20130816_SC
Source: ScienceOnline
URL: http://scienceonline.com/live/?id=80
Date: 16/08/2013
Event: Mann and Kahan at ScioClimate event
Credit: ScienceOnline
People:
- Dr. Tom Armstrong: Director of National Coordination, U.S. Global Change Research Program
- Dr. Dan Kahan: Professor of Law, Professor of Psychology, Yale Law School
- Dr. Michael Mann: Professor Michael: Climatologist, director of the Earth System Science Center, Pennsylvania State University
- Liz Neeley: Assistant Director, Science Outreach
- Karyn Traphagen: Executive Director, ScienceOnline
[Transcript of ScioClimate Fri Plenary.]
Karyn Traphagen: [Welcome to?] Day 2 of ScienceOnline Climate. Day 1 was full [?] from Andy Revkin's keynote yesterday morning, including his guitar performance, to the live premier of Daniel Crawford's cello performance "A Song of Our Warming Planet". We've been talking about climate, communication and the web. Between the sessions provided opportunities for all of you to participate with questions, discussions, ideas and challenges. As I walked around, during the breaks, I could hear the conversations continuing, new relationships developing - this is exactly the spirit of ScienceOnline.
I want to extend a special ScienceOnline welcome to those who are just joining us today, and, as I mentioned yesterday, our programme is designed to focus on conversation, not presentation. It's you, the attendees, who bring the content and make the discussion move forward, so we're so glad that you're here today. The moderator's role, again, is to frame the topic and to keep the conversation moving, to help us stay focussed and move forward.
And I just want to remind everyone, again, that the content and opinions that we express in each session may not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of the moderator. But please do remember that we're counting on you to fully participate and to drive - dive into the conversations.
Very visible yesterday, hopefully to many of you, was our inclusion of art at ScienceOnline Climate. We can see that Perrin Ireland, who's in the corner here today scribing for us, has been live-scribing - many of the sessions in her boards from yesterday are on display in the lobby area, and we'll continue to put those out there, we'll put them online. Daniel Crawford with his cello performance, Michele Banks's session on art and communicating with art, and later today Ben Lillie's going to be talking about leading a session on "How can Arts and Entertainment Contribute?"
Much of the inclusion of the arts also fits within the context of David Bend's session yesterday about "Making the Invisible Visible". Well, that session, focussed on technology, had the same goal of some of the arts sessions, in that it's trying to find ways to connect people with data - that's often a difficult task.
So [stepping forward from behind the lectern] this dress that I'm wearing today is an example of that. This, um, brings together the vision and designs of Valerie Dumaine with the innovative concepts in open-culture philosophy of Creative Commons advocate Celine Semaan - she's the founder of slowfactory.com, and they're using fashion to connect data with the public. And Celine is passionate about making this publicly available data, the datasets, more accessible to the public in these very creative ways. This image is from the MODIS or Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, and that's a key instrument on the Terra satellite - the Terra satellite and its twin the, um, Aqua MODIS view the entire Earth's surface, every one to two days. And from this data we're able to improve our understanding of global dynamics and the processes that are occurring on the surface and low atmosphere.
You can read more about this on their website - it's MODIS - M-O-D-I-S-dot-G-S-F-C - that's Goddard Space Flight Center - dot-NASA-dot-gov. And some of you, who'll be going on the NASA field trip tomorrow, will be going to the very location where some of this technology is put together.
So, I have a few little housekeeping details and then we're going to move on. I would like to give my great thanks to Climate Nexus, who's been helping us with livestreaming - Daniel Turner has been working very closely with us to make this available to people who are not able to be here, and also to you as an archive, so that you'll be able to see it later. I chose to wear this dress today because the images of Greenland and tonight we'll be screening, at the AGU headquarters, near the Dupont neighbourhood, we'll be screening the movie Chasing Ice. Now we hope that you will join us for that, it's 7:30 tonight, and many of us will be heading over there after our final session here today. There's still some room for sign-ups on the field trips, so we've got those field-trip lists out on the orange table in the lobby. In your programs there's descriptions of those field trips and we hope that you'll take that opportunity to be with your colleagues and explore some of the, er, inner city.
