"The Monterey Bay Aquarium did a huge, expensive, and well-crafted exhibit on climate change, but nobody showed up"

#120) Sawing Logs on a Burning Planet | The Benshi

This week I attended a panel discussion on the broad communication of climate change. Nice people, all admiring each other’s work. Great intentions. Much sense of urgency. “We MUST do something!”‘s all around. But nobody talked about the real crisis — how boring the topic of climate change is.

In contrast, I spoke on Monday at the USGS Pacific Climate Conference in Monterey, which was an excellent experience. Lots of great scientists there who are fired up about communicating this stuff. But a local friend mentioned something VERY distressing. The Monterey Bay Aquarium did a huge, expensive, and well-crafted exhibit on climate change, but nobody showed up. Visitors have been avoiding it like … the plague? The creators have been disappointed to see it’s not a very popular exhibit. Welcome to the real world.