This has been an extremely scary week of weather in the United States. Last Friday, a tornado ripped through the St. Louis airport (watch this dramatic footage) and then on Wednesday a series of tornadoes tore through the southern U.S. – killing more than 280 people. Tornadoes also touched down close to my home in the Washington, D.C. area, and a series of severe thunderstorms here have brought high winds, hail and intense lightning.

The damage to people, communities and livelihoods across our country is still being assessed, but, taken all together, these developments are downright scary. And folks want to know why this extreme weather is happening and with intensities we are not accustomed to seeing.

The answer is not a simple one. But, yesterday, I ventured back onto Fox News (following up an earlier appearance) to discuss the connection between extreme weather events and climate change impacts caused by carbon pollution.

The main point I wanted to make: with continued high levels of carbon pollution comes more overall warming. These carbon emissions and the resultant warming Earth are destabilizing our climate, and creating conditions consistent with the more frequent and intense storm activity we’re seeing today, and that climate scientists are projecting will increase in the coming decades.

The important thing to remember is that our planet is a system.  It could be compared to our bodies. Imagine your body temperature increasing by just 2 or 3 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s a fever. Your body would react in different ways, such as sweating, weakness, aches, and nausea. The same goes for our planet’s system. Carbon pollution is making our planet sick and extreme weather is one symptom.

Despite the range of opinions featured in the Fox News segment, no one denied that climate change is happening or that warmer air holds more moisture (which can lead to more frequent and intense storms). The piece also rightly points out that making connections to any one specific weather event is a complex matter.

While it may be difficult to connect this particular week of tornadoes to climate change, scientists have long been predicting that carbon pollution would cause more frequent and extreme weather events such as intense rainstorms, snowstorms, and heat waves and create conditions that may fuel stronger hurricanes. And we’ve certainly seen all of these things in recent times at levels that seem out of the ordinary.

However, there is still time for us to reduce carbon pollution and, in the process, slow down rising global temperatures that can fuel natural disasters and put people and property at risk. We at The Conservancy are working on this every day.

(Image: The aftermath of a tornado in Cullman, Alabama taken on April 27, 2011. Image credit: southerntabitha/Flickr via a Creative Commons license.)

1. We’re just the messengers: eating insects could reduce your food footprint. (Treehugger)
2. Who needs a degree when fish are as smart as college students at math? (Mother Nature Network)
3. How do reporters and scientists communicate with each other? Here’s a snippet. (Dot Earth)
4. The world tries to crack down on illegal fishing. (Green)
5. Having trouble deciding who’s to blame for the Gulf oil spill? The answer is easy, says this author: everyone. (Grist)

Mark Spalding is a senior marine scientist with The Nature Conservancy’s Global Marine Team.

Sometimes I feel that we environmentalists are like penguins huddled together on a melting ice-floe. We know that there is something urgent to be done, really urgent, but we don’t seem to be able to take the plunge, OFF the ice-floe, to convince anyone else.

I’ve spent my life writing books and reports that are almost always written for my own people. I tell them what they already know — I finesse the model, I update the stats, I polish the words. “Success” is counted by the number of web-hits, book sales, citations…whatever. But what I don’t realize is that my readers are all fellow penguins. I feel proud, my friend’s flippers slap me on the back, I bow, then shuffle back to the middle of the gang with my fellows nodding approval. Someone else shuffles to the edge of the ice-flow, peers into the ocean beyond and decides to do another report.

I had two relatively unimportant interviews last month. One for the Naked Oceans podcast: I did the job, talked the talk and I think came across okay. But I was struck by the contrast between that interview and one I did with a media studies student in London. I don’t think he had any environmental expertise, but he’d had the gumption to interview an impressive list of reef scientists. I played back his project and was entranced — here was a set of interviews all spliced about. He’d cut out all the answers that were too technical, but still managed to tell us about the symbiotic relationship of corals with algae: using rapid cuts between “Finding Nemo,” Bill Withers’ “Just the Two of Us,” various marine experts…and then Queen singing “You’re My Best Friend” (more specifically, “Oooh, you make me live”!” It was depressing, but somehow still upbeat. It ends with Jedi Yoda saying: “Do…or do not…there is no try.”

Sadly, the latter interview can’t be broadcast or made available because of copyright.

But maybe its time we invited some new creatures up onto our ice-floe. Ones with a different view, a fresh perspective, and a longing to get back to tell their friends in the ocean.

