Serendipity

Given the terrible internet connection and complete lack of power outlets in most meeting rooms, I’ve been reduced to taking paper and pencil notes, so I’m way behind in the blogging. So I’ll console myself with a quick tour of everyone else’s blogs about this AGU meeting:

First, and foremost, the AGU press office is putting together its own blog, coordinated by Mohi Kumar. It does a much better job of capturing the highlights than I do, partly because the staff writers can sample across all the sessions, and partly because they’re good at summarizing (rather than my own overly-detailed blow-by-blow accounts of talks).

There’s lots of talk here about impacts, especially on water. Water, Water Everywhere–Except There, and There, and There is a nice summary of some of the hydrology sessions, with the new results from GRACE being an obvious highlight. And the session on Climate Change in the West covered some pretty serious impacts on California.

But the biggest buzz so far at the meeting seems to be science literacy and how to deal with the rising tide of anti-science. Capitol Hill Needs Earth Scientists, reports on a workshop on communicating with Congress, and Talking about Climate: A Monday Night Town Hall Meeting tackled how to talk to the press. Both of these pick up on the idea that the science just isn’t getting through to the people who need to know it, and we have to fix this urgently. I missed both of these, but managed to attend the presentations this morning on science literacy: Can Scientists Convince the Growing Number of Global Warming Skeptics?, which included a beautifully clear and concise summary of the Six Americas study. I’ll post my own detailed notes from this session soon. The shadow of the recently leaked CRU emails has come up a lot this week, in every case as an example of how little the broader world understands about how science is done. Oh, if only more people could come to the AGU meeting and hang out with climate scientists. Anyway, the events of the last few weeks lent a slight sense of desperation to all these sessions on communicating science.

And here’s something that could do with getting across to policymakers – a new study by Davis and Caldeira on consumption-based accounting – how much of the carbon emissions of the developing world are really just outsourced emissions from the developed world, as we look for cheaper ways to feed our consumption habits.

But there are good examples of how science communication should be done. For example, the Emiliani Lecture and the Tough Task of Paleoceanographers, is a great example of explaining the scientific process, in this case an attempt to unravel a mystery about changes in ocean currents around the Indonesian straits, due to varying El Nino cycles. The point of course, is that scientists are refreshingly open about it when they discover their initial ideas are wrong.

And last, but not least, everyone agrees that Richard Alley’s lecture on CO2 in the Earth’s History was the highlight of the meeting so far, even if it was scheduled to clash with the US Climate Change Research Program report on Impacts.

Some more highlights:

• What Does More Atmospheric Carbon Mean for Plants? For a summary of how plants have reacted to increased CO2 levels in recent decades, and whether nitrogen levels act as a limiting factor.
• Toss Out that Rusty Old Globe, about new cool visualizations of global processes.
• Brown Haze May Alter Rainy Days in Asia, on recent studies showing how pollution levels in the Indian subcontinent affect rainfall.
• Finally, Dukin’ out the Younger Dryas Boundary – a lovely account of the lively debate about whether it was an asteroid that done it.

Yesterday afternoon, I managed to catch the Bjerknes Lecture, which was given by Richard B. Alley: “The biggest Control Knob: Carbon Dioxide in Earth’s Climate History”. The room was absolutely packed – standing room only, I estimated at least 2,000 people in the audience. And it was easy to see why – Richard is a brilliant speaker, and he was addressing a crucial topic – an account of all the lines of evidence we have of the role of CO2 in climate changes throughout prehistory.

[Update: the AGU has posted the video of the talk]

By way of introduction, he pointed out how many brains are in the room, and how much good we’re all doing. Although he characterizes himself as not being an atmospheric scientist, except perhaps by default, but as he looks more and more at paleo-geology, it becomes clear how important CO2 is. He has found that CO2 makes a great organising principle for his class on the geology of climate change at Penn State, because CO2 keeps cropping up everywhere. So, he’s going to take us through the history to demonstrate this. His central argument is that we have plenty of evidence now (some of it very new) that CO2 dominates all other factors, hence “the biggest control knob” (later in the talk he extended the metaphor by referring to other forcings as fine tuning knobs).

