As a science communicator part of my job is to take the emotional temperature of the climate community—something that can be measured on well-known, well-validated anxiety scales.
I’m often surprised by the disconnect between scientists and the public.
To say the scientists were worried would be old news—and an understatement. When we first asked the climate community in the mid-90s, most researchers said they were already Worried or Very Worried, with fewer than 30% claiming to be Not Concerned about climate change.
But then, in a Nature editorial in 2010, Professor Paul Ehrlich mentioned that “[e]veryone is scared shitless.” Such a comment might have been dismissed as hyperbole coming from anyone else, but we all knew Ehrlich’s reputation. You don’t become the world’s most respected ecologist if you’re in the habit of being wrong about shit.
So we sampled the scientists again. And guess what?
The “Unconcerned” [denialist] researchers now made up a tiny 3%.
Meanwhile, the entire mainstream had become Worried or higher.
22% of climate scientists today are Very Worried, 28% are Scared Shitless and a whopping 15% are now Shitting Themselves. In this top category the median scientist has involuntarily shat him- or herself eleven times in the last 30 days.
Whenever a climate scientist sets foot off campus these days, she’s understandably appalled by how out of touch the general public is.
“Are they reading the same IPCC reports as us?!,” one colleague asked me incredulously.
You’d never guess from watching shoppers at the average suburban mall that an ecological sword of Damocles was hanging over them, or that science had no way of telling when it would drop.
But it wasn’t always like this.
What went wrong? At what point did the public decide things weren’t so bad after all—and why?
The scientists never said you could stop panicking. The scientists never said you could get on with your lives. Yet that’s what everybody appears to be doing.
It’s easy to forget that only a few years ago, pre-Copenhagen, you could actually find laypeople who ‘got’ the science so well they were almost as incapacitated by terror as the scientists themselves. To hear their narratives of despair and resignation you might have been forgiven for expecting Western consumerism and economic activity to collapse at any moment. (Which, incidentally, would have solved 90 percent of the problem in one fell swoop.)
As a communicator I heard the same question wherever I went:
If the scientists are right, why bother getting out of bed? We’re fuck*d. We’re all fuck*d.
People everywhere were giving serious thought to starving themselves. (Yep. Even Americans.) What was the point of eating, they asked? They’d only have to shit themselves again when the evening news came on.
The Zeitgeist was unmistakeable: we’re all climate scientists now.
Child psychologists and counsellors kept detailed statistics on the young people presenting with climate-related bedwetting and nightmares. The growth in cases, month to month, was so rapid in the 4-to-7 age bracket, we fully expected an epidemic of fear that would—if nothing else—have locked in a cohort of kids emotionally receptive to the message†.
But for whatever reason, the trend wasn’t sustained. Today, clinics everywhere in the Western world are reporting the same bad news: the traditional terrors of childhood—most of them imaginary!—are overtaking climate change once more.
It’s vexing. Perhaps it’s a lost cause to even try to explain this so-called Fear Gap.
Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn’t adopt the attitude of a certain top scientist.
I can’t tell you his name, but suffice it to say he’s rumored to be the first researcher to shit himself in the middle of his own lecture. As a leader in the field, he knows he’s a high-priority target for the Subterranean War on Science—and that anything he says can and will be taken out of context, misrepresented, cherry-picked, totally ignored and used against him.
Let’s call him Professor Peter Person.
At a scientific conference a few years ago, a group of us communicators were racking our brains to understand the lack of public fear. Where had we gone wrong? Was it something we’d said?
Failed to say?
Overhearing our orgy of self-pity, Prof. Person began to chuckle. In his entire career, he told us, he’d never doubted or second-guessed himself just because some non-scientist didn’t ‘get’ it.
“What do you expect? They’re the public,” said the Professor with a shrug.
“They’re irrational.”
†Therapists were faced with an unusual ethical dilemma at this point: was it right to treat a “symptom” like recurrent, obtrusive nightmares about climate change when even the world’s top scientists were having them on a nightly basis, and considered them perfectly appropriate to the horrific nature of their predictions?