And, finally, your cellphones. While we're very happy that there's been so much activity on social media, I want to remind you to keep them out but to silence them, and to be putting them on vibrate. I know you're anxious to begin, and today's journey is going to hopefully be as exciting as yesterday's, so I want to turn over the stage to Liz Neeley.
Liz Neeley: Thank you, Karyn. Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Liz Neeley, I'm the Assistant Director of Science Outreach, with a group called Compass, and our task is to help scientists find their voices, to help them build communication skills, and then, most importantly, to build relationships with scientists and journalists. So it's a particular pleasure for me to be here today. I'm talking and moderating this plenary session on credibility, trust, goodwill and persuasion, when it comes to climate communication. And, as you heard Karyn telling you about ScienceOnline, and as many of you lived yesterday, ScienceOnline - the core, the heart and soul of it - is discussions. And so I had originally posed this as one of our breakout sessions, but because it's such a fascinating and important topic, we decided to elevate it to a plenary. And I'm particularly proud and excited to have that conversation with the guests that we have with us today.
So, to my left, we have Dr. Dan Kahan, who is the Elizabeth K Dollard Professor of Law and also Professor of Psychology at Yale Law School. His primary research interests, for those of you who might not know him - at least, for the moment - are risk perception, science communication and the application of decision science to law and to policymaking. He's a member of the Cultural Cognition Project, which you might be familiar with, and that's his Twitter handle actually - it's @cult_cognition - and this is an interdisciplinary group of scholars who use empirical methods to examine the impact of group values, right? - on perceptions of risk and related facts. So this is how our tribal identities shape the way that we process information.
Prior to coming to Yale, Dr. Kahan was on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School, and he also served as a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall of the US Supreme Court. And he also served as a clerk to Judge Harry Edwards of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He has a variety of interesting personal facts that you might want to draw out of him in conversation later today, especially those of you who are runners or cat people in the room. [Laughter.] But one of my favourite things that we discovered, as we were prepping for this session is: you heard Andy Revkin yesterday play the song about Liberated Carbon, and you heard Jamie mention that Andy has played backup for Pete Seeger. Well, Dan was actually inducted into the American Academy for Arts and Sciences along with Pete Seeger this year.
And, speaking of trust in government, I thought I'd play you just a little clip of Time Capsule... No? Actually, no, before we do that, I wanted to give a little more context for the day and the setup - my apologies, you guys. Um, this session was motivated, in part, not just "What are we doing?" but "Why?" and "How?" And many of you have been involved in these online discussions with Dr. Tamsin Edwards - she wrote a commentary piece in the Guardian recently - you can see the title here - and this breakout quote was very important. She said "I believe advocacy by scientists has damaged their credibility and eroded trust", right? And these conversations are very central to the ScienceOnline community, and in fact, Alice Bell was the person who commissioned this piece for the Guardian, David Wescott was one of the first bloggers picking up reacting to it, and in fact we continue to see these discussions going on even today - Michael Tobis has a long piece on social science, public understanding of science, and the [inaudible.]
I know that we've also been talking about this, as a group, in our sessions and breakout sessions yesterday, and I pulled some of the tweets so you can see these. You know... This was the bit about "Do we have a moral obligation to reach out, to engage?" [Screen shows tweet from Carina Barnett-Loro], "How does this dynamic of our responsibility to do something with our knowledge play against the consequences that may have for public trust in us?", right? "Should we be distinguishing between advocating for science and advocating for policy?" [screen shows tweet from Michael Halpern.]This resonates with me, but then the question comes up: "Do general members of the public also make this distinction?" [screen shows tweet from "Sci Curious"] - and we're thinking maybe, maybe they do, maybe they don't.