He also pointed out that, from looking at the blogosphere, it’s clear we live in interesting times, with plenty of people WILLING TO SHOUT and distort the science. For example, he’s sure some people will distort his talk title because, sure, there are other things that matter in climate change than CO2. As an amusing aside, he showed us a chunk of text from an email sent by an alumnus to the administrators at his university, on which he was copied, the gist of which is that Alley’s own research proves CO2 is not the cause of climate change, and hence he is misrepresenting the science and should be dealt with severely for crimes against the citizens of the world. To the amusement of the audience, he points out a fundamental error of logic in the first sentence of the email, to illustrate the level of ignorance about CO2 that we’re faced with. Think about this: an audience of 2,000 scientists, all of whom share his frustration at such ignorant rants.

So the history: 4.6 billions years ago, the sun’s output was lower (approx 70% of today’s levels), often referred to as the faint young sun. But we know there was liquid water on earth back then, and the only thing that could explain that is a stronger greenhouse effect. Nothing else works – orbital differences, for example, weren’t big enough. The best explanation for the process so far is the Rock-Weathering Thermostat. CO2 builds up in the atmosphere over time from volcanic activity. As this CO2 warms the planet through the greenhouse effect, the warmer climate increases the chemical weathering of rock, which in turn removes carbon dioxide through the formation of calcium carbonate, that gets washed into the sea and eventually laid down as sediment. Turn up the temperature, and the sequestration of CO2 in the rocks goes faster. If the earth cools down this process slows, allowing CO2 to build up again in the atmosphere. This is process is probably what has kept the planet in the right range for liquid water and life for most of the last 4 billion years.

But can we demonstrate it? The rock thermostat takes millions of years to work, because the principle mechanism is geological. One consequence is that the only way to get to a “snowball earth” (times in the Cryogenian period when the earth was covered in ice even down to the tropics) is that some other cause of change has to happen fast – faster than the rock-themostat effect.

An obvious piece of evidence is in the rock layers. Glacial layers are always covered from above by carbonate rocks, showing that increased carbonation (as the earth warmed) follows periods of icing. This shows part of the mechanism. But to explore the process properly, we need good CO2 paleo-barometers. The gold standard is ice core record. So far the oldest ice core record is 800,000 years, although we only have one record this old. Several records go back 450,000 years, and there are many more shorter records. The younger samples all overlap, giving some confidence that they are correct. We also now know a lot about how to sort out ‘good’ ice core record from poor (contaminated) ones.

But to back the evidence from the ice cores, there are other techniques with independent assumptions (but none as easy to analyze as ice cores). When they all agree, this gives us more confidence in the reconstructions. One example: growth of different plant species – higher CO2 gives preference to certain species. Similarly, different ways in which carbonate shells in the ocean grow, depending on pH of the ocean (which in turn is driven by atmospheric concentrations of CO2). Also the fossil-leaf stomata record. Stomata are the pores in leaves that allow them to breathe. Plants grow leaves with more pores when there is low CO2, to allow them to breathe better, and less when there is more CO2, to minimize moisture loss.

So, we have a whole bunch of different paths, none of which are perfect, but together work pretty well. Now what about those other controllers, beyond the rock-thermostat effect? CO2 is raised by:

• the amount of CO2 coming out of volcanoes
• slower weathering of rock
• less plant activity
• less fossil burial.

He showed the graph reconstructing what we know of CO2 levels over the last 400 million years. Ice coverage is shown on the chart as blue bars, showing how far down towards the equator the ice reaches, and this correlates with low CO2 levels from all the different sources of evidence. 251 million years ago, pretty much every animal dies – 95% of marine species wiped out, in the end-permian extinction. Probable cause: rapid widespread growth of marine green sulfur bacteria that use H2S for photosynthesis. The hydrogen sulphide produced as a result kills most other life off. And it coincides with a very warm period. The process was probably kicked off by greater vulcanism (the siberian traps) spewing CO2 into the atmosphere. When the ocean is very warm, it’s easy to starve it of oxygen; when it’s cold it’s well oxygenated. This starvation of oxygen killed off most ocean life.

