Panelists at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) examined two kinds of climate change during the launch of a new seminar series on Thursday (Feb. 4). The first involved global warming. The second concerned another atmospheric shift: the metamorphosis of communications from professional and specialized to public and diffuse, as print gives way to the Internet, and network news to fragmented cable and talk radio.<\/p>\n
The seminar, called \u201cThe Public Divide Over Climate Change: Scientists, Skeptics & the Media,\u201d<\/a> was the first of three on press coverage and global warming, and was jointly sponsored by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs <\/a>and the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy<\/a>. It came just after the release of a survey, sponsored by Yale and George Mason universities, that said almost half of Americans are \u201ccautious,\u201d \u201cdisengaged,\u201d \u201cdoubtful,\u201d or \u201cdismissive\u201d of the idea that climate change exists and is being caused by humankind.<\/p>\n \u201cMedia has that nice singular sound,\u201d said moderator Cristine Russell, a senior fellow at the Belfer Center and a freelance journalist. \u201cBut it\u2019s obviously a diverse group, many of whom are not interested in news or journalism or facts or information.\u201d The debate on global warming seems chaotic, she said, as seen through the Internet and blogosphere, with \u201cincreasingly acrimonious\u201d commentary on the issue from both sides. The task of lessening the chaos is complicated by cutbacks in the mainstream press, the rise of skepticism fueled by conservative pundits, a diverse activist agenda, the concern with politics over policy, and the competition for public attention. One goal of the seminar, Russell added, was to examine how public dialogue might be improved.<\/p>\n Panelist Andrew Revkin has worked toward that goal through his career. \u201cNow we have this instantaneous and intensifying and echo-chamberish concentrating force moving at the speed of light,\u201d said the former New York Times reporter and \u201cDot Earth<\/a>\u201d blogger about the Internet, which he contends has helped to intensify the discourse. \u201cWhat happens is it bounces back and forth within a matter of hours, and then it bounces to Rush Limbaugh or George Will, and then it becomes a really loud message in the political sphere.\u201d<\/p>\n Unfortunately, he added, the message has never been relayed clearly and productively enough to create a groundswell in the general public. \u201cIt\u2019s like water in a shallow pan,\u201d Revkin said. \u201cYou get a lot of sloshing around, but not a lot of depth.\u201d He said that climate change, which was at the bottom of Americans\u2019 priorities for 2010 in a recent Pew Research Center poll, will not become a top-tier issue in this country, in part because it hasn\u2019t hit close enough to home.<\/p>\n \u201cThe history of action on the environment, or any issue, is mainly a function of your direct experience,\u201d he said. Furthermore, cutbacks in traditional media outlets mean that scientists are going to have to work harder to get the message out. \u201cThe bottom line is that everyone\u2019s going to have to get more engaged, especially if you care about disinformation. … If you\u2019re not in that soup, no matter how ugly it may be, you\u2019re going to be missing an opportunity to exert some authority and control over the discourse.\u201d<\/p>\n Matthew Nisbet, a social scientist and assistant professor of communication at American University in Washington, D.C., agreed, adding that while skeptics of climate change continue to allege \u201cthe uncertainty of the science and the devastating economic consequences of policy action, they are also promoting a relatively new focus on the public accountability of scientists and their institutions.\u201d This narrative, he said, \u201cdefines climate change as fundamentally about alleged wrongdoing, politicization, and a cover-up on the part of mainstream scientists.\u201d<\/p>\n Recent surveys, he added, confirm that public concern about and acceptance of climate change have dipped across the political spectrum. One solution, he emphasized, is for scientists to become more focused on public engagement while considering the greater need for transparency and public access to their research, as well as their own political biases (55 percent of scientists self-identify as liberals, he said, while only 20 percent of the public does).<\/p>\n Another tack is for scientists and the press to communicate the dimensions of climate change in a way that people can digest. Framing the storyline around public health and national security, for example, is likely to bring about a shift in public opinion as the topic becomes more personally relevant to a larger portion of the population.<\/p>\n Finally, he said, emphasizing the positive \u2014 discussing mitigation efforts rather than simply presenting a doom-and-gloom scenario \u2014 may elevate concern. In one survey, he said, \u201cWhen change was talked about in terms of solutions, people\u2019s positive reactions went way up,\u201d even among the respondents identified as \u201cdismissive.\u201d<\/p>\n The Shorenstein Center\u2019s Thomas Patterson<\/a>, Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at Harvard Kennedy School<\/a>, spoke from a social scientist\u2019s perspective. He cited polling research done just after World War II showing that a determined effort on government\u2019s part to inform the public usually results in \u201cvery little change in public opinion,\u201d in part because there is too much competition among various messages.<\/p>\n The level of public understanding on a topic is \u201csometimes shockingly low,\u201d he said, citing studies taken before the Iraq War that said most Americans believed that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were allies, and more recent polls on health care saying that only 26 percent of Americans know how many votes it takes to break a Senate filibuster. (The filibuster question offered four possible answers, making the number of people who got it correct \u201calmost random.\u201d)<\/p>\n He said another recent survey reported nearly half of the respondents did not believe global warming was happening, or they weren\u2019t sure, or it was caused by something besides human activity. \u201cWe can ask the media to do better reporting,\u201d he said, \u201cbut this is a monumental task.\u201d<\/p>\n The series continues on March 4 with “Climate Policy and Politics: Covering Conflict in the Capitol, Copenhagen and Beyond” and on March 31 with “Techno-Optimism or Pessimism: ‘Fixing’ the Planet’s Climate Problems.” For more information.<\/a> <\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Panelists at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) examined two kinds of climate change during the launch of a new seminar series on Thursday (Feb. 4). The first involved global warming. The second concerned another atmospheric shift: the metamorphosis of communications from professional and specialized to public and diffuse, as print gives way to the Internet, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-282950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282950\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}