Who Should be the Climate Persuaders?

So I'm at the annual AAAS conference and the first session I attended Friday morning was called "Why climate Scientists are from Mars and Science Reporters are from Venus." I made that up. The thrust of the session mostly focused on the state of science journalism in the rapidly changing digital media landscape. But in the informal Q & A period, there were a few hot exchanges between journalists and scientists that highlighted why confusion over the role of journalism (and great annoyance with climate reporters) persists among climate scientists. I had an inkling that the frustrations of climate scientists would come to the fore when MIT's Kerry Emanuel, a panel discussant, mentioned a poll that said 40 percent of the American public didn't believe in evolution, while 98 or 99 percent of scientists did. He attributed that wide gap to a communication problem. (Never mind that many people in ...