So, now back to Dan. You've heard his introduction. Here's the Pete Seeger clip.
Pete Seeger [sings an excerpt from Tom Paxton's "What Did You Learn in School Today?"]:
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned our government must be strong.
It's always right and never wrong.
Our leaders are the finest men.
And we elect them again and again.
That's what I learned in school today.
That's what I learned in school.
Liz Neeley: So, a bit of pointed political commentary from 1964, to get us started. I just want to say I'm really looking forward to the discussion we have here today, to be able to delve into difficult issues, to have differences of opinion, but to do it in a space where we can be constructive.
Speaking of people who are comfortable with conflict and stirring the pot [audience laughter] ...
Tom Armstrong [to Michael Mann]: That's you.
Liz Neeley: Dr. Michael Mann - Mike is the Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State University, where he's also the Director of the Earth Systems Science Center. You may - may - know him as the lead author on the Observed Climate Variability and Climate [sic] chapter of the IPCC Third Scientific Assessment Report in 2001. He contributed, with other IPCC authors, to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. And 500 co-recipients of... ?
Michael Mann: At least.
Liz Neeley: At least. Um, he was awarded the Hans Oeschger Medal for the European Geosciences Union in 2012, and the National Conservation Achievement Award for Science by the National Wildlife Federation in 2013. He's a Fellow, both with AGU And the American Meteorology Society, and - how many publications do you think he has? Ballpark... Numbers... Guess... A couple of - 160, more than 160 peer-reviewed and edited publications. Two books, including Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming and The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. He is also the co-founder and contributor to the award-winning science website RealClimate.org.
And finally, it's my pleasure to introduce you to Thomas Armstrong, who joined the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as the Director of National Coordination for the US Global Change Research Program in March 2011. Tom has a list of accolades in leadership that is as long as my arm - you can see this, and I'll give you a few choice ones. He previously served as the Department of the Interior's Senior Advisor for Climate Change. He served as the Vice-Chair for Adaptation Science on the CENRS Subcommittee on Global Change, and was the Principal for the Department of the Interior to the United States Global Change Research Program. He also has been Senior Advisor to the Global Change Program at the US Geological Society. He was the lead for the Department of the Interior at the World Climate Conference, the United States Head of Delegation for the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program. And I could continue to go on and on, but I think we will just dive straight into discussion.
So what I've asked each of these guys to do is give us remarks on the order of 5-7 minutes. They're probably going to go to 7... [Some laughter.] When Mike sent me a deck of about 20 slides, I got a little bit nervous. When Dan sent me a deck of 42 slides, then I thought he might just be trolling me. So we have money riding on [inaudible] today. So they'll each be giving you, sort of, a little piece of perspective, where they're coming from, and I asked them to take - give you two talk lines. First, what is it they want you to leave here understanding, their main message. And then also what don't they have answered to you. [?] What are the conversations they want to have, or the unresolved issues that we face, as a group. So, Dan. Are you ready?
Dan Kahan: Don't start the clock... Um... Is there anybody out there, who also wants to supply me with an hour, that will really help people to understand... [inaudible.] [Audience laughter.]
[Apologies, the sound quality is not great, while Dan Kahan is speaking, so the following is an approximation and may not be accurate.]
Okay, well, thank you very much. Er... I'll just get right to it. Um... Let's see. Where do I place...? Okay. Um... So, I want to talk about, er, the contribution that trust makes to public recognition of the best available science, um, on climate change. And I'm going to make three points about that. But I'm not going to tell you about that right away, 'cause whenever I just tell people about studies ... [inaudible.] This study is not about climate change - it's about the HPV vaccine. The human papillomavirus is an extremely prevalent sexually transmitted disease - it's the only cause, actually, of cervical cancer, and the FDA-approved vaccination made in 2006 only for women and the CDC proposed that it should be put onto the schedule of vaccinations, childhood vaccinations - kids get it before they get to middle school - only girls - and it was extremely controversial. Even though every state, essentially, ended up considering a proposal to make mandatory vaccinations [inaudible], only one, a Virginian [inaudible], actually adopted the proposal for mandatory vaccination.
