Problems with communication

It was what Luntz heard from the American people that scared him. They were contentious and argumentative. They didn't listen to each other as they once had. They weren't interested in hearing other points of view. They were divided one against the other, black vs. white, men vs. women, young vs. old, rich vs. poor. "They want to impose their opinions rather than express them," is the way he describes what he saw.


From "The Agony of Frank Luntz" by Molly Ball on "The Atlantic"

From the other side of the polar vortex

While everyone in the US is freezing, here in Italy we are still waiting for winter to arrive. I am seeing mosquitoes flying in my house - never seen mosquitoes in Florence in January in all my life. Today it was a 15 degrees C (almost 60 F). Italy is not Nebraska, but in January we were supposed to have snow, once! Instead, it was raining; almost tropical weather. I was expecting to see a T-Rex walking in the garden, in turn transformed into a Jurassic swamp.

It reminds to me the movie "The Secret of the Wings" - maybe you have seen it (OK, it is not for adults, but I loved it). It tells the story of a world sharply divided in two parts: in one it is always winter, in the other it is always spring. It seems that we are seeing something similar in the real word: the Polar Vortex has sharply divided Europe in two: a Winter World and a Spring World - you see below how we are standing in Europe (from MeteoGiuliacci):

They say that next week everything should change and that temperatures should drop of even 15 deg. C. It really looks like a fantasy movie.

The climate debate: what we have been doing wrong and how to do better

 

(image source)

The frog that jumped out blog went on line less than one year ago. With the new year, I thought a little rant of mine could be in order. I started it listing all what I thought we have been doing wrong in communication the climate problem but, as I went on, I found that there were also more positive things that I could say. So, the final result is a something that tries to suggest some positive strategy for communication on the basis of network theory and some other observations. Probably, this text wants to say too many things in too little space but, now that I wrote it, maybe you'll find a moment to give a look to it and tell me what you think of it.



Perhaps you had one of those nightmares where you are chased by a monster. You desperately try to run away, but you find that your feet are glued to the ground. With climate change, it is something like that. You almost feel the breath of the climate monster on the back of your neck, but you can't move. Nothing is moving. Whatever we do to try to convince people of the danger ahead is just like the proverbial water off the duck's back. It doesn't stick.

But why are we in this situation? After all, we have a strong case: look, we have data, we have models, we have the scientific community compact behind the idea of human caused climate change and about what's to be done to stop it. So, we stated our case, we tried to do our best to explain how things stand. Then, we expected someone to do something. But no. Nothing has happened, nothing happens.

We redoubled our efforts. We read the book titled "Don't be such a scientist." We set up blogs, we wrote on facebook and on twitter, we gave interviews. We tried to be clear, pleaising, entertaining, we tried to bring solutions, not problems. We followed the advice that says "more than all, never scare anyone!" But it didn't work and, by now, it is clear that it won't work. We are reduced to wait for the next environmental disaster that we hope will finally wake up people from their torpor. But we have had already enough environmental disasters and people are not taking notice. So, are we bound to to lose this battle? There follows some thoughts of mine on this matter.


1. So, what have we been doing wrong?

We piped unto you, and ye did not dance; we wailed, and ye did not mourn. Matthew 11:17

This blog, "The frog that jumped out," has been useful for me to focus on the issue of communicating climate science. So, I think I have some ideas on what exactly we did wrong and the answer can probably be found in a mix of human psychology and the field of science called "Network Theory." It has to do with the human tendency of forming tribes, structures that in network theory are called "small worlds". You can see the structure of a small world network in the figure - it is structured as clusters of nodes strongly linked with each other within the cluster, but weakly linked on the outside (image from "researchtoaction")

That the web is structured in this way has been proven. That this is a property of not just the Web, it is clear for everyone to see. The social world around us is a network of small worlds/tribes - some are political, some are religious, some are cultural, some are dedicated to sports, some are just made of friends, and there are many more. It works this way; after all, we are a tribal species: everyone of us is embedded in at least one small world network. You may also belong to different ones on different "planes" of your cultural existence; say, one for your professional network, one for your political activity, one for your hobbies and more. Then, if society is built like a network of small worlds, it means that most of the ongoing communication occurs inside small worlds. Not that there are no contacts between small worlds, but they are less numerous and weaker.

