Communicating climate science

(upbeat music) - Our planet faces unprecedented challenges, and every day we make decisions that will shape the future of our planet. Just consider how we as a public view climate change. Do we understand what is happening? - The most common understanding of science communication is really, how do we help scientists who are creating new bodies of knowledge and new ways of understanding. Scientific topics which are often innately very complex. How do we help them communicate the findings of their research to the general audience? - From our behaviors to the pressing urgency to address changes in our environment, stay tuned as we dive into perceptions of climate change and the role of science communication in addressing these issues head on. So stay tuned for our conversation right after this. - Hi, it's Ken Weitzman, creator and artistic director of Science on Stage at Stony Brook University. This year, we've teamed up with collaborative for the Earth to commission professional playwrights to write plays on climate change research being done at Stony Brook. This live free performance of these plays will be presented this fall. Dates and details will be announced and available on the collaborative for the Earth website. Hope to see you there. - It's another episode of C4E Presents, a podcast from Stony Brook's collaborative for the Earth. I'm Heather Lynch from Science Journalism to Marine Plastics. We're tackling a range of environmental issues right here on campus and we're having exciting conversations with Stony Brook University environmental scholars and researchers about how we can save our planet and scary times. Joining me now is Christine Gilbert, an assistant professor of climate communication at Stony Brook University. You've been looking at how the public understands complex topics such as climate change. So science communication as a field is really broad which is both a blessing and a curse. I think the most common understanding of science communication is really how do we help scientists who are creating new bodies of knowledge and new ways of understanding scientific topics which are often innately very complex? How do we help them communicate the findings of their research to a general audience? So oftentimes science communication scholars sometimes think of themselves as homeless as interpreters but we're taking this really advanced complex scientific information and we're not delving it down but we're breaking it apart. We're using an analogies or we're using examples as a way to help people understand the science that's happening right? Because at least in the United States perspective much of our basic science research is funded through taxpayer money. As of to some extent, I certainly would make this argument probably many science communication scholars would make this argument that science is a public good and so the public deserves and really should be afforded the opportunity to understand the science that maybe doesn't necessarily have a direct impact on their life but then we also can think of many examples where new cancer treatment is coming out or new diagnostic technology for medical conditions which has a very direct impact on every day people's lives and so it's really a service to help people understand things that may make their lives better and easier. And science communication is also so it's this idea right kind of the hierarchy taking from scientists and kind of bringing the information to the public but it's also too about a lot of my research from an interdisciplinary perspective is also helping scientists from other disciplines talk to each other. We all have a scientist's advanced training and sometimes we're using words or language. It is so common in our everyday speech to each other for people within our discipline but that is very inaccessible for people who are outside of it. So science communication is also looking at scientists to scientists and so I guess you can kind of boil it down to science communication is helping as many communication disciplines are is helping facilitate better understanding between individuals between individuals and a large group and so it really permeates. There are science communication scholars working on all sorts of different topics from scientists to a broad audience whether it's through social media as well as people working on things like patient provider communication where it's one on one and it's really focused on making sure that the information of patients is receiving makes sense and is something that's actionable. So that's a long-winded way of dining like that kind of science communication at least how I kind of think about it and in my day to day work when I'm doing. So how are things trending when it comes to the public's understanding of climate change? Because all this focus that we've had lately on improving science communication does it seem to be working in terms of the public's understanding of these issues? I do things I want to say to that. The first is that from a public perception standpoint we know that over time understanding or acceptance of climate change is something that is happening and something that is man made has increased right. We now have more I think the numbers are anywhere between 65 and 75% of Americans believe that human cause climate change is happening. And so from a science communication perspective that would suggest that maybe there has been some success in terms of informing people what climate change is, why we know it's happening, how we can address it. But there's a caveat to that, which is that in climate communication research the evidence is quite clear that knowledge in other words having this really well-versed understanding of climate change is actually not that predictive of behaviors like taking a bike to work or purchasing an electric far as your next vehicle are installing solar panels in your house. The variables that we typically see that are actually much more predictive of people's climate change-related attitudes and their behaviors are oftentimes things like social norms. So are the people in their lives also responding to climate change and as well as personal