"SCIENCE AND SOCIETY: Framing Science"

Read the full article by Matthew C. Nisbet1 and Chris Mooney in Science, 6 April 2007: Vol. 316. no. 5821, p. 56.

"Issues at the intersection of science and politics, such as climate change, evolution, and embryonic stem cell research, receive considerable public attention, which is likely to grow, especially in the United States as the 2008 presidential election heats up. Without misrepresenting scientific information on highly contested issues, scientists must learn to actively 'frame' information to make it relevant to different audiences. Some in the scientific community have been receptive to this message (1). However, many scientists retain the well-intentioned belief that, if laypeople better understood technical complexities from news coverage, their viewpoints would be more like scientists', and controversy would subside."

The authors give the example, among others, of climate change.

many surveys show major partisan differences on the issue. A Pew survey conducted in January found that 23% of college-educated Republicans think global warming is attributable to human activity, compared with 75% of Democrats (6). Regardless of party affiliation, most Americans rank global warming as less important than over a dozen other issues (6). Much of this reflects the efforts of political operatives and some Republican leaders who have emphasized the frames of either "scientific uncertainty" or "unfair economic burden" (7). In a counter-strategy, environmentalists and some Democratic leaders have framed global warming as a "Pandora's box" of catastrophe; this and news images of polar bears on shrinking ice floes and hurricane devastation have evoked charges of "alarmism" and further battles.

Recently, a coalition of Evangelical leaders have adopted a different strategy, framing the problem of climate change as a matter of religious morality. The business pages tout the economic opportunities from developing innovative technologies for climate change. Complaints about the Bush Administration's interference with communication of climate science have led to a "public accountability" frame that has helped move the issue away from uncertainty to political wrongdoing.

Comment: How about framing the issue as one of the responsibility of citizenship? By the end of the 21st century the climate will have changed greatly. The social and economic costs of that change will be huge. The greenhouse gas emissions of the United States are the major cause of this climate change, and the refusal of the Republican party in general and of the Bush administration in particular to act responsibly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions domestically or to lead in the effort to do so globally have hamstrung efforts to reduce the rate of growth of the problem, much less to reduce the problem.

In democracies, the people get the government and the policy they deserve. If you accept policies that favor only a small minority to your own disadvantage and to the disadvantage of nearly everyone else out of ignorance, you deserve what you get. Understanding climate change is not rocket science.

It should be abundantly clear that this is a crucial issue of our time. All voters have a responsibility to understand this issue, and should take the time to become informed on it. JAD

Source: "Bangladesh: Up to their necks," The Economist, August 9, 2007.

Do you think it is unrelated to climate change that the fact that the Subcontinent is experiencing the worst flooding in living memory, with tens of millions of people flooded and a health emergency facing the world, in a year of exceptional weather in Europe? Are you willing to take the risk that this is only a harbinger of things to come?