The point is that the unit of information processing and dissemination in the social sphere is the tribe, not the individual. these small words/tribes are tremendously resilient. They are not formally exclusive, you don't need a badge and an ID to belong to your social network tribe. It is nevertheless clear whether you belong or you don't. If you belong, you have to know the background, the formally and informally accepted ideas, you have to know the jargon and use it properly. This set of commonly accepted ideas makes the group resistant to change.

This is an oversimplification, perhaps, but I have been interacting with some especially weird tribes, such as the "chemtrails" tribe; that is those who believe that the world's governments are engaged in an evil plot to poison us by spreading poisons in the sky and doing that in the form of white trails ("chemtrails") left by planes. Now, how can anyone possibly believe in that? And yet, the tribal identification of believers is so strong that they form a close knit community which react aggressively to every attempt to make the members reason on the absurdity of their beliefs (you don't believe me? Try yourself and then you'll tell me). You see that identification mechanism at work in the comments of the blogs promoting the chemtrails idea - it is a sort of "chorus." The whole as a primeval flavor; something that reminds the behavior of creatures running in packs and howling at the full moon.

The chemtrails example is extreme, but illustrates the mechanism. You see the same phenomenon, for instance, in the comments of the anti-science blog "What's Up with That?" kept by Anthony Watts. You see how members of Watt's tribe reinforce each other's beliefs by using similar language and themes. To be a member you have to repeat the commonly held memes ("there has been no warming during the past 15 years") and attack climate scientists ("Micheal Mann is an enemy of mankind"). The resistance of tribes to new information and is truly amazing.

The problem is that there is almost no way to crack the belief system of a small tribe from outside. Targeting individuals doesn't work: that person will simply compare your statements to those of his/her tribe and conclude that yours have no weight. You may say, "but this is what science says" and the likely answer will be "so what?" If you insist, the reaction may be aggressive ("scientists have been cheating the public in order to get fat research grants"). Not even major climate linked disasters, from Katrina to Hayan, can budge the tribe from its beloved feelings.

Of course, the structure of the Web is nuanced and complex and only a minority of small worlds are actively hostile to science. Most are simply indifferent and won't, in themselves, generate a strong counter-reaction to the climate change meme. Repeating the basic climate concepts over and over would probably create a foothold in these neutral worlds. The problem is that the effort is countered by the equal and opposite activity of hostile tribes. They have been effective in positioning themselves as a legitimate opinion. They have done so by being highly active and visible on the Web. One of their weapons that of aggressively trolling in the comments of scientific sites. A few anti-science trolls can completely hijack any scientific discussion and transform it into a brawl. The big, big problem is that it has been found that the opinion of initially neutral people can be strongly influenced by negative anti-scientific comments.

It is here that we have been doing our crucial mistake as promoters of the idea that we should do something to stop climate change. We tend to deal with anti-science trolls as if they were people who honestly want to know about science. They may disguise themselves in that way, initially, but their purpose is a different one: they just want to hijack the debate and turn it into a fight. They know very well that this is a very effective tactic to affect the opinion of neutral people and we have been falling into the trap over and over - picking up useless fights that served only to give visibility to people who didn't deserve it. The final result is the stalemate we are observing. We are not succeeding in affecting the majority of people and, as a result, nothing is being done about climate. We piped unto you, and ye did not dance; we wailed, and ye did not mourn.


2. The way to do better. 

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. (Sun Tzu)

If we look at past debates, we see that there is a winning strategy for science. It is to isolate the anti-science tribes and make it clear that they are minority social areas whose opinions are held by people who have no scientific credentials. Think of the battle on the health effects of smoking, or of the battle about seat belts in cars or about drunk driving. These concepts had opponents, but the battles were won by isolating them and making clear that their non-mainstream opinions (e.g. that there is no danger with driving while drunk or without seat belts) are dangerous fringe opinions which have no scientific basis and should have no equal space in the debate about driving safety.  Only in this way, it was possible to obtain effective seat belt laws and to stop drunk driving. Many people were not especially happy about that, but they accepted the mainstream opinion. 

So, our objective in the climate debate is clear: we have to isolate the anti-science tribes and make it clear that their positions on climate, for instance that there is no danger from global warming, are fringe opinions with no scientific basis. Furthermore, these opinions are dangerous and should have no "equal space" in the debate about how to keep the Earth's climate safe for humans. If we can achieve that, then we can gradually penetrate the neutral small worlds and attain something. It is the strategy to get something done. 