(Image credit: The Pug Father/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

Editor’s note: The Nature Conservancy will be publishing a variety of opinions on Cool Green Science over the next months on the state of global fisheries, including a piece from Daniel Pauly in January. The piece below — and the pieces to come — reflect only the views of the authors, not necessarily those of The Nature Conservancy.

I have been quantitatively analyzing environmental data for 30 years in a wide variety of arenas (biotechnology, endangered species, agriculture, fisheries, etc). I am sad to report that, on average, the conservation and environmental community errs on the side of being unduly alarmist and apocalyptic in interpreting the data we have, to the detriment of being solution-oriented.

Nowhere was this more apparent to me than when I worked for NOAA’s fisheries division and got to learn up close how committed and rigorous NOAA’s scientists were about finding ways to protect the nation’s fisheries. Yes, there is coastal degradation in the United States and there are fisheries that have collapsed. But there are also well-managed fisheries — something you almost never hear about. And it is these success stories that can tell us what we need to do to reverse our failures.

I am no Pollyanna — the public’s growing disconnect from climate issues troubles me deeply. But when scientists analyze and extrapolate data using methods that are open to debate and then firmly conclude with statements such as, “Our analyses suggest that business-as-usual would foreshadow serious threats to global food security, coastal water quality, and ecosystem stability, affecting current and future generations,” I wonder what is being accomplished? Have we not learned that scaring people paralyzes them instead of motivating them to act?

For The Conservancy’s science magazine, Science Chronicles, the world renowned fisheries biologist Ray Hilborn just wrote a fascinating essay examining the doom-and-gloom rhetoric surrounding the state of marine fisheries. For sure, there is another side to the story, and there are scientists who would disagree with Ray. But it is important that the conservation community and the public learn to think skeptically about messages of a forthcoming apocalypse as well as about messages of “everything is wonderful.” Our marine fisheries are too important to the world’s economy and food supply to waste energy on emotional rhetoric — our oceans demand cool-headed analyses and data-based solutions that work. Ray’s essay (reprinted below) about why all the world’s fisheries are not collapsing is a good place to start.

___________

Apocalypse Forestalled: Why All the World’s Fisheries Aren’t Collapsing

By Ray Hilborn, Professor, Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington

If you have paid any attention to the conservation literature or science journalism over the last five years, you likely have gotten the impression that our oceans are so poorly managed that they soon will be empty of fish — unless governments order drastic curtailment of current fishing practices, including the establishment of huge no-take zones across great swaths of the oceans.

To be fair, there are some places where such severe declines may be true. A more balanced diagnosis, however, tells a different story — one that still requires changes in some fishing practices, but that is far from alarmist. But this balanced diagnosis is being almost wholly ignored in favor of an apocalyptic rhetoric that obscures the true issues fisheries face as well as the correct cures for those problems.

Where the Apocalyptic Rhetoric Comes From

To get the storyline correct, it is important to go back to the sources of the apocalyptic rhetoric. In 2006, a paper was published by Boris Worm in Science (Worm et al. 2006) that received enormous press coverage. It argued that, if current trends continued, all fish stocks would collapse by 2048. Worm and his coauthors concluded their paper with the following sentence: “Our analyses suggest that business as usual would foreshadow serious threats to global food security, coastal water quality, and ecosystem stability, affecting current and future generations.”

Others joined in, chief among them Daniel Pauly, who rang and continues to ring the apocalyptic note. “There are basically two alternatives for fisheries science and management: one is obviously continuing with business as usual…,” wrote Pauly in 2009 (Pauly 2009a). “This would lead, in addition to further depletion of biodiversity, to intensification of ‘fishing down marine food webs,’ which ultimately involves the transformation of marine ecosystems into dead zones.”

It might surprise you to learn Pauly’s views are not universally held among scientists. Indeed, these papers exposed a deep divide in the marine science community over the state of fish stocks and the success of existing fisheries management approaches. Numerous critiques of the apocalyptic stance were published after the 2006 paper, suggesting that Worm et al. had greatly exaggerated the failings of “business as usual.” For instance, Steve Murawski, director of scientific programs and chief science advisor, defended the U.S. fisheries management system and pointed out that the proportion of stocks overfished in the U.S. was declining, not increasing (Murawski et al. 2007).

