Cultural Cognition Blog

Climate change & the media: what's the story? (Answer: expressive rationality)

2012-02-22T22:28:49Z

Max Boykoff has written a cool book (material from which played a major role in a panel session at the 2012 Ocean Sciences conference) examining media coverage of climate change in the U.S.

Who Speaks for the Climate? documents in a more rigorous and informative way than anything I've ever read the conservation of "balance" in the media coverage of the climate change debate no matter how lopsided the scientific evidence becomes.

Boykoff's own take -- and that of pretty much everyone I've heard comment on this phenomenon -- is negative: there is something wrong w/ norms of science journalism or the media generally if scientifically weak arguments are given just as much space & otherwise treated just as seriously as strong ones.

I have a slightly different view: "balanced" coverage is evidence of the expressive rationality of public opinion on climate change.

News media don't have complete freedom to cover whatever they want, however they want to. Newspapers and other news-reporting entities are commercial enterprises. To survive, they must cover the stories that people want to read about.

What people want to read are stories containing information relevant to their personal lives. Accordingly, one can expect newspapers to cover the aspect of the "climate change story" that is most consequential for the well-being of their individual readers.

The aspect of the climate change story that's most consequential for ordinary members of the public is that there's a bitter, persistent, culturally polarized debate over it. Knowing that has a much bigger impact on ordinary individuals than knowing what the science is.

Nothing an individual thinks about climate change will affect the level of risk that climate change poses for him or her. That individual's behavior as consumer, voter, public discussant, etc., is just too small to have any impact --either on how carbon emissions affect the environment or on what governments do in response.

However, the position an individual takes on climate change can have a huge impact on that' person's individual social standing within within his or her community. A university professor in New Haven CT or Cambridge Mass. will be derisively laughed at and then shunned if he or she starts marching around campus with a sign saying "climate change is a hoax!" Same goes for someone in a mirror image hierarchical-individualistic community (say, a tobacco farmer living somewhere in South Carolina's 4th congressional district) who insists to his friends & neighbors, "no, really, I've looked closely at the science -- the ice caps are melting because of what human beings are doing to the environment."

In other words, it's costless for ordinary individuals to take a positon that is at odds with climate science, but costly to take one that has a culturally hostile meaning within groups whose support (material, emotional & otherwise) they depend on.

Predictably, then, individuals tend to pay a lot of attention to whatever cues are out there that can help them identify what cultural meanings (if any) a disputed risk or related fact issue conveys, and to expend a lot of cognitive effort (much of it nonconscious) to form beliefs that avoid estranging them their communities.

Predictably, too, the media, being responsive to market forces, will devote a lot more time and effort to reporting information that is relevant to identifying the cultural meaning of climate change than to information relevant to determining the weight or the details of scientific evidence on this issue.

So my take on Boykoff's evidence is different from his.

But it is still negative.

It might be individually rational for people to fit their perceptions of climate change and other societal risks to the positions that predominate in their communities but it is nevertheless collectively irrational for them all to form their beliefs this way simultaneously: the more impelled culturally diverse individuals are to form group-congruent beliefs rather than truth-congruent ones, the less likely democratic institutions are to form policies that succeed in securing their common welfare.

The answer, however, isn't to try to change the norms of the media. They will inevitably cover the story that matters to us.

What we need to do, then, is change the story on climate change. We need to create new meanings for climate change that liberate science from the antagonistic ones that now make taking the "wrong" position (any position) tantamount to cultural treason.

Ocean Science Meeting science communication panel

2012-02-21T17:25:25Z

Here's where I am (or will be in few hrs).

Plan to say (1) there is a science of science communication; (2) it has assembled a good deal of data on why the public is divided on climate change; (3) what that data show is that the explanation is neither lack of scientific knowledge nor the inability to engage scientific information in a rational or systematic fashion ("system 2" etc); (4) what does explain conflict is motivated reasoning (cultural & otherwise); and (5) dispelling the conflict requires communication strategies that are responsive to this dynamic.

More later!

Could geoengineering cool the climate change debate?

2012-02-20T06:14:56Z

Geoengineering (according to the National Academy of Sciences) “refers to deliberate, large-scale manipulations of Earth’s environment designed to offset some of the harmful consequences of [greenhouse-gas induced] climate change.” But what impact might the advent of this emerging technology have on the science-communication environment in which the public makes sense of the evidence for climate change and its significance?

