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Six Degrees, but no PhD
Mark Lynas, Guardian
Not being a scientist is a help rather than a hindrance when it comes to communicating – with the necessary passion – the findings of scientific research
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“So, are you a scientist then?” It’s a very frequent question whenever someone finds out that I write about global warming. No, I reply, though the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change once referred to me – entirely incorrectly – as Dr Lynas. But that’s as close as I’m ever going to get. I’m a journalist – or worse – a campaigner. So how can I be trusted to convey meaningful information about a subject as complex and controversial as climate change?
Rather than being a setback, however, I would claim that my lack of academic qualifications as a scientist is actually precisely what does qualify me to try and communicate effectively to the general public about this issue. After all, I’m one of the latter rather than the former.
As a layperson, I have a pretty good idea of just how incomprehensible much of modern science is to ordinary people – because I’ve spent a lot of time struggling to understand it myself. It’s not just the jargon, though that is part of the problem, but the sheer complexity of the methodology. To understand a journal paper on paleoclimate, for instance, you might need to know what benthic foraminifera are, what Bayesian analysis means, or what a mass spectrometer does. There’s a yawning gulf between what goes in the scientific literature and what most people are able to understand.
That is where science communicators come in. My aim as a popular science writer is to try and synthesise a meaningful bigger picture out of this morass of information. And that is precisely what scientists themselves (with some very notable exceptions, like the biologist Steve Jones) are generally rather bad at doing.
Mark Lynas is a freelance writer working full-time on climate change
(18 June 2008)
Nice “apologia pro vita sua”. Lynas’ book just won Britain’s most prestigious prize for science writing from the Royal Society.
At the recent Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) conference at Stanford, someone summarized the difference in this way: scientists are obsessive-compulsives, journalists have attention deficit disorder. -BA
Environmental Stories You Can Localize: climate change, food crisis, water pollution
Beth Parke, Poynter Online (“Everything You Need To Be a Better Journalist”)
While just the word global may scare off some editors, enterprising journalists are finding hyper-local impacts of global warming that matter.
Look, for instance, at Boston Globe reporter Beth Daley’s global warming series, titled “The 45th Parallel: Warming Where We Live.” The series, which began in January 2007, won first place in the environmental category of the National Headliner Awards and was a 2008 Pulitzer finalist.
To examine how warming climate has taken a toll on local folks, Daley traveled to Maine to talk to the proprietor of a dog-sledding business who was trying to make a living with no snow. Even New England’s breathtaking fall foliage — a big draw for its tourist industry — seems headed for an upset, as does skiing and the production of maple sugar and blueberries, all of which depend on the weather.
Daley’s series is just one of many done in recent years as scientists accumulate more and more evidence that human emissions and activities are causing a now observable set of changes in temperature, precipitation and ecosystems. But there are many more localized climate change stories to be done.
… Local Food Story Changing Daily
No longer just a hip trend, the local food movement is now a story of economic necessity and public health for some communities. There is probably a locavore news peg near you.
Environmentalists, health enthusiasts, gourmet chefs, gardeners and small-farm advocates in recent years have put forth all kinds of reasons to eat as much locally-grown food as possible. Today’s news headlines are offering even more. As gasoline rises above $4 a gallon, “food-miles” (how far food travels before it gets to you) are as hard on wallets as the more familiar miles-per-gallon. As McDonald’s and other chains pull sliced tomatoes from their menus over worries of salmonella contamination, some people can’t wait for ripe, flavorful home-grown tomatoes (and are planting more).
Beth Parke, executive director of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), and Joseph A. Davis, editor of the SEJ TipSheet Newsletter.
(24 June 2008)
Although the suggestions in this article are directed at journalists, they’re useful for anyone preparing information on peak oil, climate, etc. Key concept – incorporate the local angle. The Society of Journalists maintains a helpful web site. They update their Environmental headline page every weekday. -BA
The Internet and Its Discontents
Michael Pastore, Epublishers Weekly
“The unexamined online life is not worth living.”
… Does the Net that snares so many of our waking hours make us more human, or less? … Invented around 1972, at the end of the American counterculture, the Internet, and its most prominent brain-child, the World Wide Web (born in 1989), have been hailed – and rightfully so – as the greatest communication tools since the printing press. Despite its youth and inexperience, the Internet has already bestowed a cornucopia of benefits and blessings on humankind. These boons affect almost everyone, not merely the point-and-clique generation – who can always be found gaping at some kind of screen – surfing, texting, sexting, twittering and plurking.
Let us count the ways the Internet improves our lives.
… The perils of using the Internet are no less tremendous than its benefits. A hacker with a laptop and Internet connection, sitting on a curb in Eastarmpit, Marzipanistan, could attack and devastate computer systems in any major city worldwide. … The heartbreak of psoriasis is nothing compared with the anxiety of malware – insidious invaders of your home computer, known in the jargon as worms, viruses, Trojan horses, spyware, rootkits, backdoors, botnets, keystroke loggers, dialers, and adware. … Spam accounts for more than 90% of all email messages; and pornography swallows more than 70% of the entire World Wide Web. … Anxiety caused by Information Overload – and the problems of how to keep up with technology and manage the assault of our exponentially-growing tsunami of information – is a problem that can only be addressed by acquiring more information. …
… Fortunately, using caution, knowledge, and uncommon sense, we can avoid (or minimize the effects of) these scourges of the Information Age. They are clear and present dangers; and it’s not too difficult to find reliable websites, savvy commentators, and free software that may keep us relatively free from cyberharm.
… The Information Revolution giveth, and the Information Revolution taketh away: should we call the game a stalemate or a draw? … Unfortunately, there is another set of dangers, far more subtle and elusive than the ones mentioned above. These days … there are only a handful of critics who dare to ask “why?”, “what’s it doing to us?’ and “should we?”. Neil Postman, who died in 2003, is one of the enlightened few. His 1992 book on this theme is Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture To Technology. Postman’s book is brilliant gem with one flaw only: it was published before the colossal expansion of the Web. What we need is a new book to explore the pros and cons of the new technologies.
Lee Siegel has written it. The book is called Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. In a pyrotechnic series of profound questions and sharp insights, Siegel’s book aims its criticisms at the dark heart of Internet, at the people who use it unquestioningly, and at the makers who, with all the energy of high-school cheerleaders, ceaselessly promote it.
(9 June 2008)
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