The Real Question: Are Current Fishing Practices Decimating Stocks…or Rebuilding Them?

No one disagrees on our goals for the world’s fisheries stocks — we need higher fish abundances. The arguments are largely about where we are now and how we will get to higher fish abundance and lower fishing pressure. Are current fisheries management systems working to decimate fish stocks…or rebuild them? Do we need large areas of the oceans closed to fishing to assure sustainable seafood supply? Daniel Pauly says yes to the latter question: “This transformation,” he writes, “would also require extensive use of ocean zoning and spatial closures, including no-take marine protected areas (MPAs). Indeed, MPAs must be at the core of any scheme intending to put fisheries on an ecologically sustainable basis” (Pauly 2009a).

In an attempt to resolve this dispute, Boris Worm and I several years ago organized a set of four meetings, sponsored by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), in which we assembled a database on abundance as measured by fisheries agencies and research surveys. Participants included several of the authors of the 2006 paper as well as several people from national fisheries management agencies.

The results were published in Science in 2009 (Worm et al. 2009), and showed that, while the majority of stocks were still below target levels, fishing pressure had been reduced in most ecosystems (for which we had data) to below the point that would assure long-term maximum sustainable yield of fish from those ecosystems.

About 30 percent of the stocks would currently be classified as overfished — but, generally, fishing pressure has been reduced enough that all but 17 percent of stocks would be expected to recover to above overfished thresholds if current fishing pressure continues. In the United States, there was clear evidence for the rebuilding of marine ecosystems and stock biomass. The idea that 70 percent of the world’s fish stocks are overfished or collapsed and that the rate of overfishing is accelerating (Pauly 2007) was shown by Worm et al. (2009) and FAO (2009) to be untrue.

The Science paper coming out of the NCEAS group also showed that the success in reducing fishing pressure had been achieved by a broad range of traditional fisheries management tools — including catch-and-effort limitation, gear restrictions and temporary closed areas. Marine protected areas were an insignificant factor in the success achieved.

The database generated by the NCEAS group and subsequent analysis has shown that many of the assumptions fueling the standard apocalyptic scenarios painted by the gloom-and-doom proponents are untrue:

• For instance, the widespread notion that fishermen generally sequentially deplete food webs (Pauly et al. 1998) — starting with the predators and working their way down — is simply not supported by data.

• Declining trophic level of fishery landings is just as often a result of new fisheries developing rather than old ones collapsing (Essington et al. 2006).

• Catch data also show that fishing patterns are driven by economics, with trophic level a poor predictor of exploitation history (Sethi et al. 2010).

• Furthermore, the mean trophic level of marine ecosystems is unrelated to (or even negatively correlated with) the trophic level of fishery landings (Branch et al. 2010).

• And the oft-cited assessment that the large fish of the oceans were collapsed by 1980 (Myers and Worm 2003) is totally inconsistent with the database we have assembled — for instance, world tuna stocks in total are at present well above the level that would produce maximum sustained yield, except bluefin tuna and some other billfish that are depleted (Hutchings 2010).

Nevertheless, many in the marine conservation community appear unwilling to accept these results, continue to insist that all fish may be gone by 2048, and use declining catches in fisheries where regulations have reduced catches as indications of stock collapse.

No one argues that all fisheries are well-managed, and so far we do not have abundance estimates for many parts of the world, especially Asia and Africa. Using the catch-based methods of Worm et al. (2006) and Pauly, these areas appear to have fewer stock collapses and overfished stocks than in the areas for which we have abundance data. However, we do not know if these areas have been reducing exploitation rates or if they are still increasing.

Finally, in places without strong central government control of fishing, there is broad agreement that community-based co-management can be effective. For these fisheries, management tools are very different than those used for industrial fishery stocks, and MPAs are here often a key ingredient. The lessons from the Worm et al. (2009) paper about what works to rebuild fish stocks are applicable to industrial fisheries, but probably not to the small-scale fisheries that support many fishing communities.

Stop the Alarmism and Build Off What’s Working

There is considerable room for policy debate about where we want to be in the trade-off between yield and environmental impact of fishing. There is no denying that sustainable fishing changes ecosystems, and that different societies will almost certainly make different choices about how much environmental change they will accept in return for sustainable food production. But science cannot provide the answers for this debate; it can only evaluate the trade-offs.

