Being true to the science while true to one’s self: how by stepping away
from scientific restraint, we can meet people—including
ourselves–where they are
Abstract
For more than 20 years, the work of academic climate scientists and
those at groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists has been to
analyze, synthesize, and convey the projected and, in recent years,
current impacts of climate change. In the earlier years, these impacts
were still largely imperceptible and pathways for solving the problem
seemed wide and flexible. A key objective of climate science
communication during those years was to establish the legitimacy of our
work, which faced tremendous public and policy maker scrutiny, as a
simultaneous barrage of well-coordinated disinformation had led to
unusual skepticism of the science. Now we are clearly seeing the impacts
of one degree Celsius of warming, the current and projected climate
impacts themselves have grown, and the solutions pathways have become
narrow and steep. While the climate context has changed for the worse
over those 20 years, scientists have largely soldiered on with the same
reticent communication. Visible climate change impacts and alarming
projections for future change have far outpaced the growth in experts’
ability to reach people and inspire them to act with urgency. At UCS, we
have consciously and deliberately begun to change the tenor of our
climate communications in response to the increasingly dire results our
own analyses have generated and against a backdrop of accumulating and
similarly dire science. In our most recent work on extreme heat,
particularly in introducing and concluding our results, we have embraced
starkly visceral and impassioned language because, as scientists, we see
how dangerous the future looks, how serious this moment is in the arc of
climate change, and our own moral obligation to communicate it. In this
presentation, we will examine the communications space our climate
scientists at UCS—as well as those at other institutions—have leaned
into. As sentient humans who see an emergency measured not just by data
points in charts and graphs but by the faces of those whose homes have
flooded, whose loved ones have lost their lives during heat waves, or
whose livelihoods are no longer viable, we can’t “tell it like it is”
without letting go of reticence and objectivity. The words we choose may
be perceived as dangerous, but they are not as dangerous as the world we
are ushering in. The house is objectively on fire. It’s time to shout.