The Guardian’s George Monbiot has a thoughtful column this week about the attacks on climate science and how they have widened to take aim at science in general.
The last sentence of his column would seem to aptly sum up the state of public opinion on climate change:
The battle over climate change suggests that the more clearly you spell the problem out, the more you turn people away. If they don’t want to know, nothing and no one will reach them. There goes my life’s work.
This week at the Science Media Centre we featured a panel of scientists talking about this exact issue – climate change fatigue and why the public has grown tired of hearing about the potentially devastating impacts of climate change. What’s their solution? Science, they say, needs to change so that the social element of climate change is better accounted for when the biophysical aspects of the science are discussed.
Sciblogger and climate scientist, Dr Andy Reisinger summed it up well in the local context at a Science Techology and Society (STS) here in Wellington earlier in the week. He said that there is actually precious little research completed to date that looks at potential scenarios for climate change mitigation and adapation in New Zealand beyond 2025. We’ve become so wrapped up in what the climate science is suggesting will happen and trying to gauge the robustness of the science that we haven’t done enough to suggest exactly how these ominous scenarios will actually impact on people.
Businesses such as Zespri are becoming more interested in this as they plan for more sustainable development over the long-term. But business, government and science need to put more emphasis on the social element of climate change scenarios if there is to be the social change that will allow us to tackle climate change.
On the subject of climate change adapation, this Climate Change Research Institute lecture may be of interest to Wellington readers…