Reality Without Consensus

It's more than a decade since I heard Bill McKibben on C-SPAN suggesting that what the U.S. needed to seriously confront the climate crisis was an "emotional consensus" of the American people.  It did not happen.  There are probably many reasons why not.  I suggested at the time that one might be the language that scientists use (and journalists following their lead) which failed to convey the danger of the crisis and the urgency required to address it.

That problem has been mocked but also more recently is being embraced by the American Association for the Advancement of Scientists.  A weather.com report begins:

"After years of publishing scientific reports filled with impenetrable jargon and numbering in the thousands of pages – like those released every few years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – one group of American scientists have said enough's enough.

Under the banner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the group of more than a dozen scientists on Tuesday launched "What We Know," an outreach effort that aims to encourage people to think of climate change as a risk management issue for human societies, rather than solely as something that impacts the environment.

"Our specific goal in this case is to try to help move policy forward by making science as clear and straightforward as we possibly can," said Dr. Alan Leshner, the chief executive officer of AAAS, in a conference call with reporters Tuesday."

The Association made good on this intent with an 18-page report, described by the LA Times:

The American Assn. for the Advancement of Science's blunt report contains no new scientific conclusions. But by speaking in plain, accessible terms it seeks to instill greater urgency in leaders and influence everyday Americans. Scientists said many previous assessments have been long and ponderous, and have failed to shift public opinion on global warming.

The goal "is to move policy forward by making science as clear and straightforward as we possibly can," association Chief Executive Alan Leshner said. "What we're trying to do is to move the debate from whether human-induced climate change is reality … to exactly what should you do about it."

The report is backed-up by a web site which also features videos.

The truth is that while this is a long overdue development, even clearer language and one minute videos for the twitter generation aren't enough.  There must be a dozen or more books that inspired reviewers to suggest that this would be the one that got people going, that would be this generations Silent Spring.  When her climate crisis book appeared in 2008 (Field Notes From a Catastrophe), Elizabeth Kolbert was the latest to be called the next Rachel Carson.  But even her exemplary writing did not have anything like that kind of impact.

Now her new book, The Sixth Extinction, is getting media attention, as well as a few words here.  In the debut of his own new site, Ezra Klein chose to interview Kolbert on this book.  He zeros in on the first--and worst-- of the five past mass extinctions, which scientists believe was set in motion by global heating caused by massive infusions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Exactly why carbon dioxide was released in these quantities is still unknown, but what apparently is known is summarized in one of Klein's questions:

Ezra Klein: One of the really terrifying parts of your almost nonstop-terrifying book, is that the quantity of carbon dioxide that we are emitting at the moment, every day, every year, every month, every year, is not just similar too, but potentially faster than the carbon dioxide emission that led to that extinction.

In her book Kolbert emphasizes how rare extinctions normally are, but that we are living through a blizzard of them.  And she emphasizes how slow changes normally are, but that we are seeing the end of an icy Arctic that existed that way for millions of years. She tells Klein he is likely to see an ice-free Arctic in his lifetime, just as scientists are learning how important Arctic ice is to global weather patterns as well as the climate itself.

Plainer statements of urgency are hard to imagine than this interview (which I highly recommend) and the AAAS report.  But Kolbert may be on to something when she tries to get us to shift our frame of reference about the speed of change.  That's only one of the conceptual blocks that ordinary people may have to this extraordinary phenomenon--the defining challenge of human civilization and to the steady development of the human species.