I’m in the second year of co-teaching a Pace University course helping environmental science graduate students develop the ability to communicate their work and avoid the pitfalls that come in a field that is often at the center of policy disputes. (You might have seen scientists at the center of a few such disputes of late.)
The students write letters to the editor and op-ed-style articles. They learn to use Twitter (the course hashtag is #PaceEnv) and blogs both for outreach and as learning and network-building tools. They become comfortable giving public presentations. And they hear from an array of guests, often via Skype, who recount what they’ve learned as public scientists.
Last year, after the CNN host Nancy Grace debated the meteorologist Bernie Rayno on air, insisting he was wrong in saying there was no chance that Japan’s nuclear crisis posed any radiation danger in the United States (he was right), Rayno “visited” us to describe the experience and the methods he uses to maintain composure and cogency in such situations.
In our latest session, we had a chat with Gavin Schmidt, who for 15 years has been a climate researcher at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and, in 2004, spearheaded the launch of Realclimate.org. The blog has become a vital online touchstone for anyone eager to assess what’s known and yet to learn about greenhouse-driven climate change. Here’s our conversation (which was recorded on Feb. 13, so there’s no discussion of Schmidt’s views on the Heartland Institute saga; his thoughts are here):
We talked about the roots of the blog, which Schmidt saw as a way to efficiently explain climate science and dispel confusion and disinformation as the issue gained prominence in the mid 2000s. He noted that he and his partners were bringing to climate discourse what was already an established model in other fields – evolution and high-energy physics – through the Panda’s Thumb and Cosmic Variance.
“They’re all focused on part education, part self interest, part debunking of nonsense,” he told the class.
He and I agreed that there is a ripe opportunity, and responsibility, for scientists and scientific institutions to pursue this model in other fields where science meets society – energy, environmental risk, and more — essentially real[any science].org.
Schmidt nicely articulated how the news focus of journalism and the agenda focus of activists of all stripes left a fertile space — “between the paper and the tweet” — to be filled:
There’s a need for training and in filling in the gaps between the extremely casual tweeting, say, and the I.P.C.C. assessment report. There’s a whole range of levels of communication that could fit in between those two things…. The stuff in the middle, that’s where the people who know what they’re talking about should be acting, because we’re not there collectively now.
Some of us are. But we’re not there collectively, and that kind of cedes that whole field to the people who don’t know anything and the people who are more fond of their own voice than they are of the facts and the people who want to disinform and misinform the public.
So it’s that area in the middle, the hinterland between the paper and the tweet, where I think there’s a lot more scope for us to communicate and where, quite frankly, the field is wide open.
I noted the space is widening these days as specialized journalism, including science reporting, by traditional media, shrinks. Schmidt said he sees the role and niche for scientists as very distinct from what media offer:
Journalism is about news. It’s a news industry. Most of what people don’ t know is not news. It’s just basic stuff. You know how hard it is to write a newspaper article about the greenhouse effect. We’ve known about that for 120 years. But people still have questions about the greenhouse effect.
And that, of course, is one reason I joined Pace Professor Cara Cea in working on this course for young scientists.
Thanks for visiting, Gavin.
In case you missed it, here’s a Columbia University video of Schmidt discussing the perils when science becomes politicized and politics gets “scientized” and other issues related to climate science and the public:
