This week in sustainability news

Big: The 24th of October was the International Day of Climate Action.  Groups around the world staged events highlighting the importance of action on climate change to their communities and their politicians. In New Zealand, Greenpeace divers unrolled a banner reading “350, or we’re all sunk” in front of the Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace ship sunk in 1985 by French foreign intelligence agents.

Interesting: Contrary to the often heard idea that vegetarianism is the most environmentally-friendly dietary choice, Lisa M. Hamilton posits that raising and eating animals is a crucial part of a sustainable farm, and on a larger scale eating more sustainably raised meat is necessary to change the nature of the current industrial agriculture system.

To take the environmentally friendly road to the afterlife, Michael at Groovy Green points to the bike hearse, an alternative to the gas guzzling Cadillac model.

Scary: Steve at Sustainablog reports (with graphs!) on the recent Pew survey – the short version is that it’s bad news.  Fewer Americans now believe that there is evidence of global warming, and fewer now think that human activity is a major cause of global warming.

Discovering global warming

Through the magic of hyperlink surfing I came across Celia’s blog post today on the Discovery of Global Warming – a hypertext history.  As she writes:

“The American Institute of Physics has done what scientists should do more often on important public science issues: explain to non-scientist citizens how science works, the steady accretion of evidence, the voicing of theories to explain it all, the further accumulation of data, and the testing of the theories. You can read chapter by chapter online or buy the book, or just start with the Summary of the History of Climate Change Science.”

Science does need to be more accessible to the public.  That’s why I love that this is a website about a book.  It enables access and exploration beyond what is in the book.   The history of climate change is complex and has ties to multiple factors, not just a few major events or revelations in understanding – which seems to be the way science is explained historically.  This hypertext model approaches the reading of this history with a model that is appropriate to the subject.

The hyperlink arrows are one of my favourite features.  Clicking forward arrows show what the topic you are reading about contributed to other topics.  Back arrow reveal the relationship between the topic you are reading about and the events which preceded it.  And to top it all off, the site is searchable.  My recommendation is starting with the introduction or tips for using the site and explore from there.  The only thing I would have added would be a timeline of major events a la Adam Bohannon.

Climate change skeptics

Last month Alex Lockwood presented a paper to the Association for Journalism Education annual conference, “New Media, New Democracy?”  In it he discusses how new media is being used as a tool to sow doubt about the reality of climate change.  He looks at how the use, volume and impact of new media, especially the use of blogs, can propagate climate change skepticism.

The paper provides some insight into the gap between the consensus of the scientific community and public opinion.  When the overwhelming scientific consensus shows that yes, climate change is real and yes, humans are largely responsible for it, how does such a large portion of the public remain unconcerned about our role in this? Or more pointedly, how do some continue to deny that global warming is a problem at all?

Have people lost their faith in science?  Or is there something particular about the format and nature of blogs that contributes to the idea that there is a still a scientific debate about the veracity of anthropogenic climate change?

It could be both, but I want to stick with new media/blogs for now.  Lockwood suggests that it’s a “question of amplification, the ways in which message multipliers use the web to not only publish but proliferate.”  Exponential growth, in other words. There is also an ability to unite a minority that would ordinarily remain disconnected from each other.

There are other factors that come into play, specifically in terms of blogs. And what seems important in these circumstances is to be able to discuss and debate; create a conversation.  There structure and form of communication that is implicit in blogging is largely behind the amplification that Lockwood refers to. Information is easy to spread, especially through the trackbacks, tagging search methods, and hyperlinking that is commonplace in blog posts.  But proliferation and amplification isn’t just a result of the structural settings of blogging.  This information is also socially channeled.  It is kind of like finding your niche, and engaging primarily with similarly interested bloggers and information compatible with your arguments.

This interaction in crucial to the way information spreads throughout the blogosphere. In a recent Public Choice (sorry, it’s subscription) article Hargittai, Gallo, & Kane (2008) studied the way bloggers interact on political topics, focusing on the interactions between liberal and conservative bloggers.  The shortest explanation of their findings is that there isn’t much interaction at all, at least not much productive interaction that leads to topical debate. For the most part liberal and conservative bloggers stick with discussions amongst themselves, and when there is cross-ideological interaction it usually takes the form of pointing out fallacies or missteps on the part of the opposition.

I find the same trend apparent in climate change/global warming bloggers.  This is only my perception though; I haven’t done any quantitative study. I started this post by mentioning Alex Lockwood and I’d like to point to him again as a counter example. He does engage in discussion with climate change skeptics.  See here and here for some examples of this. He not only links to their blogs, but uses the comments section to hash out disagreements.  It often doesn’t lead to a resolution, but at least people are talking across an ideological divide.  What he also does, which sets his blog apart from many others, is try to understand what could make the skeptics believe that climate change is a hoax or a scam.  I think Lockwood is just as rigid in his belief that climate change is anthropogenic (and I’m entirely with him) as many of the skeptics are in their belief that it is not.  Once we get to the bottom of why some people think climate change isn’t a real then perhaps we can figure out ways to communicate more productively and hopefully convince them that it is a real danger to the world.

In the conclusion to his paper he writes,

“I would argue that climate disinformation online is a form of cultural and political malware every bit as threatening to our new media freedoms, used not to foster a forum for open politics but to create, in Nancy Fraser’s term, a ‘multiplicity of fragmented publics’ that harms not only our democracy, but our planet.”

He’s right, but I think many climate change believers who blog may be just as guilty– not in the sense of spreading disinformation, but in terms of contributing to the in-crowd dynamic that does very little for a well reasoned, ongoing discussion.

Works referred to in post:

Fraser, N. 1993  Rethinking the public sphere. In Robbins, B. ed. The Phantom Public Sphere, pp. 1-32.  Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.

Hargittai, E., Gallo, J., & Kane, M. 2008  Cross-ideological discussions among conservative and liberal bloggers. Public Choice 134: 67-86.

Lockwood, A. 2008  Seeding doubt: how sceptics use new media to delay action on climate change.  Paper delivered to the Association for Journalism Education annual conference, “New Media, New Democracy?” Sheffield University, 12 September 2008.