Fast forward to the mid-cretaceous “saurian sauna”, when there was no ice at sea level at poles. Again, CO2 is really high again. High CO2 explains the warmth (although in this case, the models tend to make it a little too warm at these CO2 levels). Then there was one more blip before the ice ages. (Aside: CO2 is responsible for lots of things, but at least it didn’t kill the dinosaurs, a meteorite did). The paleocene-eocene thermal maximum meant big temperature changes. It was already hot, and the world gets even hotter. Most sea-floor life dies out. Acidic ocean. This time, the models have difficulty simulating this much warming. And it happened very fast, although the recovery process matches our carbon cycle models very well. And it shows up everywhere: e.g. leaf damage in fossil leaves at PETM.

But for many years there was still a mystery: The temperature and CO2 levels are highly correlated throughout the earth’s history, and with no other way to explain the climate changes. But occasionally there were places where temperature changes did not match CO2 changes. Over last couple of decades, as we have refined our knowledge of the CO2 record, these divergences have gone. The mismatches have mostly dissapeared.

Even just two years ago, Alley would have said something was still wrong in miocene, but today it looks better. Two years ago, we got new records that improve the match. Two weeks ago, Tripati et. al. published a new dataset that agrees even better. So, two years ago, miocene anomalies looked important, now not so clear, it looks like CO2 and temperature do track.

But what do we say to people who say the lag (CO2 rises tend to lag behind the temperature rise) proves current warming isn’t caused by CO2? We know that orbital changes (the Milankovitch cycles) kick off the ice ages – this was predicted 50 years before we had data (in the 1970s) to back it up. But temperature never goes far without the CO2, and vice versa, but sometimes one lags the other by about 2 centuries. And a big problem with the Milankovich cycles is that they only explain a small part of the temperature changes. The rest is when CO2 changes kick in. Alley offered the following analogy: credit card interest lags debt. By the denialist logic, because interest lags debt, then I never have to worry about interest and the credit card company can never get me. However, a simple numerical model demonstrates that interest can be a bigger cause of overall debt in the long run (even though it lags!!). So, it’s basic physics. The orbits initially kick off the warming, but the release of CO2 then kicks in and drives it.

So, CO2 explains almost all the historical temperature change. What’s left? Solar irradiance changes, volcanic changes. When these things change, we do see the change in the temperature record. For solar changes, there clearly aren’t many, and they act lik a fine tuning knob, rather than a major control. 40,000 years ago the magnetic field almost stopped (it weakened to about 10% of its current level), letting in huge amounts of cosmic rays, but the climate ignored it. Hence, we know cosmic rays are at best a fine tuning knob. Volcanic activity is important, but essentially random (“if volcanoes could get organised, they could rule the world” – luckily they aren’t organised). Occasionally several volcanoes erupting together makes a bigger change, but again a rare event. Space dust hasn’t changed much over time and there isn’t much of it (Alley’s deadpan delivery of this line raised a chuckle from the audience).

So, what about climate sensitivity (i.e. the amount of temperature change for each doubling of CO2)? Sensitivity from models matches the record well (approx 3°C per doubling of CO2). Recently, Royer et al conducted an interesting experiment, calculating equilibrium climate sensitivity from models, and then comparing with the proxy records, to demonstrate that climate sensitivity has been consistent over the last 420 million years. Hence paleoclimate says that the more extreme claims about sensitivity (especially those claiming very low levels) must be wrong.

In contrast, if CO2 doesn’t warm, then we have to explain why the physicists are stupid, and then we still have no other explanation for the observations. If there is a problem, it is that occasionally the world seems a little more sensitive to CO2 than the models say. There are lots of possible fine-tuning knobs that might explain these – and lots of current research looking into it. Oh, and this is a global story not a regional one; there are lots of local effects on regional climate.

