Fishburn Hedges

19.02.2010

Clare Hinkley considers some of the communications implications of "climategate". 

When Al Gore accepted his Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, he was praised by the committee for creating "an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming".

Fast forward two and half years, and the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Rajendra Pachuri is barely clinging to his job, and, according to the UK media, Gore’s hard-earned consensus has all but vanished.

Dented public confidence

The media storm created by the publication of leaked emails from Professor Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia, timed perfectly to coincide with the Copenhagen summit, has severely dented public confidence in the truth about climate change. 

At the same time it has presented a massive bump in the road for all those with an interest in communicating on sustainability. 

A Guardian poll in February revealed a quarter of those asked did not believe in climate change at all - a rise of eight percent from last year - while those convinced of the science thought claims about global warming’s potential effects had been exaggerated.

Distilling complex science into clear communication

“Climategate” has illustrated the massive communications challenge at the heart of global warming, namely the need to bring together a complex and sometimes contradictory series of historical science into one unified prediction for the future of the planet.

Then there is the challenge of turning that story into digestible soundbites to deliver to an often sceptical and impatient public, via the media who understandably want firm predictions over probabilities.

Ironically, the controversy has provided more exposure to the science behind climate change than perhaps even Al Gore achieved.  It has also illustrated what Tony Giddens, the renowned British sociologist and author of the Politics of Climate Change, refers to as the issue’s central paradox: that you can’t prove it until it’s actually here - and by then it’s too late.

Until then it is essentially a balance of probability, which any communicator will tell you won’t ever be all that compelling as an underlying message and motivation for behaviour change.

Unfortunately the scientific community, at the behest of policymakers, hasn’t been entirely honest about the probabilities involved, instead submitting to a popular desire for an easily understood and pictorially convenient “upward curve” of climate temperatures.

Own goals

Mr Pachuri, widely discredited for allowing the publication of suspect data within IPCC reports, has nevertheless hit back through a series of heavyweight media interviews with the Financial Times and International Herald Tribune. Not so much “mea culpa”, as a total denial of personal responsibility - as well as a refusal to apologise.

Professor Jones’ interview to the BBC was also a less than helpful comeback attempt, with his admission that he wasn’t that good at “organising data” providing plenty of incriminating headlines for the papers over Valentine’s weekend.

The right-leaning press in the UK has been instrumental in breaking and developing the climategate story, with the Telegraph group leading the charge with calls for an inquiry.

Not to be outdone, those on the left have gone one step further, forensically examining the issue in all its minutiae. The Guardian even launched its own “Special Investigation” led by investigative journalist Fred Pearce, running on three consecutive days in early February to examine the ‘who’ the ‘what’ and the ‘when’.

Rebuilding confidence

The big question, of course, is “What now?”  To rebuild public confidence in climate science, we urgently need people to believe in the science, and those communicating it must learn to live with the inconvenient inconsistencies in the data.

There are no certainties, but the risk of doing nothing is too great – that must be the core argument however unpalatable, and it requires a communications approach that treats people as adults and seeks to persuade with the facts. 

We need communications from the UN and national governments, highlighting not only the risks for the future, but also shedding light on what is happening today that relates to climate change: forests being lost, landfill waste piling up, threats to energy security, as well as positives such as new jobs in the “green economy”.

If these very present realities can be linked with the challenges and hopes of a low-carbon future, then perhaps we might get back on track with communicating on climate change.