Chances are you’ve heard some mention in the media or among government in recent years about the topics of global warming, extreme weather, or climate change. I won’t do scientists the indignity of considering the matter a ‘debate’ much less use this word, because it would imply we’re still at the stage of trying to see if the meter swings one way or the other on this important issue. No, much to the surprise of many, science has developed itself extensively and spoken in great certainty: there is no longer any debate, and global warming and climate change are both real and caused by humans.
So if there’s one post you peek at on the subject today, let it be this one.
I’m going to highlight two major areas relevant to our current types of media exposure: the first will show you, via independently verifiable evidence, why any notion of the media having a ‘debate’ over global warming and climate change is kind of silly, and the second will link you directly to the worldwide resource we’ve been using to disseminate the data and results of evidence-based studies on such topics as well as help form governmental attitudes and policy making.
The thin wedge of denial — in 2012, a review of all peer-reviewed scholarly articles yielded 13,950 scientific papers on global warming and climate change, of which only 24 supported denial. The other 13,926 support worldwide agreement that global warming and climate change exist and are demonstrably caused by human activity.
Any materials we disseminate using major cultural communications tools such as radio and TV leverages a strong force that shapes public opinion. This has long been a known phenomenon and forms the backbone of the reason why it’s a poor choice to give airtime or spend print space on non-rational skepticism. It’s literally trying to reopen debate on something that’s long since been settled.
There’s a sizable gap between the level of agreement in the scientific community versus the general public when it comes to understanding the key issues, which is why it’s all the more important to continue to raise awareness on the seriousness of global warming and its effects. We must not only have a conversation about the risks they bring but also be mindful to share the science behind how we’ve arrived at this conclusion, and in particular, we must make its resultant body of knowledge more readily accessible to all, particularly for those of us who don’t come from a technical background or a highly specialized industrial trade or scientific profession.
This stuff can prove an extraordinarily difficult read for most people, and key to the need to fix science’s PR problem is to speak the language of understanding. Artistic interpretation, infographics, condensed fact sheets, article briefs, public service ads, Youtube videos, and other such tools go a long way toward appealing to peoples’ diverse attention spans, especially in the media heavy and information driven culture of today in which we’re utterly immersed.
Website of IPCC — a worldwide body through which climate science is being advanced, information is being shared between governments, and new advice and solutions on environmental policy are brought forward.
This site is pretty much the gold standard for the state of climate research and governmental direction. Reports are broken down in several ways, with direct access to documents, graphics, and other materials.
So that’s it for now, in a fairly large nutshell.