Seven years ago, scientists published to help Americans understand the implications change. Here’s why you’ve never heard of it.
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Global warming is definitely happening. That’s the easy part. But it’s no cinch to dramatize the phenomenon, or to personalize it. As scientists repeatedly caution, climate change can’t be cited as the direct cause of any individual weather event, no matter how extreme. Furthermore, many climate-induced changes are occurring on a relatively slow timescale.
Take sea-level rise: It’s one of the most certain outcomes of global warming, but at least at the moment the increase is probably about an inch per decade—not exactly something you’d notice on your beach vacation. And as for the culprits behind it all—the greenhouse gases—they’re invisible in the atmosphere. All of which raises the question: How do you make people wake up about global warming, take it seriously, and perceive it as a core component of the future they’ll have to live with? How do you get them to prepare, just as they might for a terrorist attack, or a pandemic, or an intense hurricane landfall?
One idea would be a national initiative to make climate science and its implications accessible to every American, translating the science in a way that citizens cannot only understand but also begin to perceive in their backyards and communities. Sure, you’d need a rigorous scientific report, but you’d also have to go beyond mere technical jargon to engage local stakeholder communities with issues that will affect them. You’d have to bring global warming down from the atmosphere to a personal level.
Such a project actually did exist once, though you might not have heard of it.
… industry groups, conservative think tanks, and global warming skeptics despised the National Assessment like nothing else in the world of climate science (which is really saying something).
… after they gave the report their thumbs down, their gladiatorial champion—the Bush administration—lopped off its head. Not only did the White House undermine the first incarnation of the assessment, released in 2000, but rather than following up on this pioneering experiment in a serious way, it censored mere references to it out of subsequent government climate science documents. Then the administration tried to cover its tracks by replacing a required follow-up assessment with what amounted to a scientific sham.
Chris Mooney is Washington correspondent for Seed magazine and author of the new book “Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming” (2007).
