Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirshenbaum: How Scientific Illiteracy Cost Us 20 Years on Global Warming

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by Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirshenbaum

This summer, as the U.S. Senate debates whether to join the House of Representatives in passing the first law in U.S. history to control global warming, expect to hear a lot of misinformation, a lot of absurdity, and a lot of gobbledygook. You'll hear assertions that the globe isn't warming any longer -- cooling has set in. You'll see any local temperature variation (in the cooler direction, anyway) seized upon to the same end. You'll hear the sun invoked -- rather than human industrial emissions -- as the cause of climate change.

And you'll probably hear many ingeniously wrong things that we can't even predict yet.

None of this should be surprising by now: Endless surveys have demonstrated that the scientific community and the U.S. public stand vastly far apart on climate change. The latest, from the Pew Research Center and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, found that while 84 percent of scientists believe human beings are driving global warming through their greenhouse gas emissions (the accepted scientific view), just 49 percent of the public agrees. If you break that down by party affiliation, things get still more revealing: 67 percent of Republicans disagree with the scientific consensus view, arguing either than global warming is "natural" rather than human caused, or even maintaining that it isn't happening at all.

The climate issue is the most powerful -- and also the most catastrophic -- example of how our society dysfunctionally managed matters of science. The stakes are literally enormous: We're threatened with an unrecognizably changed planet, many of its largest cities submerged. The science is extraordinarily clear: It goes all the way back to 1859, when the Irish scientist John Tyndall first described the nature of the greenhouse effect. In modern times, meanwhile, the issue has been on the agenda for fully two decades now. Yet still, only about half of the public follows or trusts scientists on the matter. And so nothing has happened politically, and the problem has had all those years to steadily worsen -- and even if we do get a global warming law for the first time in 2009, in a sense we've already failed.

So perhaps we ought to ask, what could we possibly have done differently?

One thing that is clear: tempting though it may be to point the finger, the blame cannot fall on average Americans alone. For instance, journalists were just as complicit as anyone in keeping us misinformed about climate change. Not only did partisan channels such as Fox News sow massive amounts of misinformation and confusion, but also even "mainstream" reporters often played an "on the one hand, on the other hand" game in covering the science, rather than directly conveying the state of knowledge and the confidence of the experts in their results.

Blaming Republicans is certainly warranted -- after all, it's unequivocally clear that their politics are keeping them from accepting scientific reality. But we can't take too much consolation from this lesson either, at least as we look toward the future. For although to a lesser degree, liberals also have their issues where they depart from science -- such as vaccination, where scientists have stated plainly that vaccines have not caused an autism epidemic, but many people on the left refuse to accept what they say.

One group that rarely gets much blame, but should also probably shoulder some responsibility here, is the scientists. Given the massive public opinion gap between themselves and ordinary Americans, one could argue that just as the public ought to move toward thinking more like scientists, scientists should also reach out more to help them get there. Yet while scientists have released reams of steller reports on climate change over the years, they've been technocratic tomes that only reach a tiny portion of America. Overworked, immersed in the academic life, and uncertain what else they can do, scientists have rarely taken it upon themselves, as a group, to reach out to the rest of the country in a language it can understand.

Such is the mess in which we find ourselves -- and we must hope that the thinnest of political margins will save us this time around. But even if a climate bill does squeak through Congress and get signed by the president, the lost 20 years during which we could have been doing something (back when it would have been far easier and cheaper) may leave us in quite a predicament.

Even if we pass a law, scientists can't definitively say how bad global warming is going to get before it gets better. The system is just too complicated. That means we might find out a decade or so from now that we didn't move quickly or strongly enough, and that what we've done doesn't suffice -- that we're in worst-case-scenario territory. Then what? Expect another dysfunctional fight over science, this time perhaps centered on whether we should artificially modify the planet (so-called geoengineering) to turn down the thermostat by blocking out some of the radiation from the sun (no joke, scientists are already discussing this very seriously).

To prevent further debacles such as the global warming debate, then, there's just one answer: We need a more science-focused society. We have to take steps now to bring these "two cultures," scientists and the public, closer together. That's a massive endeavor involving everyone: the scientists, the journalists (those who still have jobs, anyway), the schools, the universities, the government funding agencies. It's precisely the opposite of easy to achieve.

But then, look what we risk without it.

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Chris Mooney is the author of The Republican War on Science, and Sheril Kirshenbaum is a marine scientist and author at Duke University. This article is based in part upon their new book, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.

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