CLIMATE NUREMBERG 
I have a PhD in pharmacokinetics. The current datasets don’t appear very worry some. If people would stop messing with past data, or at least explain why past temperatures keep getting reduced, I might be more interested in their results. In my job, you get fired for playing with past data.
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Ahh… ! Quite brilliant. “They’re the general public,” he shrugged. “They’re irrational.”
Captures it all so well. Love the title too!
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So that’s one vote in favor of the public irrationality thesis. I suppose my main reservation about agreeing with the prominent scientist who came up with it—”Pete Person”—is that science communication as a profession needs to believe in the common man’s capacity to reason, at least minimally. This faith may or may not be naïve, but without it we’d all be futilitarians. Nevertheless, Person is not a person to be dismissed lightly. (He’s already being called a young Ehrlich.)
I’m glad you found the title apt. I don’t pretend to have the solution, but asking the right question is always the first step.
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Ahh… ! Quite brilliant. “They’re the general public,” he shrugged. “They’re irrational.”
Captures it all so well. Especially love the title!
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In a 2010 Nature editorial Professor Paul Ehrlich mentioned that, “Everyone is scared shitless.” A comment like this might have been dismissed as hyperbole if it had come from anyone else, but we all knew Ehrlich’s reputation.
Yeah, we all know his reputation. He’s the guy who said the following, among other things:
I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000 (Quote from 1969).
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And he began his most famous book, The Population Bomb, with this statement: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”
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So Obama made him his science advisor…go figure.
What could go wrong with that?
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Brad, are you familiar with the book “Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life” by Kari Norgaard?
You can see some of it here on Amazon
Norgaard went to stay for a while with people in a small town in Norway, during an unusually mild winter. When she asked people about climate change, they said, yes, they were concerned about it. But, amazingly, despite the mild winter and saying they were concerned, they CONTINUED TO GO ABOUT THEIR EVERYDAY LIVES! They would take their children to school, and even watch TV. Norgaard was so astonished that they were not all marching on parliament in protest, that she wrote a book about it. Well worth reading, or even blogging about, if you haven’t already.
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Thanks for calling my attention to this book, Paul. No I haven’t read it, but it sounds too important to wait. I should really just start blogging my opinion about it right now, as my science-communication idols Peter Gleick and Dana Nuccitelli would do. Amazon can take up to a week to deliver.
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Ha, and don’t forget top scientist wotty, who in a post earlier this week announced that he was alarmed by the IPCC report, though he hadn’t quite got round to reading any of it yet.
I was reminded of the Norgaard book by your final statement about how irrational the public is and the clever social scientist who spotted this. Her book is exactly this. If you search Wuwt I think you will find an article about her.
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Fair enough—perhaps the scientist whose bowels had turned to water should have asked me incredulously, “Are they not-reading the same IPCC reports as us?!”
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Steve mcdonald
Disgraceful alarmism again from the ABC and the BOM. When will they learn that we not as dumb as they demand we should be.
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If you are among the 12% of climate scientists who are regularly shiting themselves,would they need to be taking advice from a qualified dietician?, I imagine that if you were in this category it might be good idea to lay off the lentils,chickpeas ,refried beans and move into something more constipating like rump steak and potatoes,any suggestions?
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A quick Google search fails to indicate that you have any qualifications whatsoever as a climate physician, Old Griffo.
Please respect our unwritten Moderation Policy against citation-free, uncredentialled scientific and medical advice.
Commenting at ClimateNuremberg is not a right but an honor.
Thank you.
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St Paul’s (Ehrlich) stools ought be preserved f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶p̶o̶s̶t̶e̶r̶i̶o̶r̶ for posterity.
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“You don’t become the world’s most respected ecologist if you’re in the habit of being wrong about shit.”
Are you serious? Ehrlich has made a career of “being wrong about shit.”
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Just to be clear, are the categories all in ascending order? You describe the top category as shitting themselves and the one below as scared shitless. I’m no climate scientist, but surely you can only be scared shitless AFTER you’ve finished shitting yourself. Does the fear not build incrementally, or are some scientists leapfrogging categories of fear?
Climate science is hard!
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