Note that most of these recent discoveries haven’t percolated to the IPCC yet – much of this emerged in the last few years since the last IPCC report was produced. The current science says that CO2 is the most important driver of climate throughout the earth’s history.

Some questions from the audience followed:

• Q: If we burn all the available fossil fuel reserves, where do we get to? A: If you burn it all at once, there is some chance of getting above the cretaceous level, but lots of uncertainty, including how much reserves there really are. In a “burn it all” future, it’s likely to get really hot: +6 to 7C.
• Q: We know if we stop emitting, it will slow down global warming. But from geology, what do we know about removal? A: Anything that increases weatherabilty of rocks. But seems unlikely that we can make it go fast enough to make a difference, at an economic level. Key question is how much energy we would we need to do it, e.g. to dig up shells from ocean bed and allow them to carbonate. It’s almost certainly easier to keep it out of the air than to take it out of the air (big round of applause from the audience in response to this – clearly the 2,000+ scientists present know this is true, and appreciate it being stated so clearly).
• Q What about feedbacks? A: As we put up more CO2, the oceans take up about half of it. As the world gets warmer, the ability of the ocean to buffer that reduces. Biggest concern is probably in changes in the arctic soils. Methane on the seafloor. As you go from decades to centuries, the sensitivity to CO2 goes up a little, because of these amplfying feedbacks.

Well that was it – a one hour summary of how we know that CO2 is implicated as the biggest driver in all climate change throughout the earth’s history. What I found fascinating about the talk was the way that Alley brought together multiple lines of evidence, and showed how our knowledge is built up from a variety of sources. Science really is fascinating when presented like this. BTW I should mention that Alley is author of The Two-Mile Time Machine, which I now have to go and read…

Finally, a disclaimer. I’m not an expert in any of this, by any stretch of the imagination. If I misunderstood any of Alley’s talk, please let me know in the comments.

This week I’ll be blogging from the American Geosciences Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, one of the biggest scientific meetings of the year for the climate science community (although the European EGU meeting, held in the spring, rivals it for size). About 16,000 geoscientists are expected to attend. The scope of the meeting is huge, taking in anything from space and planetary science, vulcanology, seismology, all the way through to science education and geoscience informatics. Climate change crops up a lot, most notably in the sessions on atmospheric sciences and global environmental change, but also in sessions on the cryosphere, ocean sciences, biogeosciences, paleoclimatology, and hydrology. There’ll be plenty of other people blogging the meeting, a twitter feed, and a series of press conferences. The meeting clashes with COP15 in Copenhagen, but scientists see Copenhagen as a purely political event, and would much rather be at a scientific meeting like the AGU. To try to bridge the two, the AGU has organised a 24/7 climate scientist hotline aimed at journalists and other participants in Copenhagen, although more on this initiative a little later…

Today, the meeting kicked off with some pre-conference workshops, most notably, a workshop on “Re-starting the climate conversation“, aimed at exploring the sociological factors in media coverage and public understanding of climate science. I picked up lots of interesting thoughts around communication of climate science from the three speakers, but the discussion sessions were rather disappointing. Seems like everyone recognises a problem in the huge gulf between what climate scientists themselves say and do, versus how climate science is portrayed in the public discourse. But nobody (at least among the scientific community) has any constructive ideas for how to fix this problem.

The first speaker was Max Boykoff, from University of Colorado-Boulder, talking about “Mass Media and the Cultural Politics of Climate Change”. Boykoff summarized the trends in media coverage of climate change, particularly the growth of the web as a source of news. A recent Pew study shows that in 2008, the internet overtook newspapers as people’s preferred source of news, although television still dominates both. And even though climate change was one of the two controversies dominating the blogosphere in the last two weeks, it still only accounts for about 1.5% of news coverage in 2009.