experience. And so while knowledge in and of itself is not often the most important variable, I think an increasing acceptance of climate change is a topic that is happening or as an event that is happening and that is human cause. Does actually predict these kind of increasing pressure of social norms because so many other people are talking about it and thinking about it. So I do think hasn't brewed, but I think it's also just as more and more people accept climate change as an event as a topic, there's more pressure, there's more social norms. And so we kind of see this almost kind of runaway effect where it will hopefully accelerate. And we certainly, when we look at younger generations, we know that this right there entire lives, they have lived in an environment that is seemingly 100-year storms every couple of years. And so at what point does the science communication basically then become an exercise in marketing? And it really maybe is drifted from actually being about the science at all. So I mean, from a communication as a discipline perspective, it would be a pretty standard definition of communication to talk about persuasion. In other words, it's hard to talk about communication without talking about persuasion, whether that's marketing, so getting you to purchase a service or a good. And so I think I don't know that I would see them as mutually exclusive to this idea of science communication or marketing. I think there's probably some overlap. I think your point about, I think it's fair to say we're seeing this in the literature. And we're kind of shifting away from focusing only on the communication of knowledge and focusing on communication of knowledge within a bigger package, right? Within a package that says, hey, you're using this much water consumption on a regular basis. Did you know that you're actually doing better than your neighbors, right? So we're starting to see kind of narratives that are being used. But again, I don't see that the technique of applying things that are maybe more common in a marketing perspective. I don't think that negates science communication. We don't need everyone to be a PhD in climate science in order to have their behaviors and attitudes changed. Oftentimes things that are related to knowledge is a very. You know, when I think about science communication, a lot of the people doing this work are in a school of journalism. And I know that you have a role here. And I'm so always surprised that how much that science journalism seems to be about journalists who identify themselves as journalists first and foremost that happen to be on the science beat. And there's a much rarer path for scientists to move into science journalism. And so I'm kind of curious whether that perception is a reality and whether there's a reason for that. Like is it easier to pick up the science than it would be for scientists to pick up the tools of journalism? Like why is it so asymmetric in terms of who's working in this space? I should probably preface anything I'm going to say with. I have no data or evidence to support any of the claims I'm going to make. You know, I was listening to a podcast yesterday from WNYC and one of the reporters has a PhD, I think, in a pathobiology. And so there are certainly examples or even some, you know, I know some reporters who work for a radio lab who did this science to journalism pipeline. What's interesting when you kind of phrase the question like that is there are many similarities between being a scientist and being a journalist, right? This search for objectivity, this idea of trying to understand the fundamental basics of either, you know, why a crime happened or why science is this phenomenon is happening. So I imagine, right, I imagine part of it could be just kind of the legacy of academia, right? The ideas you go, you get an undergrad, you get a master's, you get a PhD and you forever remain in this ivory tower where you're doing research. I think sometimes there are scientists out there who think that their science is important for the sake of science and I certainly would not be gay that. But again, I think I go back to this idea that I think that's a great, I think that's a great question. I would, you know, maybe a journalist or historian or someone would have a better sense. It's really interesting. Do you have any thoughts about that? Yeah, I mean, I guess I, I worry that the act of getting a PhD actually makes it difficult for people to communicate clearly. Like the type of communication that you would learn as a PhD actually moves you backwards. I know that Stony Brook University has particular programs to take scientists and to turn them into science journalists and so maybe fighting against that, that tide. But the issues that we're dealing with with climate in particular are so technical and very nuanced that we may need to see a bit more flow between them than necessarily having people that happen to report on climate, you know, climate in particular maybe requiring a lot of domain knowledge where people might have to spend their careers in that space as opposed to it being one of many things on which they might be reporting. Related to this idea about how difficult it is to work in the space, I know that you've recently looked into the attribution of blame and crises, particularly in environmental crises. And I was looking at your paper and in your paper, you're one of your recent papers, you distinguish between these two terms blame and attribution that I think in common parlance or used interchangeably, but they have slightly different connotations. And when I was reading this, it occurs to me that the difference between them seems very central to how nation states are moving forward on the issue of climate change, particularly with regards to this idea of loss of damages, you know, that some countries are more responsible for climate change and they should compensate countries that are less responsible but feeling the greatest impacts. So I'm curious what you think about this distinction between blame and attribution as far as climate change goes and how do science communicators wrestle with that fairly nuanced point? - The soon as we start to think