 I'm Rachel Schwam. I'm at Rutgers University in the Department of Human Ecology, and my research area is risk energy, climate change, and human dimensions. Yeah, I always have my advisor was Tom Dietz, and he'd always say, oh, the hard sciences are the natural sciences, but he says, the social sciences are really the really hard sciences, because you've got to deal with all these variables going on in the social world all the time. But when I'm communicating about the social science or trying to get across a point of where there's a robust field of findings for my students, I try to pick a couple exemplar studies that have real empirical research, and it can be qualitative in the sense of when I'm talking about, it's not an accident that you're more skeptical when you live in the United States. This is kind of purposeful, and there's been a lot of content analysis that's been done on think tankers. So I walk them through Aaron McRite's work on think tanks and the claims they're making, and when those emerged, and talk to them about the sampling when you're doing content analysis, and the analysis of that, and set up hypothesis, and try to present it as a line, I understand that social science isn't exactly like natural science, but as aligned with natural science, what they understand about the scientific method, if they do understand the scientific method. So I'll try it when I'm teaching to address those issues and talk, to give them the strongest pieces of empirical evidence that we know that this just isn't, oh, all the time I see skepticism around me. No, they're very well-designed studies that demonstrate that US newspapers are more skeptical than other English-speaking newspapers around the world, at least at one point in time they were. The universal findings on survey findings and of kind of representative samples of the US American public anyway, are telling us, I mean, that we certainly know that ideological differences, so it doesn't matter if you use the measure Republican versus Democrat or conservative versus liberal or however you want to do it, just consistently conservatives or Republicans will have higher levels of skepticism than Democrats or liberals. So that's certainly one driver. And then what's interesting about climate change from public opinion studies standpoints is often, at least, it used to be historically that personal demographics predicted a lot. So race, age, maybe, male, female, income level, these kind of socio-demographics. And with climate change, that's all kind of overwhelmed by ideology or those kinds of things. And so that's consistent. And then there's all kinds of other interesting findings about fairly complicating findings that I couldn't sum up in a sentence or two, but about how immediate weather or temperature affecting, really, there's been, I don't know, just a outburst of 20 or 30 studies on that, talking about how the natural environment that we're in at that moment or recently influences our public opinion on climate change. Women tend to be more concerned, but this is a consistent finding across just most environmental risks that women are more concerned. What role does science literacy and climate literacy, which are two different things, what role do they play in driving climate attitudes? There's a variety of findings that at least one fairly well older study now, though, that had found that people who could correctly identify the causes of climate change, for example, were more likely to adopt or support the correct solutions. As far as kind of self-assessed knowledge levels go, I think in the kind of field I study more, which tends to be a little bit different than the literacy, that knowledge either doesn't matter or that it interacts, that there's an interactive effect with ideology, right? So I was talking about this and so you find conservatives or Republicans who have higher levels of education or higher levels of self-assessed knowledge, they say, yeah, I know a lot about climate change, actually are more likely to be skeptical, right? And the higher level of self-assessed knowledge or education on Democrats are less like, far far less likely to be skeptical. And so this points to some of the mechanisms we think that are driving some of this, right, around biased assimilation of information and particularly, well, there's a couple of potential explanations, but biased assimilation where people kind of well-educated Republicans are able to really parse through the literature to find, I mean, and some of them really do kind of dig in a little bit and find things that support, they become educated consumers, but in a very kind of biased way. The idea is that they're very good at finding some of the information that supports their worldview and perspective already. Also, some things along more sociological explanations around the line of system justification or the idea that somebody who's probably well-educated, Republican, probably has a certain status and that you're looking for ways to kind of uphold the status quo and then there's the biased assimilation. So it was interesting because there was this whole session on, you know, this morning that I sat through on kind of, you know, is it the information deficit model? This idea that if you give people information, now they're going to, A, accept climate changes happening and B, make the necessary adjustments in their behavior and policy support and all these things. I think as a sociologist, you know, that's not, that just doesn't happen very often. But, and then I heard this, you know, this other realm where it was kind of like, this is all