Boykoff’s research focusses more on the content, and reveals a tendency in the media to conflate the many issues related to climate change into just one question: whether increasing CO2 warms the planet. In the scientific community, there is a strong convergence of agreement on this question, in contrast to say, the diversity of opinion on whether the Kyoto protocol was a success. Yet the media coverage focusses almost exclusively on the former, and diverges wildly from scientific opinion. He showed a recent clip from NBC news, which frames the whole question in terms of a debate over whether it’s happening or not, with a meteorologist, geologist and sociologist discussing this question in a panel format. Boykoff’s studies showed 53% of news stories (through 2002) diverge from the scientific consensus, and, even more dramatically, 70% of TV segments (through 2004) diverge from this consensus. In a more recent study, he showed that the ‘quality’ newspapers (in the US and UK) show no divergence, while the tabloid newspapers significantly diverge in all sources. Worse still, much of this tabloid coverage is not just on the fence, but is explicitly denialist, with a common framing to present the issue as a feud between strong personalities (e.g. Gore vs. Palin).

Some contextual factors help explain these trends, including a shrinking technical capacity (specialist training) in newspaper/TV; the tendency for extreme weather events to drive coverage, which leads to the obvious framing of “is it or isn’t it caused by climate change?”; cultural values such as trust in scientists. Carvalho and Burgess present an interesting case study on the history of how the media and popular culture have shaped one another over issues such as climate change. The key point is that the idea of an information deficit is a myth – instead the media coverage is better explained as a complex cycle of cultural pressures. One of the biggest challenges for the media is how to cover a long, unfolding story within short news cycles. Which leads to an ebb and flow such as the following: In May 2008 the Observer ran a story entitled “Surging fatal shark attacks blamed on global warming“, although the content of the article is much more nuanced: some experts attribute it to global warming, others to increased human activites in the water. But then a subsequent story in the Guardian in Feb 2009 was “Sharks go hungry as tourists stay home“. Implication: the global warming problem is going away!

The second speaker was Matthew C. Nisbet, from the American University, Washington, perhaps best known for his blog, Framing Science. Nisbet began with a depressing summary of the downward trend in American concern over climate change, and the Pew study from Jan 2009 that showed global warming ranked last among 20 issues people regarded as top priorities for congress. The traditional assumption is that if the public is opposed, or does not accept the reality, the problem is one of ignorance, and hence scientific literacy is the antidote (and hence calls for more focus on formal science education and popular science outlets – “if we only had more Carl Sagans”). Along with this also goes the assumption that the science compels action in policy debates. However, Nisbet contends that when you oversimplify a policy debate as a matter of science, you create the incentive to distort the science, which is exactly what has happened over climate change.

This traditional view of a lack of science literacy has a number of problems. It doesn’t take into account the reality of audiences and how people make up their minds – essentially there is nothing unique about the public debate over climate change compared to other issues: people rely on information shortcuts – people tend to be “cognitive misers“. And it ignores the effects of media fragmentation: in 1985, most people (in the US) got their news from four main sources, the four main TV network news services. By contrast, in 2009, there are a huge array of sources of information, and because of our inability to take advantage of such a range, people have a tendency to rely on those that match their ideological preferences. On the internet, this problem of choice is greatly magnified.

Not surprisingly, Nisbet focussed mainly on the question of framing. People look for frames of reference that help them make sense of an issue, with little cognitive effort. Frames organise the central ideas on an issue, and make it relevant to the audience, so that it can be communicated by shorthand, such as catchphrases (“climategate”), cartoons, images, etc. Nisbet has a generalized typology of ways in which science issues get framed, and points out that you cannot avoid these frames in public discourse. E.g. Bill O’Reilly on Fox starts every show with “talking points”, which are the framing references for the likeminded audience; Many scientists who blog write with a clear liberal frame of reference, reflecting a tendency among scientists to identify themselves as more liberal than conservative.

