serious or imminent problem. It’s long ago become very tiresome, as hollow, obfuscatory tactics typically are. But it leads me to ask a very simple question: If you are part of a small group that knows beyond all reasonable doubt that the theater really and truly is ablaze, what are you supposed to do? Quietly and calmly keep giving seminars on the history of deaths by fire, advances in materials science to create better fire resistant textiles, and the latest human factors studies on how best to place and illuminate emergency exit signs? Or should you be standing on a chair screaming, “FIRE!!!”, especially when so many others are telling the audience not to worry, sit back, enjoy the show, and spend more money at the concession stand?[1]

[1] The metaphorical fire doesn’t have to be the single, vast topic of climate chaos; it can be peak oil, water issues, air pollution in general, ocean acidification, etc. The landscape is lousy with genuinely serious challenges, at least some of which could turn into Irwin Allen-movie-scale problems.