Connecting climate change to everyday life: Guest blogger Christine Shearer
I regularly meet new people through this blog. Recently Christine Shearer contacted me to look over some paragraphs in her forthcoming book. Christine is a sociologist working on climate change. As my readers know, I believe that perspectives from many different fields are what we need to move our addressing climate change forward. I asked, and she agreed to write a guest blog.
Connecting climate change to everyday life by Christine Shearer
One of the interesting things, sociologically, about climate change science is just how political it has become. It is not, however, that people merely fall on different sides on the issue, depending upon their views concerning government regulation. In many ways this divide was socially engineered. In their research, sociologists Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap track how those opposed to climate change regulations helped transform growing national understanding and concern over global warming into a “nonproblem”, creating a political climate conducive toward the US Congress rejecting the binding greenhouse gas limits of the Kyoto Protocol. Regulation opponents did this by borrowing tactics from Big Tobacco: demanding certainty as the only acceptable standard for action, while simultaneously funding research to deliberately create uncertainty. Historian Naomi Oreskes has traced how many of the same scientists that questioned the science on smoking also went on to question acid rain, ozone depletion, and climate change. These efforts are aided by the media, which too often confuse balanced journalism with presenting various views on an issue, ignoring the weight of scientific consensus.
After Kyoto, public perception of global warming as a problem shrank among U.S. Republicans, marking the beginning of a growing partisan divide concerning global warming and the need for action. Conservatives are arguably exposed to more media sources that question climate change, such as the recently leaked memo of a Fox News editor ordering its journalists to always state that climate change data has been called into question when discussing the topic. Gallup surveys also suggest there has been a measurable decrease since Kyoto in just how severe a problem much of the U.S. public – Republicans and Democrats – regard climate change.
This has been the brilliance of the climate change “doubt” campaign – to tame down the urgency with which people wanted action on climate change, and to create pockets of the US population that are absolutely convinced the entire issue is a hoax.
More concerning is that this is happening while the information on climate change is growing more alarming, with glaciers melting more rapidly than many models had predicted, with new studies suggesting carbon dioxide may stay in the atmosphere for longer than had been previously estimated, and with increasing signs that many of the world’s carbon sinks are growing stressed. The disconnect between scientific research and mainstream public opinion is huge, with many scientists quietly acquiescing that we should be performing small-scale experiments of geoengineering, since the social dynamics concerning climate change look so unlikely to change anytime soon.
That is why many organizations like 350.org have been calling for a social movement on this issue, to create the large-scale response needed to push social change. Activists have been trying to argue that action on climate change is a win-win-win: we clean up our environment, stimulate the economy with new technologies and jobs, and remove our dependence on unstable fuels.
What this movement needs, however, is some urgency. Research on climate change and risk perception show people think of climate change as a distant concern, not immediate to them, and not as pressing as other issues like the economic crisis. This is a problem, because the history of social movements and social change show that people often do not get active and involved in an issue until they can connect it to their daily lives, until it touches them personally. The economic crisis is touching people personally. Climate change, in the public mind - not so much.
This is where climate scientists could have a very important role to play: to begin shattering the taboo between weather and climate.
Right now, the conventional wisdom is that no specific weather event can be attributed to climate change. This is of course “true.” But it is the wrong question, and its persistence is having disastrous effects. First, it reinforces the public view that climate change is a remote, long-term concern not immediately affecting them. Second, it falls into the “uncertainty” argument - since you can't say that climate change “caused” a weather event, it ends up being an argument of doubt (and inaction) that plays into climate deniers' hands.
Again, the problem is it’s the wrong question, and we need to reframe the issue. Luckily, some are already doing this. In his paper “How Warm Was This Summer?” NASA scientist James Hansen suggests climate scientists reframe the question to: “Would these events have occurred if atmospheric carbon dioxide had remained at its pre-industrial level of 280 ppm?” To which he says: “An appropriate answer in that case is ‘almost certainly not.’”
Other scientists, for example, Ben Santer are using climate models as a “control experiment” for pre-industrial greenhouse gas levels, to determine how many times an extreme event of a given magnitude should have been observed in the absence of human interference, and compare that to present conditions, called “fractional attributable risk.
These are much needed advances, for both scientific and public understanding. The more people connect daily occurrences to increasing greenhouse gases, the more they’ll want to do something about it. Now.
The next step, of course, is getting the media and meteorologists to pay attention. But the more scientists discuss daily events, the more social scientists, activists, and other concerned people will demand attention be paid to it. And that will help raise the broader attention and concern we need around climate change. Because the best option, of course, is mitigation. And sadly it is an option we have yet to try.
Christine Shearer
Christine Shearer is a researcher for CoalSwarm, part of SourceWatch, and a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at UC Santa Barbara. She is managing editor of Conducive, and author of the forthcoming book, "Kivalina: A Climate Change Story" (Haymarket Books, 2011).