Geoengineering is still very much at the drawing board stage, but the sketches of what it might look like—from solar-reflective nanotechnology flying saucers to floating mist-emitting “cloud whiteners”—are pretty amazing.

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society in the U.K. are among the preeminent scientific authorities that have called for stepped up research efforts to develop geoengineering—and to assess the risks that it might itself pose to the physical environment.

Also very much in need of research (and getting it from an expert UK team that includes Nick Pidgeon) are the science-communication challenges that geoengineering is likely to confront.

Indeed, anxiety over the impact that geoengineering could have on public opinion is now putting research into the underlying science at risk.

All the issues surrounding geoengineering, including the ethical ones, obviously demand open public deliberation.

But critics oppose even permitting research to begin lest it lull the public into a state of false security that will enervate any support for carbon emission limits—a dynamic labeled (mislabeled really, given the well-established and familiar technical meaning of the term in economics) the “moral hazard” effect.

Political resistance fueled by this argument resulted in postponement of a very rudimentary scientific experiment (one involving the operation of a high-pressure water hose attached to a helium balloon) that was supposed to be conducted by scientists at Cambridge University last fall.

CCP recently conducted a study to see what impact geoengineering might have on the science-communication environment. We found no support for the “moral hazard” hypothesis. Indeed, the study, which was conducted with both US and UK subjects, found that geoengineering might well improve the quality of public deliberations by reducing cultural polarization over climate change science.

The study involved an experiment in which subjects assessed a scientific study on climate change. The study (a composite of two, which appeared in Nature and Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences) reported researchers’ conclusion that previous projections of carbon dissipation had been too optimistic and that significant environmental harm could be anticipated no matter how much carbon emissions were reduced in the future.

The subjects, all of whom read the dissipation study, were divided into three groups, each of which was assigned to read a different mock newspaper article. Subjects in the “anti-pollution” condition read an article that reported the recommendation of scientists for even stricter CO₂ limits. Subjects in the “geoengineering condition” read an article that reported the recommendation of scientists for research on geoengineering, on which the article also supplied background information.

Finally, a “control condition” group read an article about a municipality’s decision to require construction companies to post bonds for the erection of traffic signals in housing developments.

Logically speaking, what one proposes to do about climate change (implement stricter carbon emission limits, investigate geoengineering, or even put up more traffic signals) has no bearing on the validity of a scientific study that purports to find that climate change is a more serious problem than previously had been understood.

But psychologically one might expect which newspaper article subjects read to make a difference. The “moral hazard” argument, for example, posits that information about geoengineering will induce members of the public to discount the seriousness of the threat that climate change poses.

That’s not what we found, however. Indeed, contrary to the “moral hazard” hypothesis, subjects in the geoengineering were slightly more concerned than ones in the anti-pollution and control conditions.

We also found that the experimental assignment affected how culturally polarized the study subjects (in both countries) were. The subjects in the anti-pollution condition were the most polarized over the validity of study (whether computer models are reliable, whether the researchers were biased, etc.); subjects in the geoengineering condition were the least.

We had hypothesized this pattern based on cultural cognition research.

That research shows that individuals tend to form perceptions of risk that fit their values. Thus, egalitarian communitarians, who are morally suspicious of commerce and industry, find it congenial to believe those activities are dangerous and thus worthy of regulation. Hierarchical individualists, in contrast, tend to be dismissive of environmental risk claims, including climate change, because they value commerce and industry and perceive (unconsciously) that such claims will result in their being restricted.

These meanings were reinforced by the newspaper article in the anti-pollution condition, resulting in the two groups becoming even more divided in that condition on the validity of the carbon-dissipation study.

But the information on geoengineering, we posited, would dissipate the usual cultural meanings associated with climate change science. Because it shows that there are policy responses aside from restricting commerce and industry, information on geoengineering reduces the threat that evidence of climate change poses to hierarchical individualist sensibilities and thus the psychic incentive to dismiss that evidence out of hand.

This conjecture was the basis for predicting the depolarization effect actually observed in the geoengineering condition.

What’s the upshot?

Well, certainly not that geoengineering should be embraced as a policy solution to climate change. Whether that’s a good idea depends on the sort of research that the Royal Society and National Academy of Sciences have proposed.

Moreover, although this study furnishes evidence that engaging in that sort of research—and inviting public discussion of its implications—will actually improve the science communication environment, rather than harm it as the “moral hazard” position asserts, that proposition, too, certainly merits further research.

But the one conclusion I think can be made without qualification is that claims about the impact of scientific research on public risk perceptions, just like ones about the impact of human activity on the environment, admit of scientific investigation.

When predictions of adverse public reactions are not only advanced without any supporting evidence but also asserted as decisive reason to block scientific inquiry, there should be little doubt that those making them lack a genuine commitment to the principles of science.

References:

Allen, M.R., et al. Warming caused by cumulative carbon emissions towards the trillionth tonne. Nature458, 1163-1166 (2009).

Corner, A. & Pidgeon, N. Geoengineering the Climate: The Social and Ethical Implications. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 52, 24-37 (2010).

Hamilton, C. Ethical Anxieties About Geoengineering: Moral hazard, slippery slope and playing God. (unpublished, Sept. 27, 2011).

Kahan, D.M. Cultural Cognition as a Conception of the Cultural Theory of Risk. in Handbook of Risk Theory: Epistemology, Decision Theory, Ethics and Social Implications of Risk (eds. Hillerbrand, R., Sandin, P., Roeser, S. & Peterson, M.) (Springer London, 2012), pp. 725-60.

Kahan D.M., Jenkins-Smith, J., Taranotola, T., Silva C., & Braman, D., Geoengineering and the Science Communication Environment: a Cross-cultural Study, CCP Working Paper No. 92 (Jan. 9, 2012).

Keith, D.W. Photophoretic levitation of engineered aerosols for geoengineering. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, 16428-16431 (2010).

National Research Council. Advancing the Science of Climate Change, (The National Academies Press, 2010).

National Research Council. America's Climate Choices, (The National Academies Press, 2011).

Parkhill, K. & Pidgeon, N. Public Engagement on Geoengineering Research: Preliminary Report on the SPICE Deliberative Workshops, Understanding Risk Working Paper 11-01 (Understanding Risk Research Group, Cardiff University, June 2011).

Parson, E. Reflections on Air Capture: the political economy of active intervention in the global environment. Climatic Change 74, 5-15 (2006).

Royal Society. Geoengineering the climate: science, governance and uncertainty, (Royal Society, London, 2009).

Solomon, S., Plattner, G.-K., Knutti, R. & Friedlingstein, P. Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, 1704-1709 (2009).

Time to act. Nature 458, 1077-1078 (2009).

Report from Garrison Institute Climate Change conference: the good & not so good...

2012-02-18T14:11:14Z

As noted previously, I attended the Garrison Institute meeting on Climate, Mind and Behavior.

On positive side, the highlight, in my view, was very interesting presentation by George Marshall.

Marshall, a man of apparently unbounded curiosity, creativity, and public spirit, is organizing a set of related initiatives aimed at improving climate-change science communication.

One of these is http://talkingclimate.org/, essentially a mega-wearhousing facility for collecting, organizing, & promoting transmission of empirical studies on communication.

Another is a research project aimed at production of effective targeted messaging. Marshall outlined a research protocol that is, in my view, just what's needed because it focuses on fine grained matching of cultural meanings to the diverse information-processing dispositions that exist in the public. It uses empirical measurement at every stage -- from development of materials, to lab testing, to follow-up work in field in collaboration with professional communicators.

This is exactly the systematic approach that tends to be missing from climate change science communication, which is dominated by impressionistic throw-everything-against-the-wall-but-don't-bother-measuring-what-sticks strategy... Marshall offered a devastating (and devastatingly funny) analysis of that.

I look forward to the distribution of the video of his talk (the organizers were filming all the presentations).

On downside:

1. Goldilocks was also there. Lots of just-so story telling -- "engage emotions ... but don't scare or numb" -- based on ad hoc mix and match of general psychological mechanisms w/o evidence on how they play out in this context (indeed, in disregard of the evidence that actually exists). The antithesis, really, of the careful, deliberate, fine-grained, and genuinely empirical approach that Marshall's protocol embodied. Sigh...

2. I was also genuinely shocked & saddened by what struck (assaulted) me as the anti-science ethos shared by a large number of participants.

Multiple speakers disparaged science for being "materialistic" and for trying to "put a number on everything." One, to approving nods of audience, reported that university science instruction had lost the power to inspire "wonder" in students because it was disconnected from "spiritual" (religious, essentially) sensibilities.