about blame and attribution rate, I think part of the challenge that we are seeing, and certainly part of the challenge between kind of blame and attribution and what these technical terms mean is if someone accepts responsibility for something, what are they now liable to pay? I haven't really looked into blame or attribution, but it's a really interesting thing to me from a communication perspective, because if we can understand who people are blaming, I would rate the argument that based on that kind of communication either that they're having in their head or if they're having some type of interaction with another individual or posting something on social media, we can kind of get a better idea of how they are conceptualizing this topic of climate change. One of the things that makes me think of too with blame and attribution is kind of this idea of like the cognitive versus the emotional side of things and I think within certainly climate communication research for many years, we were so focused, we are so heavily focused on the cognitive perspective, right? Can I tell you how many polar bears will die? And if I use a certain term, is that gonna be the three net triggers versus if I'm trying to trigger an emotion that may be more effective or appealing? And I mean, words are powerful, right? That's part of the reason I became a communication scholar is I think words really matter. So I think, yeah, although I'm torn on this and you know, in that there was a story in the New York Times magazine last weekend about exactly this idea that, you know, maybe there are ways to get to solutions without just rehashing the blame and attribution part. You know, we could change the way we talk about these issues. And on the other hand, I wonder to what extent we are, I guess not being straight with the populace in some sense that if we avoid using terms that we think of as triggering people's reflexive defensiveness in some sense that we are, as scientists that we are self censoring ourselves in a way that's not true to the science. So I don't know how you think about maybe balancing that. - My silly answer would be it depends, which is always true and never helpful. - From a communication perspective, I think maybe, I think I am less married to a term because to me, I think so much of like my academic discipline was like, it's the, you know, communication is a process, right? It's all about kind of making incremental improvements in order to have some type of outcome that you want. And so to me, I think my kind of, you know, biased reaction maybe that I need to sit with a little bit is like, well, just change the word. The outcome is what we want it to be. But I think your point, and this is kind of some of the criticism too of science communication is to what extent are we dumbing down the science? And I think science is often innately very complex. That doesn't mean that you can't bring someone along on the journey with you, right? It doesn't mean that you can't help them understand some fundamentals over time, right? That's that's the thing I try to stress to my students as well as like, if you have a family member or someone who is in in favor of a COVID vaccine or isn't in favor of, doesn't believe in human cause climate change, you are not going to change their opinion in one session and one Thanksgiving dinner, right? It is about continued communication over time. And so I think sometimes if we want to continue using certain terms, I think that's fine. I think it mandates the more engagement and interaction over time. Then if we choose to use a different term, we don't have to do as much legwork in terms of kind of mitigating that initial reaction, right? And so I think it's both our useful tools, both have downsides as well as pros. - Yeah, no, I totally get this idea that it's not gonna be that one conversation and I'm reminded I just came back from the Antarctic a couple of weeks ago and one of the things I love about working in the Antarctic is that I work on commercial cruise ships and so we get the full spectrum of people on these ships. They are not self-selected for their environmental passion and there are a lot of people that are quite skeptical about climate change. And I was standing on the beach, waiting to go back for the boat and there was this couple there from Houston, Texas and I can't remember how we got talking about it, but we started talking about climate change and the husband was clearly quite skeptical about man-made climate change and he said something to the effect of is, so you're telling me that all the snow I see all around here is gonna just disappear and I was like, no, you know, not at all and it was a chance to explain that the changes that we see while fast on geological time scales, you know, are slow on human time scales and there will still be a lot of snow and that doesn't mean that climate change isn't happening and it was just maybe five minutes and you know, I don't think that he walked away, you know, having completely changed his views but I realized that it was, I sensed that it was an important conversation for him because I think that he was clearly sort of both skeptical but open to understanding the climate issues better and so I don't know, I kind of imagine that maybe it cracked a door open through which other people will walk sometime, you know, in the future in his life but it did, I think it was hard for him in that moment just being surrounded by snow and ice to think that the Antarctic was actually warming up and, you know, so I enjoy that part about working on the cruise ships. What did the, you know, in this case, I was talking to a husband and wife and it was clear that they did have, they were in different places, I think, with regards to their feelings about man-made climate change and I know that you have looked at these gender differences and maybe you could speak to just how do men and women gather and interpret information differently when it comes to crises and how does gender come into play in terms of people's receptiveness to climate change in particular? - Yeah, that's a good question. I also, just to kind of circle back, I want to applaud you for that interaction you