Milton Oceanographers on Global Warming

The home of biologist Carin Ashjian’s research efforts, the port of Barrow, Alaska, is drowning. Melting Arctic ice is producing more severe ocean storms, sending larger waves crashing onto the shores of the low-lying communities, swamping roads and eroding the landscape. Carin, Class of 1978, is an associate scientist at the Woods Hole Oceano-graphic Institute studying biological oceanography, particularly in polar regions (Arctic and Antarctic). She’s currently leading a Barrow-based project that is exploring how climate change is affecting the migration and feeding patterns of bowhead whales, a traditional food source for the indigenous Inupiat people. In Barrow, she says, climate change seems very real.

“For those kinds of communities the effect of climate change is pretty obvious,” Carin says. “For us down here we say, oh, we have a colder winter, you know, but surely the fossil fuels aren’t really doing anything. Up there they’re far more cognizant of the fact that things are changing. They’re interested in figuring out why.”

For most Americans, the threat isn’t so immediate. The public conversation turns to climate change during hurricane season or in the midst of a few unseasonably warm winter days. Occasionally, a global-warming-related entertainment event like the disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow or Michael Crichton’s highly contentious novel State of Fear sparks debate. Generally, though, the reality of climate change

hasn’t quite hit home. A 2005 survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) reveals that only 52 percent of Americans are even aware of the fact that the vast majority of scientists think that climate change is real. Accord-ing to several Milton alumni working in the field, this disconnect between scientists and the public stems from the politicization of the issue, a general science literacy problem in the United States, and the fact that the two camps just aren’t speaking the same language.

Our science literacy problem has been well documented—a 2004 National Science Foundation report found that 50 percent of U.S. citizens don’t know that electrons are smaller than atoms. In terms of climate change, literacy is a major problem, says Bonnie Epstein, Class of 1990, who is currently on maternity leave from her position as a principal investigator for the New England Aquarium. “I think it’s crucial for the public to be science literate,” Bonnie says. “The research in which I’m most interested (how human activity affects the world around us) requires that individuals make changes in their behavior in order to ameliorate the problem. We can’t expect individuals to make changes unless they understand why they are doing so.”

In other words, you can’t expect the average consumer to do her part in saving the environment by switching from a gas-guzzling SUV to a more efficient hybrid if she doesn’t understand why excess fossil fuel consumption is bad in the first place. If she isn’t familiar with the prevailing wisdom—that the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere has trapped excess heat near Earth’s surface, which may be triggering a warming trend that is changing climate worldwide—then she won’t see any reason to make the trade. (Except of course for high prices at the pump.)

After earning her Ph.D. in oceanography, Bonnie decided not to pursue a career in pure research. She briefly taught high-school science, and lectured at the college level while pursuing her graduate studies. Later, when an opportunity to head the Newport, Rhode Island, branch of the New England Aquarium opened up, she took it. She saw the museum environment as a good way to educate the general public. “I wanted to spread the basic information about oceanography,” she says. “I felt most people really lack understanding about the way things work.”

While museums have the advantage of capturing a broad audience, Bonnie insists that for young people, the classroom is still the ultimate opportunity. The problem, of course, is that students do move on and might never take another science course again. Nathalie Goodkin, Class of 1995, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in chemical oceanography through a joint program at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, says that the number of science-based debates in the country today—global warming, stem cells, evolution—makes the right education all the more important. Students should acquire an understanding of the underlying facts and ideas, but there’s more to it than that. “Getting students comfortable with reading and having conversations about science, science policy and even technology at the high-school level is critical,” she says. “This way they can make educated decisions later in life when voting and deciding what is important to their lives.”

Postgraduate education is trickier. While there’s no shortage of places for the inquisitive adult to research climate change—museums, television, magazines, newspapers and the Internet—it’s often hard to discern the good sources from the bad. Bonnie cautions: “With the Web, as with books, it is so important to consider your source. The printed word may also have an agenda, be out of date, carelessly researched, etc.”

At the same time, there’s also some evidence that this rift between science and the public has less to do with literacy than public relations; it may be that scientists just need to do a better job of informing people of the prevailing thinking on global warming. The 2005 PIPA study reveals that 65 percent more people would be willing to absorb the costs of combating climate change if they were aware of a scientific consensus on the issue. The sad part is that the consensus does exist. A large population of the United States just doesn’t know about it.

Politicians certainly aren’t helping the situation. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma frequently trots out “experts” of questionable scientific standing to challenge the reality of climate change, including the novelist Michael Crichton—a medical doctor. And Carin cites the Bush adminis-tration’s refusal to accept that climate change could be exacerbated by man’s activities as a major contributing factor. “They say, ‘Oh, well, it’s a natural cycle.’ Yes, there is a natural cycle, but it seems that things are happening much more quickly now than they have in the past and this is probably our contribution.”

But Nathalie suggests that it might not just be politics; the training of scientists could also be partially to blame. “The biggest problem I’ve seen in educating the public about science is that scientists are trained to speak in very specific ways,” she says. “Here is my data and these are the best conclusions that I can draw from this data. What happens when you say that to people who work in worlds that are more absolute is that they say, ‘Well, he doesn’t really know.’”

This sort of intellectual honesty can prevent scientists from fully convincing a lay audience. “In general we always tend to be more cautious. I think that works to our disadvantage,” Carin says. “There’s a real mismatch between the way we talk and what the public needs to hear in order to be convinced.”

She points to one of the most contentious issues of the day—evolution—as another example. The “evolution is just a theory” argument of the creationist and intelligent-design camps reveals a massive misunderstanding of how science works. To a scientist, a theory is a very powerful thing. There’s still a certain degree of uncertainty, but it’s been massively reduced by evidence. “Maybe we should change it to the principle of evolution instead of the theory,” Carin jokes.

Another possible solution, Nathalie suggests, would be training scientists to be better communicators—giving them crash courses in public relations, perhaps. “I think that scientists need to do a better job of learning how to communicate what they’re doing in a manner that’s going to be different than the way they communicate with their peers, but is both effective and honest,” Nathalie says.

Currently, the opposite is the case: scientists are taught to speak only to each other. Bonnie says that one of the factors that pushed her away from a career in research was the fact that her advisors were practically teaching her how not to communicate her ideas. “They were actually training me to be incomprehensible to all but the few people who specialized in my field,” she recalls.

Learning this research language is absolutely necessary if one wants to be published, so Bonnie hardly faults her advisors, but she still felt as though she was heading in the wrong direction. Now, at the Aquarium, Bonnie considers herself to be a kind of translator: she oversees the content and message of many of its exhibits, ensuring that they’ll be both interesting and comprehensible to the general public. Nathalie recently started speaking with an adult-education program in Bermuda—where she’s studying a 230-year-old coral head as a way of charting how sea surface temperatures have changed over time—about teaching science classes to adults. And Carin has made her own efforts at educational outreach, including describing her research on climate change at a landlocked middle school in New Hampshire. Recently she also wrote an article for Oceanus, a Woods Hole publication aimed at the lay reader, on her experiences studying zooplankton in Alaska. But this is effectively extra-credit work. She has to find her own time for these projects—a reality that Carin sometimes finds frustrating. “There’s a great push for us to communicate our results. We’re mandated to do so, and not just to our peers but to a broader audience. But in the days of shrinking budgets it’s not often that you get sufficient resources to do that extensively.”

Still, in a country in which so many people aren’t aware, don’t understand or— for political reasons—refuse to accept the reality of climate change, these small efforts may be just what we need. Some-day, through the work of people like Bonnie, Carin and Nathalie, scientists and the public just might find a common tongue.

Gregory Mone

 

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