For anyone who is inclined to buy that, I strongly recommend watching The Relation of Mathematics to Physics, Lecture 2 of Richard Feynman's 1964 Messenger Lectures on the Character of Physical Law!

Actually, I think it is a huge problem in our culture that we don't make it as easy for people who have a religious outlook and love science (there are many of them!) as it is for those who have a more secular outlook & love it to participate in the thrill and wonder of knowing about what we know about nature.

But that problem is one rooted in an imperfect realization of the Liberal ideal of making all the resources of a good society (including access to its immense and inspiring knowledge of nature!) available to all citizens irrespective of their cultural worldviews or moral/political outlooks.

Those who ridicule science for being insufficiently "spiritual" or excessively "materialistic" etc. are engaged in a form of illiberal discourse. They are entitled to pursue their own vision of the best way to live but should show respect -- when engaged in civic deliberations -- for those who see virtue and excellence in other aspects of the human experience.

That these anti-liberals happen to be concerned about climate change does not excuse their cultural intolerance.

Slides from Garrison Institute talk

2012-02-16T21:04:48Z

Gave talk today on "Climate Change and the Science Communication Problem" at Garrison Institute's Climate, Mind and Behavior Initiative. Basic gist -- "it's cultural cognition, not deficiencies in rationality, so communicate meaning and not just content" -- is clear from the slides, which are here.

Scientists of science communication: Profiles #1 & #2

2012-02-15T12:37:47Z

There is no invisible hand that guides valid scientific knowledge into the beliefs of ordinary citizens whose lives it could improve.

If simple logic doesn't make that clear, then historical experience ceratinly does -- from the public's rejection of "expert consensus" on deep geologic isolation of nuclear wastes to the massive backlash today against the CDC's proposal for universal vaccination of girls against HPV (just to name a couple that come to mind).

The emerging science of science of science communication uses scientific methods (drawn from a variety of disciplines) to identify the processes that enable nonexperts to recognize valid scientific knowledge, the dynamics that predictably disrupt those processes, and the steps that can be taken to preempt those dynamics or to reverse them when they are not successfully averted.

I will post now & again (very brief) profiles of scholars who are doing important work in this high interdisciplinary field.

One explanatory note, though: after the first entry, the profiles will not be based on any assessment on my part of the contribution the individual has made to the science of science communication. Pretty much going to list in random-ass order ones that I happen to think of at the time!

1. Paul Slovic. Slovic invented the field of public risk perceptions with his pioneering work on the "psychometric paradigm" in the late 1980s (e.g., Slovic, P. Perception of risk. Science 236, 280-285, (1987)) and is the scholar whose work in the last decade crystallized the "affect heuristic," which identifies the decisive role of emotional perception as the faculty of cognition most consequential to the formation of lay perceptions of risk (e.g., Slovic, P., Finucane, M.L., Peters, E. & MacGregor, D.G. Risk as Analysis and Risk as Feelings: Some Thoughts About Affect, Reason, Risk, and Rationality. Risk Analysis 24, 311-322 (2004)). Through his teaching and collaborations, moreover, he is also contributed immeasurably to the ability of countless other scholars to contribute to the advancement of knowledge in the risk perception and communication field (just as math has its Erdös number, so the field of public risk perception as its Slovic number!). Many of his key works (not all; it would take a library to assemble them) can be found in two collections: Slovic, P. The Perception of Risk, (Earthscan Publications, London ; Sterling, VA, 2000) & Slovic, P. The feeling of risk : new perspectives on risk perception, (Earthscan, London ; Washington, DC, 2010).

2. James N. Druckman. Druckman, the Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, is, to my mind, a great model of what a genuine science of science communication looks like. An editor of Public Opinion Quarterly. He is a first-rate-- world-class even -- political scientist, who has done immensely work on framing (e.g., Druckman, J.N. Political Preference Formation: Competition, Deliberation, and the (Ir)relevance of Framing Effects. American Political Science Review 98, 671-686 (2004)). At the same time, he has turned his attention systematically to the way in which political economy and political psychology interact with (and can distinctively distort) societal dissemination of scientific information (e.g., Druckman, J.N. & Bolsen, T. Framing, Motivated Reasoning, and Opinions About Emergent Technologies. Journal of Communication 61, 659-688 (2011)). What's more, he doesn't just grab recognized mechanisms (one he is worked on or is simply familiar with from the general political psychology literature) and use them as a story-telling simulacrum of explanation; he conjectures and tests with actual science communication phenomena. We need more Druckmans: people whoare not only great social scientists but who get that there is a distinctive set of processes affecting the dissemination of policy-relevant science and who are genuinely involved in empirically studying them.