about ideology and this is all what's driving this. And I just thought, no, we know there are different groups of people, right? So I think about some people that are just kind of, they're not particularly ideologically driven much in, you know, anyway. And they tend to, you know, be uncertain about climate change just in the fact that they're not playing, paying very close attention and they're hearing mixed messages when, you know, it kind of comes across and so there are kind of uncertain, right? And that's some pretty sizable segment of, you know, 20, 30%. And those, you know, some of those folks information can be enough to push them towards, you know, that or even I had a teaching assistant in one of my interdisciplinary climate change classes where, you know, she was, she's a chemistry major. She hadn't been paying very much attention to climate change. And then she said, oh, I sat through this class and so now I don't eat meat, right? Because you talked about how this drives a lot of greenhouse gas emissions and I just didn't know that before, right? And so there were people like that. There's some segment that can be, that I think having a, you know, good sense of climate literacy, what's driving greenhouse gas emissions, what actions are effective, both individually and collectively is going to help that, right? And then I think there are people that that's just not going to matter at all, right? And so there's kind of some hardcore skeptics that are at 10% that I'm pretty sure there's just nothing you're gonna say. But, you know, a lot can get done with 90% of the people kind of carrying along. We talk a lot about reaching the 10%, you know, or whatever percentage it is, exactly, of skeptics, but I'm definitely somebody who thinks, you know, it's okay to discuss that with them and you feel free to, you know, kind of carry on. Discourse always kind of, you know, could civil discourse can always, can't hurt the situation, but to go in with the expectation that something's going to change because, you know, these ideologies and these fundamental values that are driving this by definition values or something that we see as relatively stable and consistent for people, right? And so, you know, value changes tend to happen over generations, you know, it's kind of within a person and the occasional near-death experience or something like that, right? I got cancer and shifted the whole way, you know, my life and what I valued, but generally it's very, very consistent. And so I really have turned much more towards my attitude about that is a lot of these actions that we should be doing to address climate change as far as mitigation are things we should be doing anyway for other reasons. And so I'm much more, for that 10%, it's like, all right, let's talk about energy policy and let's talk about energy, not independence, but security in the US. And, you know, let's talk about air pollution and asthma and all kinds of other things, right? And economic efficiency. And these are all kinds of things in health and, you know, whatever, all kinds of other objectives that can be met with not everything, you know, it's not overlapping for all climate change policies but for a good number of them. I often, if I'm meeting somebody just totally new and they ask me what I study, I say energy policy, right? Or energy and society, which are classes I teach, you know? And then if they want to talk about climate change or whatever, but I'll talk about energy and, you know, what kinds of policies could be adopted. I often hear the comment, there's so much information, I don't know who's right this guy or that guy. I don't know how to determine what's information and what's misinformation. How can we guide people or help people? It's become a really interesting and complicated issue because I've been trying to parse through this because that really is a goal of climate literacy, right? Is to let people have people have a good understanding of what is credible science and, you know, what's misinformation. And so I've been thinking about how do I teach my students to do this, right? And it's really difficult when people are purposely misleading you, right? Purposely naming websites, different things and making it sound very scientific. So I talked to my students about all the studies that have been done on, you know, the effort to advance, you know, the messaging around the uncertainty of climate change. And I do that partly because it's a robust kind of group of findings, but it's partly so they know that content, which is these are think tanks. If you see these names, this is where they're coming from. And I mean, it's interesting because at least, and I have to imagine this is true with the general American public, although I don't know. You know, when I talk to my students and I say, do you know what a think tank is? You know, maybe. And, you know, I'm like, well, give a guess based on what it's saying, right? But then, you know, do you know what a conservative versus liberal is? And, you know, this is something we're so seeped in and we're studying it, you know, maybe some more, but not a ton, right? And so then saying like, okay, this is what conservative ideology is at this point in time. It's changed over time, giving them an idea that there's a historicity and a development of this. And the same with, you know, the liberal and what that's meant in the U.S. over time. And, yeah, and it's different in different places, you know, so giving them a real sense of that. And, but getting them to, so understand that and that people are, you know, giving information based on their