Climate Change - As If We Care

At a AGU Town Hall meeting in San Francisco last night a group of engaged scientists discussed
"Directions in Climate Change Education and Communication"

...
The Panelists included Michael Mann, Richard Somerville, and James Hoggan.

Somerville started the show by underlining the urgency of the matter of climate change and he repeated several times that the science was clear and well understood. This is when I started to get slightly annoyed.  I just came from a meeting on Extreme geohazards in Spain where we discussed among a number of other issues, the challenge of communicating uncertainty. Climate change is no differently understood than extreme geohazards in this respect - there are uncertainties.

In my view scientists should stick to communicate science and not divert to politics. It undermines their credibility - at best. At this town hall meeting the participants did not discuss communication of science - they discussed politics and strategies to influence the public, the politicians etc. That is not what I signed up for and I noticed a certain disapproval from the rest of the group when I asked James Hoggan, a renowned PR-consultant, his advise on how we as scientists could best communicate uncertainty. Unfortunately, he didn't really answer my question. His focus at this meeting was basically his books and his award winning website desmogblog. That was all fine and dandy, but I'd be more interested in tapping into his professional PR competence...

Global warming evangelist has a message for West Texas - latimes.com

Hayhoe's success in changing other minds has been uneven.

Her book for evangelicals, "A Climate for Change," sells tepidly because Christian bookstores won't stock it. At a senior citizen center in Lubbock, a man shaking with rage shouted an expletive-studded monologue about how the greenhouse effect doesn't exist. At a talk for Texas Tech business school students, her arguments were simply dismissed. At the end of any given talk, perhaps one person might tell Hayhoe she's convinced him of the scientific consensus on global warming.

Note that in the photo of Hayhoe trying to convince us that CO2 might kill us all, she's both smiling and clutching some planet-killing bottled water.