My perspective is that we need to treat fisheries like medical diagnoses. We must identify which fisheries are in trouble and find the cures for those individual fisheries. The evidence is strong that we can and are rebuilding stocks in many places. Let us accept that progress and identify the problem stocks and how to fix them.

Apocalyptic assertions that fisheries management is failing are counter-productive — not only because these assertions are untrue, but because they fail to recognize the long, hard work of fishery managers, scientists and stakeholders in the many places where management is working. While the gloom-and-doom advocates have been attracting public attention and press coverage, thousands of people — decried by Pauly (2009b) as agents of the commercial fishing interests — have worked through years of meetings and painful catch and effort reductions to lower fishing pressure and successfully rebuild fisheries.

References
Branch, T. A., R. Watson, E.A. Fulton, S. Jennings, C.R. McGilliard, G. T. Pablico, and D. Ricard. 2010. The trophic fingerprint of marine fisheries. Nature 468:431-435. doi:10.1038/nature09528.

Essington, T. E., A. H. Beaudreau and J. Wiedenmann. 2006. Fishing through marine food webs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103:3171-3175.

FAO. 2009. State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2008. FAO: Rome.

Hutchings, J. A., C. Minto, D. Ricard, J.K. Baum, and O.P. Jensen. 2010. Trends in abundance of marine fishes. Can. J. Fish. Aquat. Sci. 67:1205-1210.

Murawski, S., R. Methot, and G. Tromble. 2007. Biodiversity loss in the ocean: How bad is it? Science 316:1281-1281.

Myers, R. A. and B. Worm. 2003. Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory fish communities. Nature 423: 280-283.

Pauly, D. 2007. The Sea Around Us Project: Documenting and communicating global fisheries impacts on marine ecosystems. Ambio 36:290-295.

Pauly, D. 2009a. Beyond duplicity and ignorance in global fisheries. Scientia Marina 73:215-224.

Pauly, D. 2009b. Aquacalypse Now: The End of Fish. The New Republic 240:24-27.

Pauly, D., V. Christensen, J. Dlasgaard, R. Froese, and F. Torres Jr. 1998. Fishing down marine food webs. Science 279:860-863.

Sethi, S. A., T. A. Branch and R. Watson. 2010. Global fishery development patterns are driven by profit but not trophic level. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107:12163-12167.

Worm, B., E. B. Barbier, N. Beaumont, J.E. Duffy, C. Folke, B.S. Halpern, J.B.C. Jackson, H.K. Lotze, F. Micheli, S.R. Palumbi, E. Sala, K.A. Selkoe, J.J. Stachowicz and R. Watson. 2006. Impacts of biodiversity loss on ocean ecosystem services. Science 314:787-790.

Worm, B., R. Hilborn, J.K. Baum, T.A. Branch, J.S. Collie, C. Costello, M.J. Fogarty, E.A. Fulton, J.A. Hutchings, S. Jennings, O.P. Jensen, H.K. Lotze, P.M. Mace, T.R. McClanahan, C. Minto, S.R. Palumbi, A. Parma, D. Ricard, A.A. Rosenberg, R. Watson, and D. Zeller. 2009. Rebuilding Global Fisheries. Science 325:578-585.

(Image credit: mistersnappy/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

1. An irreverant video featuring exploding schoolchildren causes an uproar for British climate group 10:10. (DotEarth)
2. And more funny business from across the pond: a UK town uses human waste to heat homes. (BBC)
3. Are compostable chip bags really that noisy? (GreenBiz)
4. The U.S. military goes green. (The New York Times)
5. Who’s to blame for killing the climate bill? (The Vine)

From the leaked emails of Climategate to the data woes of the IPCC, it’s been a year to forget for climate scientists…at least in terms of the public’s perception of their work. How could a couple of pilfered emails and a handful of misread data counterbalance the weight of decades of science? Why isn’t the certainty of scientists about the fact and dangers of climate change translating into public trust? Could that very certainty be working against climate science credibility?

To learn more, Cool Green Science asked five scientists — Georgia Tech’s Judith Curry, a climatologist who has been in the forefront of engaging climate change skeptics in the blogosphere; USC’s Randy Olson, a scientist turned filmmaker who directed the movie “Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy” and wrote the book “Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style”; and the Conservancy’s Jonathan Hoekstra, Peter Kareiva and Rebecca Shaw — to discuss how climate science communication went so very wrong…and what it’s going to take to fix it.