The ideological symmetry of motivated reasoning, round 15

2012-02-14T12:04:20Z

Okay, so Chris Mooney decides to get me in a place where he can swat me down like an annoying flea buzzing in his ear on this "asymmetry question." As I was in a big hole in terms of arguments & evidence, I had to resort to chicanery: by personally displaying more motivated reasoning than anyone would have thought humanly possible during a 30-minute period, I managed to demonstrate to the satisfaction of all objective observers that this barrier to open-minded consideration of evidence is not confined to conservatives.

Whoa, slow down: public conflict over climate change is more complicated than "thinking fast, slow"

2012-02-10T12:37:52Z

With the (deserved) popularity of Kahneman's accessible and fun synthesis "Thinking Fast and Slow" has come a (predictable) proliferation of popular commentaries attributing public dissensus over climate change to Kahneman's particular conceptualization of dual process reasoning.

Scientists, the argument goes, determine risk using the tools and habits of mind associated with "slow," System 2 thinking, which puts a premium on conscious reflection.

Lacking the time and technical acumen to make sense of complicated technical information, ordindary citizens (it's said) use visceral, affect-driven associations--system 1. Well, climate change provokes images -- melting ice, swimming polar bears -- that just aren't as compelling, as scary as, say, terrorism (fiery skyscrapers with the ends of planes sticking out of them, etc.). Accordingly, they underestimate the risks of climate change relative to a host of more gripping threats to health and safety that scientific assessment reveals to be smaller in magnitude.

This is not a new argument. Scholars on risk perception have been advancing it for years (and reiterating/amplifying it as time passes).

The problem is that it is wrong. Empirically demonstrably false.

Consider:

Variance in the disposition to use "fast" (heuristic, affect-driven, system 1) as opposed to "slow" (conscious, reflective, deliberate system 2) modes of reasoning explains essentially none of the variance in public perception of climate change risks. In fact, when one correlates climate change risk perceptions with these dispositions, one finds that the tendency to rely on system 2 (slow) rather than 1 (fast) is associated with less concern, but the impact is so small as to be practically irrelevant.

What does explain variance in climate change risk perception -- evidence shows, and has for years -- are cultural or ideological dispositions. There is a huge gulf between citizens subscribing to a hierarchical and individualistic worldview, who attach high symbolic and material value to commerce and industry and who discount all manner of environmental and technological risk, and citizens subscribing to an egalitarian and communitarian worldview, who associate commerce and industry with unjust social disparities.

Because climate change divides members of the public on cultural grounds, it must be the case that ordinary individuals who use system 1 ("fast") modes of reasoning form opposing intuitive or affective reactions to climate change -- "scary" for egalitarians and communitarians, "enh" for hierarchical individualists. Again, evidence bears this out! (Ellen Peters, a psychologist who studies the contribution that affect, numeracy, and cultural worldviews make to risk perception has done the best study on how cultural worldviews orient system 1/affective perceptions of risk, in my view.)
Individuals who are disposed to use system 2 ("slow") are not more likely to hold beliefs in line with the scientific consensus on climate change. Instead, they are even more culturally polarized than individuals who are more disposed to use "fast," system 1 reasoning. This is a reflection of the (long-established but recently forgotten) impact of motivated reasoning on system 2 forms of reasoning (i.e., conscious, deliberate, reflective forms).

So why do so many commentators keep attributing the climate change controversy to system 1/2 or "fast/slow"?

The answer is system 1/2 or "fast/slow": that framework recommends itself -- is intuitively and emotionally appealing (especially to people frustrated over the failure of scientific consensus to make greater inroads in generating public consensus) and ultimately a lot easier to get than the empirically supported findings.

This is in fact part of the explanation for the "story telling" abuse of decision science mechanisms that I discussed in an earlier post.

There's only one remedy for that: genuinely scientific thinking.