Figure 1: Conceptual framework showing (in the shaded area) the steps involved in planned adaptation to climate variability and change from Application of environmentally sound technologies for adaptation to climate change; United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat, Bonn, Germany, Technical Paper FCCC/TP/2006/2, 107 p
Reader Comments
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Listen, I hate to bring this up, but that kind of thinking seems to be what the climate change debate is about. You see, it's true the economy has been bad, but that doesn't mean that the correlation between declining belief in global warming and increased concern about the economy are related. For example, we are moving through the Milky Way. Do you believe our changed position in the Milky Way has anything to do with our changed attitudes about Justin Bieber? Well, do you?
A recently published estimate of Earth%u2019s global warming trend is 0.63 0.28 W/m2, as calculated from ocean heat content anomaly data spanning 1993%u20132008. This value is not representative of the recent (2003%u20132008) warming/cooling rate because of a %u201Cflattening%u201D that occurred around 2001%u20132002. Using only 2003%u20132008 data from Argo floats, we find by four different algorithms that the recent trend ranges from %u20130.010 to %u20130.160 W/m2 with a typical error bar of 0.2 W/m2. These results fail to support the existence of a frequently-cited large positive computed radiative imbalance.
sorry to repeat, but I couldn't correct the previous post
From the article:
“Previous studies have shown that the upper ocean is warming, but our analysis determines how much additional heat the deep ocean is storing from warming observed all the way to the ocean floor,” said Sarah Purkey, an oceanographer at the University of Washington and lead author of the study.
Given that they start off with an incorrect premise, as indicated in the article I submitted, could it be that their conclusions are incorrect?
Michael, you always have a pretty picture, but you always fail to address the issue. It is incongruous to believe that surface waters would flat line or cool because deeper waters are now absorbing increased heat. It makes no scientific sense. You know this, but you will persist while you avoid the conclusions from the other study. We all know that heat rises. I'm sure someone here can explain what I believe to be true intuitively. That is, the surface waters cannot maintain a level temperature or lowering temperature while the waters beneath increase in temperature.
Very good on heat rising and convection currents Martini!
It is truly astounding how foolhardy and stupid some are. We can look at modern history to learn that it has been capitalism and democracy that has controlled pollution and maintained the environment. All we have to do is look behind the former Iron Curtain to know this. And yet some fool will write an article and another a book defying what is so obvious. Wealth creation is the savior of the environment and even the arts. This has always been true.
It stands to reason that as the surface warms the lower depths will warm some also.
This graph is easy to explain:
1. The margins of error are so large what we're looking at is a statistical tie.
2. The graph starts during La Niña conditions (2000-1) and ends with El Niño (2010).
What else would you expect it to show but warming? There may well be an underlying amount of warming due to CO₂ within the past ten years, but your graph doesn't show that. At most, it's representative of each temperature measurement's variation in response to changing ENSO conditions.
It's not really proof of anything one way or the other but it definitely doesn't say what you claim it does.
McBill, are you a collectivist?
A socialist?
A communist?
Oh, by the way, how many superfund sites are there in Poland,
In Hungary,
In the former Soviet Union?
In China?
Yes, history does repeats itself because of fools like...
Well you fill in the blank.
LOL. Your post is meant as a joke, right?
Florida, you really demonstrate a lack of basic understanding. The internet was discovered and advanced by mankind. There was no more collectivism involved in its making than the making of language, reading , writing and arithmetic.
Collectivism is any philosophic, political, economic or social outlook that emphasizes the interdependence of every human in some collective group and the priority of group goals over individual goals.
The internet did not REQUIRE that the makers of it be forced to think and work as one. Do you grasp the difference?
No one is forced to be a part of the internet. We must abide by its rules much as you drive by the rules laid out by the state or city or for that matter your landlord. Those rules don't create a collective anymore than living in any town under its laws creates a collective.
It is the forced sharing of your labors, IMO, that is the fingerprint of the collective.
Who gets all the money?
Pardon me. What is it EXACTLY that you claim I am denying?
What EXACTLY is it you think I am arguing with you about?
I thought my claim was that the internet was not discovered and advanced by a collectivist movement.
Are you saying that it is conservative philosophy that leads to standards and regulations?
I'm having a tough time trying to understand what your saying.
I have a BS in Business Administration. It sounds to me like you have a BS, a MS and maybe even a PHd in science, but don't know what you're talking about when it comes to economics and business. Saying that economics documents the distribution of wealth is like saying the study of medicine documents your heart rate. Quit being naive.
Economics is an analytical field of study. We can debate whether or not it is science, but it certainly isn't history or journalism.
The right to personal ownership of property is as important as the other rights you mentioned and that right and capitalism are not necessary to the study of economics. I'm sure the former Soviet Union had its share of economists. Incidentally, they weren't there to document the distribution ofd wealth either. They were there to make five year plans.They were bad at their work.
The internet is what we're using right now and soviet economics is the type of economics that developed ideas similar to the ideas evolving today to redistribute wealth under the banner of staving off global warming.
Those ideas will be about as effective as the Soviets five year plans and lead to destruction of the world's leading economies. But, hey, that's just my opinion.
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