had. I think that can be really challenging so I just, like, it's, I truly think those interactions are so powerful and I just, like, that is, couldn't have been a better example of communication that you don't necessarily see the outcome of but you know it's important in the moment so that is wonderful, Heather, I think that's incredible. So there's this phenomenon in crisis and risk communication literature which is kind of raising things of kind of climate change is kind of a small circle and then with, you know, you kind of zoom out a little bit within that climate change I think of it is sitting within crisis and risk communication because climate change is both a crisis that we're kind of undergoing but we also see these different events and storms that I would consider risks. And so there's this phenomenon called the white male effect and it's where we see, you know, decades of research about risk communication we see that men tend to have lower risk perceptions than women meaning if a hurricane is coming we survey men and women in different households men tend to have lower perceptions of risk related to that event and women do and then we also see that white people in general tend to have lower risk perceptions than people of color. Similar thing, a hurricane is coming we survey people where white people of color we would see that those means are much lower for white people. Potentially if it were the case and I think it's reasonable to suggest that women with children, right? Maybe asking a meteorologist to mention closures of schools or to mention evacuation routes where there are frequent West rest stops of children you to go to the bathroom, right? That can be a relatively easy fix that can help address what we know is probably underlying an elevated risk perception by women. Now it's not 100% clear why this is happening. - You might not know the answer to this but I'm curious if there are approaching hurricanes you know you got the husband and the wife let's say and they have different risk perceptions and they have to make a decision about whether to evacuate do they have to wait for the man to believe that they should leave in order to leave or is it tend to be that in some sense the woman is the one who's driving that decision because I know there had been some other research that you know on health risk and how women are often driving the train even for their husband's health but I don't know who ends up being the decision maker in that and that I guess would play into how the information about whether to evacuate an area should be pitched at the husband or at the wife it's like who's probably more likely to be the decider? - Enteres into kind of more interpersonal communication so what does that dialogue look like? I mean I that would be so interesting to look at. - I guess the way to tackle it it would seem is if you were to go to evacuation shelters for example you know and perhaps survey families on it's like they had made the decision to evacuate you know it's kind of like post retrospectively was there a worker who wanted to evacuate you know who made the decision? Who pushed to evacuate? 'Cause I could see that the marketing to convince the husband to evacuate might be different than the wife in those cases. So it would just be interesting to you know to know who makes that decision. You had mentioned racial differences and maybe you could just cycle back to that in terms of what the racial differences are in terms of risk perception and how that plays into some of these same issues. - The evidence in terms of kind of why we think this is happening is at least in the US context right? We know that there have been decades of marginalization of people of color and so it tends to be the risk, risk perceptions are higher for people who are people of color simply because they don't have the same access to resources that white people do right. If if there is some type of event they simply don't have the same access to money or to capital or even to the ability to evacuate, right? And that's kind of a really terrible tension is that I can be so concerned about the hurricane that's coming but I literally don't have the money or the resources or the ability to evacuate an area. And so from a communication perspective I would probably make the argument that the communication there is maybe a little bit less important than creating infrastructure that helps support the most vulnerable among us. And I certainly think thinking about like hurricane Katrina I think that was really kind of a beacon of everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, right? People were standing on their homes because they literally could not evacuate. Not because they didn't want to but because they didn't have the resources. And so I think at least in the US and I imagine this is probably true for many other countries is a crisis or a risk. You really can't separate it from the day-to-day life of being a person of color in the US in that those same biases and prejudices and decades of marginalization, right? It is still gonna appear no matter if there's a hurricane or some other type of wildfire, things like that. - So in all your work I'm curious whether you're hopeful or more optimistic or more pessimistic about our ability to actually do something about climate change and what role do you see communication playing in that? Like what do we need to figure out to actually keep ourselves from, you know, more than a two degree change in temperature? - I think probably like many of us and I would love to hear your thoughts on this as well. I certainly vacillate I think between the two. I think overwhelmingly, you know, more often than not I feel optimistic. You know, I spoke, I must have been a family member over Christmas or something where I was kind of talking about, you know, we have actually made some incredible progress in terms of staving off, you know, four degrees or five degrees or six degrees Celsius in terms of warming, right? Some of the changes that we have made have been really, really robust, but there is this concern in communication as well as I think scientists who get concerned about if we talk too much about our successes, does