Interesting, Lengthy Report/Recommndations On Climate From Yale

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For those aiming to raise public awareness of the projected consequences of climate change, a laundry list is available: sea-level rise, extreme weather events, droughts and water shortages, agricultural and food risks, infectious disease, ecosystem loss, species extinction, and others. The Biblical quality of these consequences – floods, droughts, plagues – has often been assumed to be an advantage in getting people’s attention, even though the associations with divine wrath may also promote a sense of human futility.

An intuitive overview suggests, moreover, that many of the climate change risks may not be as viscerally unsettling to people as one might think. Sea-level rise may be perceived as inherently geological and longterm, even if accelerations lie ahead from unexpectedly rapid ice sheet melting (new satellite observations reported in the journal Science in February 2006 show that Greenland’s glaciers are sliding toward the sea almost twice as fast as previously thought). The spread of climate-sensitive diseases to new latitudes and elevations sounds troubling, but disease risk is a probabilistic phenomenon and many people appear to like their chances in such situations. Food scarcity from disrupted agriculture and threats to drinking water may cut closest to home, but at least in the industrial world, the image of plentiful grocery stores is so deeply imprinted that it may be difficult to shake it loose even if a
particular projection warrants it.

The fact is that there is surprisingly little hard evidence about which of the many climate change related risks are of greatest concern to the American population. The risk perception and communications fields have largely focused elsewhere (e.g., seat belt usage, drunk driving, STDs, cancer screening), typically on issues of personal behavior rather than daunting collective action problems like climate change. And the major survey organizations rarely probe these depths, instead going only so far as asking whether Americans think global warming is a serious or very serious problem as a whole.

Even if we had better data, one may ask whether it is scientifically legitimate to select some consequences above others for motivational purposes, when the science encompasses all of them. If an important 27 scientific disconnects goal is to translate science to action, however, such choices may simply need to be made. Communications can be constructed that remain faithful to the natural sciences, while doing much more to reflect our advancing understanding of how human beings assess risks.

Communicating the Risks or the Solutions

There is, as well, a more basic question, discussed a great deal at the Conference, of whether communicating the risks associated with climate change to Americans is the correct route to go in the first place. Many contend that it is time to discontinue “scare-mongering” and alarmism, and instead portray a hopeful vision of solutions that will create jobs and pump up the economy. Those seeking to advance action will likely need to communicate both consequences and solutions. Finding the right balance and sequence to promote action commensurate with the science is a task that will need to draw not just on the natural sciences
but also on the social sciences (see more on this theme later in Part I).

Meanwhile, many at the Conference intuitively recognized the potential value of better understanding and communicating local
impacts of climate change so that Americans would grasp what this issue could mean for their well-being and that of their children. Recognizing that this is partly a function of the available science, Conference Recommendation #2 calls for research priorities on climate change to be more responsive to society’s information and decision-making needs, including acceleration of ongoing efforts to observe and model local impacts at greater resolution levels.

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http://environment.yale.edu/climate/americans_and_climate_change.pdf

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1. fascinating reading so far at page 40, thanks for posting N/T