Winning the guerrilla war on climate change at Science meets Parliament 2010

By Joelle Gergis, School of Earth Sciences

School of Earth Sciences Research Fellows Dr Joelle Gergis and Dr Ailie Gallant attended Science Meets Parliament with the support of The Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society.

Image credit: Lorna Sim / FASTS

If you had the attention of a politician for five minutes, what would you say? How would you summarise the work that you do, or the importance of acting on climate change in less than 45 seconds – the time it takes for a sparkler to burn itself out?

This is the dilemma 120 early-mid career scientists faced during the 11th Science Meets Parliament (SmP) held in Canberra on 9–10 March 2010. The Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies (FASTS), runs SmP every year as an opportunity for scientists to meet with MPs and to understand how science can influence decision makers.

Image credit: Lorna Sim / FASTS

A series of professional development seminars provided a glimpse of how the media, policy development and effective communication actually work. We heard from Kevin Rudd’s speechwriter Tim Dixon, Alison Carabine from ABC’s Radio National and Richard Dennis, executive director of the Australia Institute.

Climate change quickly emerged as an unofficial theme. The media guest speakers admitted that conflict makes a good story. We discussed the ethics of providing voice to global warming contrarians in the name of journalistic ‘balance’. They explained that the public is trying to assimilate the complexity of climate science and often finds it a challenge to distinguish the weight of opinion filtered through the peer-reviewed literature and the opinions of non-specialists in the blogosphere. When a controversial view on climate change crops up, the media seize it as a ‘fresh angle’ on a long running story that is starting to sound like more of the same to the general public.

Chair of the Australian Science Media Centre, Peter Yates, cautioned the climate community’s habit of avoiding addressing the arguments of extremely vocal, well-orchestrated global warming contrarians.

He argued that climate science needs a key spokesperson to lift its profile and popular understanding, in the way that Carl Sagan did for the complex field of astronomy. Perhaps the recent development of Climate Scientists Australia, an independent group of our senior scientists willing to provide evidence-based information to climate-related policy decisions, will fill the vacuum created by the collapse of discussions surrounding the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) and international negotiations at Copenhagen last year.

American science writer Chris Mooney outlined the ‘guerrilla war’ on climate science in the untamed jungles of the online world. He said it was naïve for scientists to feel that the ‘truth will prevail’ as the mountain of peer-reviewed evidence grows. He suggests that as a community we must equip ourselves with the professional communication skills to combat the targeted tactics of our opponents. Most people know how easy it is to click the ‘publish’ button on a blog, but in reality, very few know the rigours of publishing evidence-based science in the peer-reviewed literature.

It was reassuring to meet with parliamentarians who had an impressive appreciation of climate science and to hear examples of infiltration of science into policy making.

I met with Petro Georgiou, a moderate liberal from the seat of Kooyong in Melbourne’s east. As a man who crossed the floor in support of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill in November 2009, he needed no convincing about the dangers climate change poses to our economy and lifestyle. He believes that one of the Government’s key mistakes was trying to rush through the complexity of decarbonising the Australian economy to meet the Copenhagen deadline. He felt that the public and parliamentarians did not really understand the Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) so were not prepared to compromise the status quo.

At the end of our time in Canberra, we left with the clear message that scientists are welcome in the political process, but we must equip ourselves with effective communication tools so the essence of our knowledge is heard. We need to be prepared to defend our science in the face of intense public scrutiny, concisely, with conviction and in plain English. Once we restore community confidence in climate science, one conversation at a time, our politicians will have no choice but to follow.

Here’s that sparkler; your time starts now.