In Part I, they debate just how bad scientists are at communicating…and how much Al Gore is to blame for creating unreasonable expectations about the certainty of climate change science.

________

Why should scientists even be communicating with the public about climate science? Aren’t there too many minefields?

OLSON: Scientists carry the big stick in mass communications. They speak with a voice of authority, and if they can be properly used and coached, they are the voice that the public will respond to.

But we need to make sure first that they’ve got the right facts. Second, we need the right scientists as spokespersons. And if scientists are going to talk about certainty, they need to embrace humility and cautiousness to build trust.

CURRY:  People ask me, “Well, how can these skeptics be converted?” and I say, “Well, that’s completely the wrong tactic, and that’s not what I’m doing when I engage with them in the blogosphere and elsewhere.” I’m trying to answer questions and help build up some trust in the process of science and scientists themselves because, as Randy points out, humility is important.

There’s a certain level of haughtiness and arrogance sometimes among scientists. When groups of scientists appeal to their own authority, you get these letters from National Academy members saying, “We’re the important people. You should be listening to us.” That doesn’t play very well with the public. They want to understand, and they want to be able to trust people.  So I think engagement is really important.

I’ve also learned quite a bit through engaging with skeptics. The discourse has become so polarized — mainstream scientists versus skeptics — but there’s really a distribution of ideas.  I get very concerned when people who have slight differences in approach from the IPCC orthodoxy start to get labeled as “skeptics.” That’s wrong. Communication and engagement are very important, but we have to be humble and we have to acknowledge the uncertainties, and then we’ll be trusted.

KAREIVA:  Not all scientists should communicate with the public, because some scientists will just never be really effective communicators, just like some scientists aren’t really good teachers. It’s a learned craft, but also there’s a little bit of an innate talent for it. I don’t think all scientists should jump into the fray. If you’re either impatient or have a very thin skin, you won’t enjoy it.

OLSON: I came out to Hollywood as a scientist 15 years ago, and one of the crucial things that I learned from going to film school and making a few feature films is the importance of casting. You learn this working with actors. You can’t put bad actors into a movie and over the course of three or four weeks teach them how to be good actors. I’m hearing a lot of people think, kind of naively, that we can run these communications workshops, and suddenly scientists that are utterly hopeless can be turned overnight into great communicators.

We need greater prioritization on finding the right spokesperson. Here’s an example: I’m currently working with the Union of Concerned Scientists, and we took video clips of science spokespeople who had appeared on TV talk shows. I got a dozen of my Hollywood friends out here, directors, agents, casting directors to look at the four clips and score them on six different criteria from 1 to 10, and the overall scores came out around 4 and 5. Nobody was impressed with any of these people, and these were some of the best spokespeople we have. We can do a whole lot better — it’s just a matter of priorities, putting more resources into it.

Judy Curry, you wrote in 2003: “Reducing uncertainty is probably not the appropriate goal.  We should instead focus on increasing credibility.” Have you changed your mind? Hasn’t the last year shown that these two concepts — uncertainty and credibility — are very tightly tied together?

CURRY: Well, no, I haven’t changed my mind about this at all. I agree with my statement more profoundly now than I even did back in 2003, but I think that at this point that trust is more important than certainty in terms of the public understanding and acceptance regarding climate change.

This is a very complex problem. Some of the confidence levels in the IPCC report have been overstated. There’s a lot of ignorance about what’s going on and what might happen in the future, and that uncertainty needs to be acknowledged. We need to allow a plurality of views and to debate the science. This shouldn’t be a threat to policymaking if it’s done right.

But by trying to isolate a certain group of people and call them “skeptics” and then put too high a confidence level on the scientific findings, I think that’s how we lost the trust of the public. The scientific findings weren’t any different before than after Climategate, but people got an inside view of what actually went on behind the scenes in terms of building that consensus and decided they didn’t really trust it.

OLSON: I think I take exception to your statement that people got an inside view through Climategate. What they got was the Fox News version. Unfortunately, scientists didn’t know how to combat that perception, and only now, in the last few weeks, has the truth come out that there wasn’t that much really to Climategate in terms of scandal. The public really didn’t get much of an insight into the scientific process, and it doesn’t seem to me overall that the scientific system is that unhealthy.