that negate anyone's, this feeling of urgency that we need to continue to address climate change? And so I think that is attention that is really tricky, but I think it is attention that we should do our best to get right. I certainly think scientists journalists are kind of on the forefront of this in the sense of that they write these really, you know, these really in depth pieces about climate change effects of whether it's sea, sea ice melting or it's warming in the ocean. And then I have noticed that they tend to have sections within the article that talk a little bit about like, what can you do? And I think that is a balance that we need to strike, but that sometimes I can come off as disingenuous. So I think I have hope, the gallery generation certainly gives me a lot of hope. This is something that they just don't seem to have any lack of understanding of. It's something they grew up with. I always ask my students and my classes, you know, when did you first learn about climate change and has started this move from middle school to elementary school now? But I think there is a lot of work to be done, but I'm hopeful that we can also talk about our successes as a way to motivate us to continue to move forward. Because I think if we just sit in kind of the darkness and the pending doom, I don't think that helps drive behavior. But you know, that's certainly easier said than done. I mean, you were recently in an article. Did you feel like you came back from the trip more optimistic pessimistic? Yeah. No, I always come back more pessimistic. And I think that the challenge for me is that even when you have people on board the ships that are passionate about the environment, they are on a ship in the middle of the Antarctic, which means honestly, they couldn't be that concerned about the environment because they wouldn't have gotten on a plane to get down to Antarctica and they wouldn't be on a cruise ship in the middle of the Antarctic, they would have stayed home. And so the environmental footprint of the industry concerns me greatly and it's hard to meet a reconcile sometimes. People stated interest in protecting the environment and how that is at odds with their day-to-day activities. And quite honestly, I see this hypocrisy first and foremost among academic environmentalists and ecologists that will think nothing of, you know, flying to the other side of the globe for a meeting to talk about the impact of climate change. And so while I totally agree that we cannot address these problems or that huge systematic change and that industries and governments will have to make the major choices to save us from this fate, I worry that we've moved too far away from the agency provided to individuals that just because we cannot have the, you know, we don't have the biggest lever in the system does not absolve us of some responsibility towards our individual activities. And so this balance between individual responsibility and sort of corporate governmental responsibility is something that I wrestle with, the how much should we, you know, do we as individuals get a pass just because our own sphere is so small. But I'm not particularly optimistic and I though you're completely correct that the next generation has grown up in, you know, sort of in this soup of climate change discussion. There's also this shifting baseline's problem, which is that they don't know what normal weather looks like. And I worry that they won't know that it used to snow heavily on Long Island. They might not know that, you know, the things that we take for granted now, like Lyme disease and, you know, all the ways in which climate change can manifest itself, they will just assume it's always been there. So there's also this shifting baseline's concern that they won't feel the urgency that we do 'cause we grew up in a very different environment. - Yeah, that's a great point. I was having a conversation with someone about that kind of yesterday or flight. - A winter storm now means rain. And for us who have experienced a winter storm of snow, it feels but these kids, I mean, yeah, that I think that's a great, it will be very interesting to see as more and more generations are born into kind of this environment. Are there experiences that for them indicate climate change? In other words, right, I could foresee a five year older, a six year older, a seven year old experience in the wildfires in New York City and knowing what New York City looks like on a regular basis and that feeling very, very scared. That's why, and again, it's a little bit of a, within crisis and risk, it's kind of this dicey line we walk of being like an event like the wildfires who look as excellent for research, but it's terrible from a humanity perspective, right? So it's, I don't want to say we should have more events like that, but we do know from an empirical perspective that experience with extreme weather events, however you wanted to find that does tend to be really, really persuasive and changing attitudes in ultimately painful. - Yeah, well, there is just so much work to do and so much that we could talk about. But you've been generous with your time and I really appreciate this. And all of this is so important to what the collaborative for the earth is trying to do and some of the interdisciplinary approaches that we're trying to take to solving environmental problems. So I really appreciate the time and for you joining us today for the podcast. - Thanks, Heather, appreciate it. - That was Christine Gilbert, a professor of climate communication at Stony Brook University. To learn more about her research, you can go to her profile under people at stonybrook.edu/somas. I'm Heather Lynch. That's a wrap on another episode of C4E Presents. We aim to bring you closer to the heart of environmental issues with interviews from Stony Brook scholars, shedding light on the state of our planet and actionable solutions for climate change. To listen to all of our episodes, go to stonybrook.edu/c4e/podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. In our next episode, I'll be chatting with Kevin Reed who helps lead Stony Brook's involvement in the New York climate exchange. Until next time.