The infamous Lunz memo contains some interesting framings: “the scientific debate remains open”, the “economic burden of environmental regulation”, and “the international fairness issue” – if countries like China and India not playing along, US shouldn’t make sacrifcies. In response, many scientists and commentators (e.g. Gore) have tended to frame around the potential for catastrophe (e.g. “the climate crisis”; “Be worried“). This is all essentially a threat appeal. The problem is that if you give an audience a threat, but no information on how to counter it, they either become fatalist or ignore it, and also, it opens the door to the counter-framing of calling people “alarmists”. This also plays into a wider narrative about the “liberal media” trying to take control.

Another framing is around the issue of public accountability and scientific evidence. For example, Mooney’s book “The Republican War on Science” itself became a framing device for liberals, which led to Obama’s “must restore science to its rightful place”. However, this framing can reinforce the signal that science is for democrats, not for republicans. Finally, “climategate” itself is a framing devices that flips the public accountability frame to one of accountability of scientists themselves – questioning their motivations. This has also been successfully coupled to the media bias frame, allowing the claim that the liberal media is not covering the alternative view.

So how do we overcome this framing? Nisbet concluded with examples of framings that reach out to difference kinds of audience. For example: EO Wilson’s book “The creation“, frames it as a religious/moral duty, specifically as a letter to a southern baptist. This framing helps to engage with evangelical audiences. Friedman frames it as a matter of economic growth – we need a price on carbon to stimulate innovation in a second American industrial revolution. Gore’s “We” campaign has been rebranded as “Repower America“. And the US Congress no longer refers to a “cap and trade bill”, but the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES).

Nisbet thinks that a powerful new frame is to talk about climate change as a matter of public health. The strategy is to shift the perception away from issues of remote regions (e.g. ice caps and polar bears) to focus instead on the impact in urban areas, especially on minorities, the elderly and children. Frame in terms of allergies, heatstress, etc. The lead author of the recent Lancet study, Anthony Costello, said that public health issues are under-reported, and need attention because they affect billions of people.

The recent Maibach and Leiserowitz study identifies six distinct audience groups, and changes ideas about where public perceptions are, especially the idea that the public is not concerned about climate change:

As an experiment, Nisbet and colleagues set up a tent on the National Mall in Washington, interviewed people who said they were from outside of DC, and categorized them in one of the six audiences. They then used this to identify a sample of each group to be invited to a focus group session, where they could test out the public health framing for climate change. Sentence by sentence analysis of their responses to a short essay on health issues and climate change proved very interesting, as there are specific sections, especially towards the end about policy options, where even the dismissives had positive responses. For example:

• all six groups agreed “good health is a great blessing.
• all six groups agreed to suggestions around making cities cleaner, easier to get around, etc.
• 4 of the 6 groups found it helpful to learn about health threats of CC (which corresponds to a big majority of American audience)
• All 6 groups reacted negatively to suggestions that we should make changes in diet and food choices, such as increasing vegetable and fruit and cutting down meat consumption. Hence, this is not a good topic to lead on!

In the question-and-answer session after Nisbet’s talk, there was an interesting debate about the lack of discussion in the media about how the science was obtained, concentrating on the results as if they came from a black box. Nisbet pointed out that this might not be helpful, and cited the fact that the climategate emails surprised many people with as how human scientists are (with egos and political goals) and the level of their uncertainty about the specific data analysis questions, which has made it a very successful framing device for those promoting the message that the science is weak. However, several audience members contended that this just means we need to do a better job of getting people to think like scientists, and bring the broader society more into the scientific process. While others pointed out how hard it is to get journalists to write about the scientific method, so the idea of partnering with others (e.g. religious leaders, health professionals) makes sense if it helps to identify and motivate particular audiences. This still leaves open the question of how to communicate uncertainty. For example, in the public health framing, people will still want to know does it affect, say, asthma or not. And as we’re still uncertain on this, it leads to the same problem as the shark attack story. So we still have to face the problem of how people understand (or not!) the scientific process.

The final speaker was Gwendolyn Blue, from the University of Calgary, Canada, talking about “Public Engagement with Climate Change”. Blue contends that major issues of science and technology require a participatory democracy that does not really exist yet (although is starting to appear). A portion of the lay public is distrustful of scientific institutions, so we need more effective ways of engaging the more diverse groups in the conversation.

