20140514_EU

Source: University of Exeter

URL: http://echo360.exeter.ac.uk:8080/ess/echo/presentation/efc6701f-1727-4f96-9b92-708a41088cd5

Date: 16/05/2014

Event: Julia Slingo: climate communication "through art, through music, through poetry, whatever..."

Credit: University of Exeter

People:

Professor Sam Fankhauser: Co-Director, Grantham Research Institute
Professor Tim Lenton: Chair, Climate Change/Earth Systems Science, Exeter University
Julia Slingo: Chief Scientist, UK Met Office

[This is part of a Q&A session at the end of an event: "Frontiers of climate change research".]

Eva: Hello, my name is Eva [inaudible] and I'm from the University of Exeter, and I would like to add on the matter of communication, which Sam has mentioned. People don't usually communicate in terms of tables and graphs, and references to reports and papers. They usually do it at work, and they're quite happy to leave it there. And I think that we could perhaps collaborate with artists and people from expressive media, like film-makers or musicians, who could help us engage with people more, and we could also work more with scientists from humanistic area and social sciences to help us find out about people's responses to climate change. Are there any efforts or funds or... initiatives, like this?

Julia Slingo: Thank you very much. I think we increasingly recognise that to reach the general public, and so forth, we have to use all sorts of different channels of communication. And you're right - it's not tables and graphs, and sometimes it is through art, through music, through poetry, whatever... And storytelling. And that is increasingly something we need to think about how we do that, as you say, in a more humanist way. Er, anybody on the panel want to comment? I know this -

Tim Lenton: I can comment briefly, as someone who's on the board of Kaleider, an arts project in Exeter that's doing just that kind of thing, and also having taught over 10,000 students who signed up for our Massive Open Online Course, which may not have been very artistic and creative, but in - just on the board of topic of communication, it's one of the most positive experiences I've ever had, because when you've just create - well, it's a free offering but you create a space for learning on this topic - it completely changed the nature of the discussion. People came to learn more, and they came in droves.

And instead of what I feared, which was sceptics getting hold of the course and bombarding us all the time, the whole, er, dynamic was shifted, because it wasn't about that, it was about - people came to the course because they thought it was an important issue they wanted to know more about. There were some sceptics, but some of them actually converted during the course, and they certainly didn't dominate it. And it told me that there's a lot of appetite out there in society at large, to want to engage with this issue.

And yes, people mentioned storytelling, I mean, what have we been doing - we looked at the projections out to 2100 again, over the last day and a half - that's what we do, in the scientific sense, we're telling stories about the future. What we should be telling, collectively, are some positive stories about the future we want to work towards. Those stories are stories we'll develop collectively, as a society, not as a subset of scientists. If we can do that, and if we can articulate it and we can work out how to get from here to there, then I think we will be getting somewhere.

Julia Slingo: Thank you. Sam.

Sam Fankhauser: Yeah, just to have a quick plug, because that's something we're trying to do at the Grantham Research Institute. And we're learning fast, and we're learning that it's an altogether very different way of communicating, so we're sort of inching our way forward, we learned we don't need a website - it's fully done through social media - we sort of learned that it is all the sorts of things you mentioned, it is artists, it's poetry, it's sort of reaching out to community leaders, so it's a wholly different way of communicating, which doesn't come natural to us. But we should have a go.

Julia Slingo: Thank you.