Then, strategy needs tactics to be put into practice. And the basic tactics in communication is always the same: know your target. You must understand whom you are speaking to and tailor your message to them. Otherwise, it is lost time - actually it is worse than that: you achieve the opposite than what you want to achieve. So, we need to consider that, in the vast universe of the Web, we are talking to three kinds of people, each embedded in their small worlds: sympathetic, neutral, and hostile. The ways to deal with them are different.

- Speaking to people who are already sympathetic to science poses no problems. We are talking the same language - we understand each other. We are a small world, after all, although we are a scientific small world. 

- Speaking to neutral people is where you can use the advice that you can read, for instance, in books like "Don't be such a scientist." You have to be competent, you have to be clear, you have to be honest. If you do that, you don't have to follow particular rules in your job of informing people. For instance, you may have heard that you shouldn't scare people. It is true, but it doesn't mean you should sugar the pill so much that you turn yourself into a Ronald McDonald of climate. The best way, I think, is to be honest about what you are talking about and if you see serious danger ahead, you should say that. Most people, out there, are decent people who can appreciate honest talk. It takes time, you have to keep at that, but eventually it works.

- Speaking to people who belong to hostile tribes, well, it is simple: you don't! Our objective is to isolate them, denying them visibility, and we are learning how to do that. For instance Gavin Schmidt - climate scientists - recently refused to have a TV debate with a hostile opponent saying "Television is performance art, not scientific debate. We shouldn't confuse the two." Well said! That, of course, generated loud accusations against him of being a "coward". Sure, sure.... they can howl at the moon as much as they like - but they know very well that they were beaten. Schmidt perfectly understood that it would have been a mistake to give to his opponent the chance of appearing as if he were on an equal scientific footing and to have a wide exposure with that. And, recently, the Reddit's science forum banned climate deniers. You see? We are learning to know our enemy! And if we know our enemy (and ourselves) we can win this battle.

3. Conclusion

And if I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. Paul, Corinthians 13:2

The battle on climate is turning out to be the ultimate battle for humankind - if we lose it, we lose everything. You don't have to be a scientist or an expert to fight it, but if you have the right frame of mind it is your duty to fight. It is a tremendously difficult battle, but not an unwinnable one. But don't forget also another thing: science is not everything. The reason you fight is not just because you know that you are scientifically correct. A medical doctor is a good doctor not just because she knows the science of medicine, she is a good doctor because she cares about her patients. The same is for you. You are fighting the climate battle not just because you know the science of climate. It is because you care about the life of your friends, your family, your children, all of humankind and everything which is alive on this planet. This is the only way to win. 

This said, sorry for this rather long rant of mine. But, if you arrived all the way to here, I hope you might have found some useful suggestions in it.

Robots pass the Turing test: they'll debate climate change for us

Given the level of the debate on climate change in the comments of blogs and on twitter, I am not surprised that robots can easily pass the Turing test in there. A 2010 report, reproduced below, tells of a pro-science chatbot, but I am sure that there are anti-science chatbots as well. Isn't it nice? So much hassle avoided! In the end, I hope they'll come back telling us who won. Wouldn't it be a good idea also to have drones fight wars among themselves for us?

Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense

By C. Mims - from the MIT technology review

When he tired of arguing with climate change skeptics, one programmer wrote a chatbot to do it for him.

Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.

The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn’t happening or humans aren’t responsible for it.
It then spits back at the twitterer who made that argument a canned response culled from a database of hundreds. The responses are matched to the argument in question – tweets about how Neptune is warming just like the earth, for example, are met with the appropriate links to scientific sources explaining why that hardly constitutes evidence that the source of global warming on earth is a warming sun.

The database began as a simple collection of responses written by Leck himself, but these days quite a few of the rejoinders are culled from a university source whom Leck says he isn’t at liberty to divulge.

Like other chatbots, lots of people on the receiving end of its tweets have no idea they’re not conversing with a real human being. Some of them have arguments with the chatbot spanning dozens of tweets and many days, says Leck. That’s in part because AI_AGW is smart enough to run through a list of different canned responses when an interlocutor continues to throw the same arguments at it. Leck has even programmed it to debate such esoteric topics as religion - which is where the debates humans have with the bot often wind up.