But the science community is just massively vulnerable to these attacks because scientists are utterly inept at communicating to the broad audience. There’s the sophisticated discussion of global warming, which involves all these blogs and massive discussions on what the IPCC is about. But the general public doesn’t still quite know what the IPCC is.

Mostly what the broad public knows is one thing only, and that’s the Al Gore movie [“An Inconvenient Truth”]. The movie was a big, brave, bold experiment, but it was a giant failing of the science community to allow Al Gore and Laurie David and Lawrence Bender to come along and take over the messaging of this science issue to the broad public. What we ended up with was a non-science group that promoted their version of global warming, which involved a great deal of reaching into the future and making alarmist predictions, while the scientists just sat there like a bunch of kids and were so excited that Al Gore was coming to their rescue.

The science community had the ability to make those predictions more responsibly. I would have hoped we would have spent more time instead building trust, as Judy is saying, by looking at all the successes that the climate science community has accomplished and not reaching so far into the future with alarmist predictions. We’ve paid a price for those predictions since 2006 because we’ve been dealt four years of not having the giant hurricanes and super warm winters Al Gore and others predicted.

KAREIVA: I would put a slightly different slant on it. One, I think the IPCC and the scientists didn’t break down their communication of the uncertainty or the science into enough steps, and it all got lumped together.

The future projections — with all of their uncertainty — got lumped in with the solid evidence that humans are indeed having an impact and are warming the planet with our emissions. By failing to break down the story into chapters, it’s almost like the whole chain of evidence and logic is tainted with the uncertainty that applies primarily to the future projections — the last chapters of the story. We should have said: “Humans are warming the planet. This has been solidly demonstrated. There are risks associated with that. Here is how we are going about estimating these risks.” And that’s where you then start getting into the uncertainty.

The second thing, which gets lost, is that there was and is a huge disinformation campaign about climate change. You had Frederick Seitz, the ex-president of the National Academy of Sciences, and William Nierenberg from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography lending their voices to all these authoritative-looking reports — and they weren’t peer-reviewed — that just massively and disingenuously attacked the climate change science in totally improper ways. We can’t ignore that this disinformation campaign has had a major impact on the public discourse.

OLSON: One of the miscues of “An Inconvenient Truth” was the arrogance with which it brushed aside the disinformation campaign and the skeptics and projected the message that there is no debate.  I heard that from so many people around 2006, 2007 and 2008.  As I made my movie “Sizzle,” people asked me: “Why would you even talk about there being controversy? There is no debate.”

Maybe there is no debate among scientists, but in public perception, when you have that much noise coming out of Fox News and everywhere else, you have to call it a debate.  In a social context, it absolutely was a debate. It was very arrogant for Gore to imply otherwise. And I think by doing so he really lit the fires of the skeptic crowd that really paid off in Climategate.

CURRY: This is not settled science. There are some basic things we have confidence in, but there are a lot of things that we know we’re uncertain about, and then there are the unknown unknowns. We don’t know if there are some big surprises in store for us from the sun or something with the internal oscillations of the ocean that could really dominate the climate of the next century. Science is not an answer. It’s really a process, and there’s lots more work to do on climate change.

HOEKSTRA: In hindsight, we made a mistake by letting the idea of consensus be the reason people should be concerned about climate change. Instead of saying, “let us show you data, let us show you trends, let us help you understand this issue,” we latched onto this idea that there’s consensus and there’s no need for debate. Well, consensus is very easy to destroy, and we’ve seen that happen now. As soon as some scientists started standing up and saying, “I’m not behind it,” we lost.

We missed an opportunity to play to our strengths and really help educate people about the science. I think back to the old toothpaste commercials, where 9 out of 10 doctors recommended some toothpaste for fighting cavities — they at least allowed that there was one dentist who wasn’t going to recommend that toothpaste. We didn’t even do that. We spent three years not talking about the climate science, and now we find ourselves in a panic trying to get everybody up to speed on a very complicated issue that they don’t have background in and frankly probably don’t have that much interest in.

SHAW: I guess I’m a little confused by the conversation because I’m wondering which uncertainty we’re talking about and which uncertainty actually matters as it relates to the IPCC and how it compiles information from scientists around the globe to come up with a report every five years.

The IPCC is not a renegade, vigilante band of geeks that ignore this distribution that doesn’t reconcile with their propaganda. It’s just an amazingly conservative international body of the world’s governments that compiles information that’s been peer-reviewed.