Blue defines public engagement as “a diverse set of activities whereby non-experts become involved in agenda setting, decision-making, policy forming and knowledge production processes regarding science”. The aim is to overcome the traditional “one-way” transmission model of science communication, which tend to position lay audience as passive, and hence obsesses over whether they are getting good or bad information. But public understandings of science are much more sophisticated than many people give credit for, particularly away from questions of basic facts, such as the ethical and social implication of scientific findings.

There are clearly a number of degrees of citizen participation, for example Arnstein’s ‘ladder’. Blue is particularly interested in the upper rungs – i.e. not just ‘informing’ (which movements such as cafe scientifique, and public lectures try to do) but through engagements that aim  to empower and transform (e.g. citizen science, activism, protests, boycotts, buycotts). But she doesn’t think citizen participation in science is a virtue in it’s own right, as it can be difficult, frustrating, and can fail: success is highly context dependent.

Examples include: 350.org, which uses social networking media to bring people together. Lots of people creating images of the number 350 and uploading their efforts (but how many participants actually understand what the number 350 represents?); tcktcktck which collected 10 million signatures and delivered them to the COP15 negotiators. And the global day of action yesterday, which was one of the biggest demonstrations of public activism. However, this type of activism tends to be bound up with social identity politics.

Deliberative events aim to overcome this by bringing together people who don’t necessarily share the same background / assumptions. Blue described her experiences with one particular iniative, the World Wide Views on Global Warming events on September 26, 2009. The idea grew out of the Danish model of consensus politics. Randomly selected participants in each country, were offered free trip to a workshop (in Canada, it took place in Calgary), with some effort to select approximately 100 people representing the demographic makeup of each country. The aim was to discuss the policy context for COP15. There were (deliberately) no “experts” in the room, to remove the inequality of experts vs. lay audience. Instead, a background document was circulated in advance, along with a short video. Clear ground rules were set for good dialogue, with a trained facilitator for each table. Used cultural activities too: e.g. at the Canadian event, they used music and dance from across Canada, Inuit throat singers, opening prayer by Blackfoot Elder, etc.

The result was a fascinating attempt to build an engaged public conversation around climate change and the decision making process we face. A number of interesting themes emerged. For example, despite a very diverse set of participants, lots of common ground emerged, which surprised many participants, especially around scale/urgency of the problem, and the overall goals of society. A lot of social learning took place – many participants knew very little about climate science at the outset. However, Blue did note that success for these events requires scientific literacy and well as civil literacy in the participants, reflexivity, humility and willingness to learn. But it is part of a broader cultural shift towards understanding the potential and limitations of participatory democracy.

The results were reported in a policy report, but also, more interestingly, on a website that allows you to compare results from different countries. Much of the workshops were about public deliberation, which can be very unruly. But at the end this was distilled down to an opinion poll with simple multiple choice questions to communicate the results.

The discussion towards the end of the workshop focussed on how much researchers should be involved in outreach activities. It is not obvious who should be doing this work. There is no motivation for scientists to do it, and lots of negatives – we get into trouble, and our institutions don’t like it; it doesn’t do anything for your career in most cases. And several of the speakers at the workshop described strategies in which there doesn’t seem to be a role for climate scientists themselves. Instead, the work seems to point the need for a new kind of “outreach professional” who is both scientific expert and trained in outreach activities.

Which brings me back to that experiment I mentioned at the top of the post, on the AGU providing a 24 hour hotline for COP15 participants to talk directly with small groups of climate scientists. It turns out the idea has been a bit of a failure, and has been scaled back due to a lack of demand. Perhaps this has something to do with the narrow terms that were set for what kinds of questions people could ask of the scientists. The basic science is not what matters in Copenhagen. Which means the distance between Copenhagen and San Francisco this week is even greater than I thought it would be.

[Update: Michael Tobis has a much more critical account of this workshop]