Just as we are destined not to solve the problems associated with climate change without availing ourselves of the best available science on how the climate works, so we are destined to continue floundering in addressing the pathologies that generate public dissensus over climate change and a host of other issues unless we attend in a systematic, reflective, deliberate way to the science of science communication.

Do people with higher levels of "science aptitude" see more risk -- or less -- in climate change?

2012-02-06T19:57:14Z

The answer — as it was for “do more educated people see more risk or less”—is neither. Until one takes their cultural values into account.

The data were collected in a survey (the same one discussed in the earlier post) of 1500 US adults drawn from a nationally representative panel. My colleagues and I measured the subjects’ climate change risk perceptions with the “Industrial Strength Measure.”

We also had them complete two tests: one developed by the National Science Foundation to measure science literacy; and another used by psychologists to measure “numeracy,” which is the capacity to engage in technical reasoning (what Kahneman calls “System 2”). Responses to these two tests form a psychometrically valid and reliable scale that measures a single disposition, one that I’m calling “science aptitude” here.

As we report in a working paper, science aptitude (and each component of it of it) is negatively correlated with climate change risk perceptions—i.e., as science literacy and numeracy go up, concern with climate change goes down. But by an utterly trivial amount (r = 0.09) that no one could view as practically significant—much less as a meaningful explanation for public conflict over climate change risks.

A reporter asked me to try to make this more digestible by computing the number of science-aptitude questions (out of 22 total) that were answered correctly (on average) by individuals who were less concerned with climate change risks and by those who were more concerned. The answer is: 12.6 vs. 12.3, respectively. Still a trivial difference.

But as we make clear in the working paper, the inert effect of science literacy and numeracy when the sample is considered as a whole obscures the impact that science aptitude actually does have on climate change risks when subjects are assessed as members of opposing cultural groups.

Egalitarian communitarians—the individuals who are most concerned about climate change in general—become more concerned as they become more science literate and numerate. In contrast, hierarchical individualists—the individuals who are least concerned in general—become even less concerned.

The result is that cultural polarization, which is already substantial among people low in science aptitude, grows even more pronounced among individuals who are high in science aptitude.

Or to put it another way, knowing more science and thinking more scientifically doesn’t induce citizens to see things the way climate change scientists do. Instead, it just makes them more reliable indicators of what people with their values think about climate change generally.

This doesn’t mean that science literacy or numeracy causes conflict over climate change. The antagonistic cultural meanings in climate change communication do.

But because antagonistic cultural meanings are the source of the climate-change-debate pathology, just administering greater and greater does of scientifically valid information can't be expected to cure it.

We don’t need more information. We need better meanings.

Cultural consensus worth protecting: robots are cool!

2012-02-05T14:55:06Z

Just a couple of yrs ago there was concern that artificial intelligence & robotics might become the next front for the "culture war of fact" in US.

Well, good news: Everyone loves robots! Liberals & conservatives, men & women (the latter apparently not as much, though), rich & poor, dogs & cats!

We all know that the Japanese feel this way, but now some hard evidence -- a very rigorous poll conducted by Sodahead on-line research -- that there is a universal warm and fuzzy feeling toward robots in the US too.

This is, of course, in marked contrast to the cultural polarization we see in our society over climate change, and is thus a phenomenon worthy of intense study by scholars of risk perception.

But the contrast is not merely of academic interest: the reservoir of affection for robots is a kind of national resource -- an insurance policy in case the deep political divisions over climate change persist.

If they do, then of course we will likely all die, either from the failure to stave off climate-change induced environmental catastrophe or from some unconsidered and perverse policy response to try to stave off catastrophe.

And at that point, it will be up to the artificially intelligent robots to carry on.

You might think this is a made up issue. It's not. Even now, there are misguided people trying to sow the seeds of division on AI & robots, for what perverse, evil reason one can only try to imagine.

We have learned a lot about science communication from the climate change debacle. Whether we'll be able to use it to cure the science-communication pathology afflicting deliberations over climate change is an open question. But we can and should at least apply all the knowledge that studying this impasse has generated to avoid the spread of this disease to future science-and-technology issues.

And I for one can't think of an emerging technology more important to insulate from this form of destructive and mindless fate than artificial intelligence & robotics!

******

disclaimer: I love robots!! So much!!!
Maybe that is unconsciously skewing my assessment of the issues here (I doubt it, but I did want to mention).