I wonder about the focus on the scientists and the IPCC in bolstering information about climate change as opposed to focusing on other credible sources that could do that when the scientists can’t do it very well. I think there’s a lot of uncertainty that our greenhouse gas emissions might be far above anything that’s ever been considered by IPCC, and so, even if the IPCC considers a lot of models and they consider a lot of information and there is variance in the way different people model it, it all goes in the same direction. The IPCC estimate is a very conservative estimate.

So I wonder if the battle we’re losing isn’t the one of uncertainty or the one of credibility, but the one of effectively communicating how truly conservative the IPCC estimates are and how great the consequences are if they’re right. How important is focusing on uncertainty or credibility when both of those can be tainted any which way in the media on any day? Shouldn’t we be focusing on what do we know and how it does have meaning for how we deal with uncertainty every day? And shouldn’t we focus on the things we need to do to reduce risk today that won’t be painful, so we can avoid some of the outcomes that scientists project?

CURRY: There are a whole host of scientific uncertainties out there, but uncertainty is a two-edged sword. It’s plausible that the worst-case scenario could be worse than anything that the IPCC has looked at. On the other side of the coin, the unknowns about solar radiation and the ocean circulation could swamp the greenhouse warming signals in the next century. We just don’t know.

But science shouldn’t be the only driver for the political decisions. Given the uncertainty, we should start talking about a range of robust policy options that can accommodate that kind of uncertainty. This means that we have to talk about values and equity and justice and sustainability and a whole host of other issues. Let’s take the dialogue away from the science as we figure out what to do about the risk of climate change.

SHAW:  I couldn’t agree more with that. One of the biggest problems is that there is so much reliance on science to communicate this stuff effectively, but when you really get down to what we need to do, it’s those folks that work in policy who understand the uncertainty and who need to be holding the messages and communicating about how you do policy going forward in the context of uncertainty. I think relying on the scientists to do this is a non-starter.

Next: Is the IPCC helping or hurting efforts to educate the public about climate change? And can climate scientists get any better at communication…or should they even bother?

(Image 1: Greenland’s Iluslissat Icefjord breaking into the Atlantic Ocean, September 24, 2008. Image credit: Tim Norris/Flickr through a Creative Commons license. Image 2 credit: cactusbones/Flickr through a Creative Commons license. Image 3: Lord Monckton (left), climate change skeptic, wearing several climate change stickers on his back at the COP-15 conference, December 2009. Image 3 credit: Matthew McDermott/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

1. Why you shouldn’t be overwhelmed by the oil spill. (Grist)
2. Dave Roberts of Grist starts a debate on cap-and-trade. (Grist)
3. The fire hydrant of the future — it’s eco-smart! (But you’ll have to paint it red.) (CleanTechnica)
4. Study says: National parks are choking on pollution. (Conservation Maven)
5. Ladies and gentlemen, Andy Revkin singing his original hit, “Liberated Carbon.” (Dot Earth)

1. $1.8 million… that’s how much was raised in last night’s celebrity telethon to help the Gulf. (CNN)
2. What will the oil spill mean for life at the very bottom of the ocean? (The New York Times)
3. A scientific look at climate scientists finds that they do indeed agree about global warming. (Green)
4. Warning, potty humor ahead: how can whale poop help fight climate change? (Conservation Journal Watch)
5. Is the Internet as much of an energy hog as we think? (Treehugger)

1. Did you miss it? #1: Get the full text of President Obama’s speech on energy and the Gulf oil spill.  (Huffington Post)
2. Did you miss it? #2:  The Nature Conservancy’s Florida team shows off a NOAA-funded coral restoration project (CBS Evening News).
3. Here are 11 fun and exciting ways to get your kids to play outside.  (The Daily Green)
4. Kevin Costner and his science are really and truly helping to clean up the Gulf oil spill.  (Guardian)
5. Guess what?  The month of May was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth.  (Los Angeles Times)

1. Climate change and bacteria. Yes, something else to worry about. (Yale Environment 360)
2. Wanna bike commute, but intimidated? Introducing…The Monster Bike. (Treehugger)
3. Fake, posed “wildlife” photos: the continuing scandal. (Audubon Magazine; HT 10,000 Birds)
4. Britain to Europe: Take our domestic waste fuel pellets, please. (CleanTechnica)
5. Could a price on carbon spur nuclear power development? (Green/The New York Times)