And so we did a study. We were interested in trying to figure out: is this controversy one that reflects some kind of a distrust in scientists, right? What we did was we looked at how people's perceptions of the risk of HPV vaccine relate to what we call their cultural world views, just their preferences for how society should be organised. And we used these two cross-cutting dimensions - how individualistic, how communitarian, how hierarchical, how egalitarian - and we found that people with more hierarchical and individualistic their traditional values about gender, and, you know, why the government is telling them what to do, and more sceptical about the risks. People who were more egalitarian and communitarian - they think that the risks outweigh the benefits.
But that's a really small effect. I mean, it was among people who we didn't give any information, maybe they knew something about this and [inaudible] the controversy. We also took another group of subjects and we gave them some balanced information, some scientific information about what people thought the benefits would be and at least what some of the possible risks might be. And that ended up actually generating even more polarisation, and people kept picking out pieces of information that [matched] their previous position and disregarding the rest.
But the next thing we did was summarising [?] these positions, these arguments to what we call culturally identifiable advocates. They're fictional, but we had another pretest where people would look at these pictures. "What do you think this person would say about [?]?" And we were able to locate them on this, kind of, framework that we were using for these [inaudible] culturally identifiable advocates. We assigned positions to them, and now we were asking another group of people "What do you think about the benefits and risks?"
And it turns out that people's perceptions then about the benefits and risks are highly conditional on the fit between their cultural [?] values and the perceived values of the advocate that they're hearing - it's the public health advocates, we're telling people. So if you get the argument that we can see a predisposed based on the other conditions except coming from the advocate, we would predict that you would see tacitly as most like you. And you can see the argument about the HPV vaccine that's coming from the advocate that we would predict, and this [inaudible]... That maximises and increases the polarisation. But if you flip things around, now you're getting the position you would have been predisposed to reject but it's coming from the expert - all these contradictions [inaudible]. And the position you are predisposed to reject - to accept - coming from this other person, that turns things around, right?
Now, here's the point. Three points, okay? First, members of the public do trust scientists, on this issue, right. They actually gave more weight to what the scientists said than to their own predisposition. But members of the opposing culture groups - they don't really [inaudible] shudder, right. At least, if they think that well: "There's some kind of issue here that puts my status at risk", that the HPV vaccine was understood to be a kind of contest between opposing cultural groups with different understandings of sexual [inaudible] authority. When that happens, when the facts become entabled [?] in opposing cultural meanings, it isn't that people don't trust scientists, it's that they become confused and polarised about what the scientists are actually saying. Okay?
Now, I started out showing you something with HPV vaccine, but this is generalised, you know, all kinds of issues like this, all right, including climate change. Here's another study we did on scientific consensus, right, and here we looked at people's understandings of what scientists think about gun control and about environmental risks. We know we [inaudible] but we also know that there are expert consensus reports in the National Academy of Science [inaudible]. And we asked people "Do you think that these people are experts?" They have really sterling credentials - one of them went to a really amazing school, and was trained [inaudible] the same person as Michael Mann [inaudible]. [Audience laughter.] The National Academy of Science, right. But here, instead of saying that the people were arguing with each other, [inaudible] unpack the subjects - "This scientist took this position, a high-risk [?] position on this issue - climate change is low-risk, it's not a concern", similar on the concealed nuclear waste, something that concealed [?]-wise.
And what we're finding is that when people ask "Is this an expert? Somebody who you should give some attention to?", their answer depends very strongly on whether their position that we're attributing to an expert matches the one that corresponds to the position that - a really big effect size is how much more likely is one [inaudible], case one position versus the other. Right?
