Out of my confort zone
So last night I was challenged. I played with fire and I paid for it. I met my first climate change denier.
On our way to sample in Diskø Bay, Greenland, as part of the course "Fate of the Arctic Spring Bloom".
A few months back, I was approached by a colleague to speak at a local pub about what I do. I was skeptic at first, but after thinking about it, I decided to drop an email to the organisers to tell them I was interested.
As they say in their website (PubhD Glasgow), the idea is that "at each event, three PhD students, from any academic discipline, explain their work to an audience in a pub in exchange for a pint or two. The talks are at a “pub level” – the idea is that you don’t have to be an academic to understand the talks." And that is exactly what I prepared myself to. However, I ended up underestimating the presence of skeptics and deniers in the audience. Shame on me! But first a little about the organisation that helped hosting this PubhD Glasgow - the Glasgow Skeptics. Again, to avoid rephrasing, I will just paste their self-description: "Glasgow Skeptics is a grassroots, non-commercial organization committed to promoting science, critical thinking, and freedom of expression.", which, in my opinion, sounds like a great thing to join.
As I said in my previous post, we, scientists, need more training on how to talk and communicate our science to non-academics, especially the curious (and skeptical) public. It is more than fair that people have doubts and need reassurance. We, scientists, should not laugh at these questions and should do out very best to make them understand what we mean with what we say. In fact, we are like "translators" of scientific results, and this kind of mindset and training are still missing in our scientific programmes.
It is true that everyone can draw conclusions from scientific, peer-reviewed publications, but that does not necessarily mean they understand what is being said and it is up to us to change that. In short, I was not ready for this. I did not have any evidence right there with me, and I can actually come up with a short list of reasons (ok, call it excuses if you will) as to why I was so unprepared:
l am a non person-person, meaning that I am not a person that knows how to deal with people, (why do you think I decided to work with fish?);
I, probably stemming from 1, am very impatient, thus a terrible debater;
I was not ready with facts and figures to prove climate change, because I was not expecting to take that role. I was there to talk about plankton, but decided, in light of last week's USA elections, to change the end of my talk and add climate change to my agenda. Well, guess what? I paid my price;
I seriously have terrible memory (especially after having had a baby and lack of sleep being a daily struggle that I am still to master) and all those facts and figures to debate climate change have definitely not taken enough space in my brain. Shame on me! I should be better than that;
I obviously came up with MUCH BETTER answers after I came home to my half-asleep daughter and husband to not only the climate change deniers, but also the others.
Long story short, I learned my lesson. I should have been ready, and that is why we, scientists, should engage more in this sort of public speaking activities to challenge and train ourselves to have healthy and fruitful debates, and who knows if we don't end up changing some minds in the process?
Now I will end this post with a few clarifications of what I meant with a term that I think some of the public got confused with. With climate change denier, I refer to people denying the existence of a changing climate at the levels and rates that is currently occurring. It is important to differentiate a climate change denier (such as, for example, D Trump) from a climate change skeptic. The latter has questions concerning the levels or the rates of climate change that are being published, which are more likely to stem from the levels of uncertainty associated with climate models. As suggested by one of the members of last night's public, the book by Alan Longhurst (yes, one of the inventors of the Longhurst-Hardy Plankton Recorder) "Doubt and Certainty in Climate Science" - which is freely available here - perpetuates and promotes doubt, which is fair, but everyone, especially the non-academic people, should pay extra attention when using this sort of non-peer-reviewed references.
So, my fellow scientists, do not get discouraged with these encounters. Their concerns are real and it is up to us to put them away. It is also important that we don't loose enthusiasm on these topics even if someone uses arguments that seem very scientifically-driven - they are usually cherry-picked figures from a vast google-type "research". They may seem valid (and they surely sound scary to an unprepared scientist like myself yesterday), but they are usually just memorised facts.
Sunrise in Copenhagen, Denmark.
See you soon,
Sofia, a supporter for the fight against anthropogenic climate change
P.S.: I deeply regret not having enough evidence on the top of my head last night to reply to Robert Insall's question regarding the effect on temperature on plankton. Here is some insight. Thank you, Robert, and my sincere apologies.