“If [the chatbot] actually argues them into a corner, it tends to be two crowds out there,” says Leck. “There’s the guns and God crowd, and their parting shot will be ‘God created it that way’ or something like that. I don’t know how you answer that.”

The second crowd, Leck says, are skeptics so unyielding they won’t be swayed by any amount of argumentation.

Occasionally, the chatbot turns up a false positive - for example, it has a complete inability to detect sarcasm. This proved to be a problem when a record heat wave hit L.A. last summer, causing innumerable tweets of the form “It’s 113 degrees outside - good thing global warming’s a myth!”
Leck always apologizes when AI_AGW answers someone who isn’t actually arguing about the science of climate change and then subsequently whitelists his or her account. The bot also has a kind of learning algorithm in it in that can be trained not to respond to phrases that cause false positives.
In the future, Leck would like to expand AI_AGW by giving it the ability to learn new arguments from the twitter feeds of others who debate climate skeptics - allowing it to argue into the ground an ever expanding array of anti-science tweeters who are unwilling or unable to look up the proper scientific literature themselves.

In a way, what Leck has created is a pro-active search engine: it answers twitter users who aren’t even aware of their own ignorance.

Update: some guy on Hacker News sums it up better than I ever could.

Santa sells all his coal assets!

Happy Christmas to all the frogs who are trying to jump out of the boiling water before it is too late (and convincing all the other frogs, too!)

Climate change communication: why do we keep making the same mistakes?

We should know, by now, that what we have been doing in climate communication just doesn't work; we aren't getting anywhere. We need to think of something new, more effective.

Here, Joe Brewer, research director for Culture2 Inc., does just that, presenting some ideas based on the concept of "meme". The task we face is not going to be easy, but if don't try new methods, we are not going to succeed.

Greenhouse gases: are we sure it is our fault?

Data on atmospheric oxygen concentration from the Mauna Kea observatory (link). This result shows that oxygen goes down as carbon dioxide goes up - it is what you would expect as the result of the combustion of fossil fuels. And, yes, it is us who burn them. 

While the preferred weapon against climate science seems to be character assassination, it is also true that climate is a complex subject and there are perfectly correct reasons for perplexity. One is whether the CO2 increase in the atmosphere is really the cause of global warming change - and not an effect of it.

The reasoning goes as follows: we see an increase in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and, yes, we also see an increase of planetary temperatures. But how can we be sure that CO2 causes warming and not the reverse? After all, if something else (say, the Sun) were to heat the planet, then we would expect the oceans to release CO2! And in those plots that Al Gore was so fond to show in his movie, warming comes first, then CO2 increases. So, it could really be the Sun (or cosmic rays, or whatever else coming from outer space) and not us.

Alas, it doesn't work that way. The additional CO2 in the atmosphere does not come from the oceans. On the contrary, oceans are a sink that absorbs part of the CO2 we humans generate. How do we know it? Well, there are several ways; one is that ocean water is becoming more acidic. Now, CO2 is an acidic molecule. If oceans were emitting CO2, they would become less acid, not more acid. That shows that oceans are absorbing CO2, not emitting it. Another way, even simpler, is to look at the oxygen record - shown in the figure above.

Suppose that is the sun that warms the oceans and, consequently, causes them to release CO2 in the atmosphere. Then, oxygen is not consumed and you wouldn't expect its atmospheric concentration to change. Actually, if oceans are warming, the may release some oxygen together with the CO2, so the concentration of oxygen should increase. But this is not what we see. We see that the oxygen concentration in the atmosphere is going down, not up.

Suppose instead that CO2 comes from the combustion of fossil fuels. "Combustion" means combining the carbon and the hydrogen contained in these fuels with oxygen. So, the more we burn fuels, the less oxygen remains. The oxygen concentration, then, should go down with time. And this is exactly what we see (see figure above).

With plenty of fantasy, you might find a way to concoct a different theory explaining these data. But remember that there is something called the "Occam's razor." What we see is simple: we burn fossil fuels, we increase the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, that causes warming. It is straightforward: it is not the Sun, it is us.

• About the loss of oxygen in the atmosphere and its long term effects, see this post on Cassandra. 
• For a more detailed treatment of the same question discussed here, see this post on Real Climate
• About Al Gore's movie and the lag between temperature and CO2 concentration also see Real Climate