So, none of them are very good at this, by the way - all [inaudible] 50% on what the scientific consensus is. But this is what they're doing - they end up polarised on the scientific consensus, [inaudible] by sampling. They only recognise somebody as an expert if the person takes the position that dominates in their group. And they end up very polarised, on these kinds of issues, right.
Now, the last thing is: this is not normal, okay. The number of issues that are like this is small, relative to the number of ones that aren't like this. And, just to give you an idea, there's the HPV vaccine controversy - HBV, hepatitis C vaccine, right, [inaudible] disease - no controversy, right. And during the period where there's all this conflict, 92%, 93%, - these are the uptake rates, vaccination rates - 30% for HPV vaccine. Why? What's the difference? What's contained in the [inaudible] that the other isn't? [Inaudible] people trusting science, and their groups don't even disagree. So what you want to do, right - avoid getting issues onto this map of entanglement, remove them if they are. Right?
Because you want people to not have the distrust of their group, [inaudible] what they want science to be. How do we do that? I guess I'm out of time. [Audience laughter.] You'll have to ask me, during questions. But you see, people do trust scientists, and they don't trust other people. Was the issue what they were debating about? What [inaudible] do relevant? I mean, I'd say, this research suggests it's not.
Right? Okay. I can't tell you what this experiment would actually solve [inaudible].
Michael Mann: I think you won your $10,000.
Liz Neeley: I know... So, I won the money, on -
Dan Kahan: Well, I was up here and moving very fast, so actually the time was slower than it appears. [Audience laughter.]
Tom Armstrong: That's due to the curvature of the Earth...
[Michael Mann goes to the podium.]
Michael Mann: Okay. [Looking at slide]. Nice cat. [Audience laughs.] So, as some of you know, I have a somewhat unique perspective, when it comes to the - sort of - battle over climate change and the communication of climate change. I became a rather reluctant - or initially rather reluctant - participant in this battle, when I published a curve - actually, a decade and a half ago, now - so-called Hockey Stick, which demonstrates that modern warming is unprecedented in a long-term context. It became a sort of a lightning rod in the climate-change debate, and that inserted me into the centre of the larger public fray over climate change and what to do about it.
So I'm going to tell a very short version of my longer story, as told in my book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. And the first point that I want to make here is that this isn't really a battle over science - the scientific case is actually very clear. There is a well-established consensus - the National Academy of Sciences, the national academies of all the major industrial nations, 30 - more than 30 - different scientific societies in the US - all on record, climate change is real, it's caused by us, it represents a threat if we don't do something about it.
So what this really is, is a battle, it's a proxy battle - no pun intended - over policy. And there are powerful vested interests who, understandably, don't want to see us shift our reliance away from fossil fuels, because they profit from that, from what George W Bush called our "addiction" to fossil fuels.
And in a memo - some of you may be familiar with the Luntz Memo from 2002 - sort of betrayed the agenda, the strategy, where Frank Luntz, Republican pollster, was advising clients, basically fossil fuel interests, that there was a closing window of opportunity. The public was becoming convinced that there is a scientific consensus surrounding climate change, and if they were to become convinced that there is a consensus, they would demand action.
But what he essentially said is: you need to act now, you need to create confusion, you need to generate uncertainty in the public mindset. You need to make the public think that there isn't a scientific consensus - that's the only way that you're going to be able to prevent policies from being enacted to regulate carbon emissions. And so that's what fossil fuel interests, and front-group that represent their interests, did - they spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a massive disinformation campaign, to cloud the public understanding of climate change and the threat that it represents.
And so we have powerful politicians like James Inhofe, the senior Senator of the hottest State ever, as of two summers ago - Oklahoma became the hottest State any State has ever been. And that summer, James Inhofe was continuing to claim that climate change is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.
In fact, he would have made that argument at the annual climate-change denial conference of the Heartland Institute. He'd been invited to be the keynote speaker, here in Washington DC, just about two years ago, at the annual conference of the Heartland Institute. He had to cancel out at the last minute.
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