goals. And, yeah, but basically, and then for my students anyway, I just kind of say, and it's a little unfair, but I say, .org, just, you know, get rid of it, right? I don't know, like just any, I mean, it could be NRDC or it could be whatever, but I don't want it cited in my, you know, in my class. And so there are plenty of other places. I encourage them to go kind of directly to sources. You know, I actually give them a specific list, but I don't know how you do that on like a general public basis, right? When they're reading a newspaper and they're, you know, just seeing two names thrown out there from two organizations, that's what I always think about is like, unless they're kind of seeped in like actual, the actual politics of climate change knowledge and, you know, in media, which is kind of something when I was talking about, you know, advancing climate social science literacy, that's kind of, and I understand that's probably not the general like something everybody in the U.S. is going to get or you're gonna be teaching in high school, but that can help people a lot, right? To understand that this is people purposefully being, you know, making science sound uncertain and these are the people now you know, right? And I always have to tell my students, I know it sounds like I'm being crazy, like I'm saying it's a, you know, it's a conspiracy and it makes me sound crazy, right? That I'm saying it's right wing conspiracy, but then I always look at them and say, but it's really a right wing conspiracy, right? And there's all this data, I mean, that's right, because there's all, and then there's all this evidence that shows exactly how this happened in the U.S. since, you know, 1990 on and really started, you know, in the Reagan era and things, right? So, but I don't know exactly how, you know, to give people general guidelines about, you know, assessing the credibility of this stuff. I think it's really difficult. I actually, I'll go way back or a little bit back, but I mean, I started studying climate change when I was an undergraduate and, you know, at that point it was kind of things like, where's the missing carbon sink and, you know, things like that and I was like, oh, this is interesting because it's like, you start to discover there are questions out there that are a little bit unanswered, right? This is kind of cool. But by the time, I feel like even by the time I graduated, I started to get this feeling, oh, they know enough about climate change, right? And that was 99 or something, right? So, oh, I'm like, okay, there's, this isn't like, we don't need a ton of research on this or it's not where I need to go, right? And I got my master's in resource economics and or environmental management with a focus on resource economic policy at Duke University Nicholas School of Environment and when I was there, I did my master's project on, so I thought, okay, so there's enough science but that seems to be the problem is, I don't know, the policy makers aren't getting it, or you know, and so my master's was actually on looking at scientific testimonies before Congress and how they communicated uncertainty and risk, right? So I went through the literature, found what are the good principles for communicating risk and uncertainty? What should you be saying to convey it properly? And then give somebody a full kind of risk message and things like that and then I went through all these testimonies and kind of scored all the scientists on how they did, right? This isn't a communication problem really and this isn't really a science problem anymore. We know enough and so that's kind of where I've been ever since is, oh, this is a political problem, right? So my questions are things like how would a political system address something like this when there's entrenched interests that my session tomorrow is on long-term risk governance? So how do you get people, when a risk is increasing, how do you get them to act now to lessen that risk in the future? Because my question is when have we ever done that before the risk, you know, is there any example where we've ever said, oh, this might happen in the future, we should do something and we do something about it? Because what I've found is basically we wait for the crisis to happen, right? And there aren't very many cases when we haven't, so. That's a good question because something bad that I've done actually is because once I moved over, once I kind of said, I accept the science, I believe this, I understand general mechanisms of global warming and how this is happening, right? You start to study other things. And so, some however we once in a while I'll get some very, very hard science question that I know I should know and I'm like, I don't know, I stopped paying attention to the science. You know, like I'm not as climate literate as I should be. Or I'm a climate literate, maybe I meet those basic standards, but not much beyond that. But I mean, I generally tell people, well, it's very certain that climate change is happening, that it is man-made. We know a lot about what we're doing to drive it. I tend to go to the activities that we are doing to drive it, right? So I think a lot about this, I talk a lot about this. So, you know, this is being, we know a lot that is driven by consumption and economic activity and particular activities, you know, such as our agricultural and food system, our transportation systems, our residential energy systems, these things are driving the energy use that is driving greenhouse gas emissions, that is driving climate change, and we know this, so. And then, I also will try to talk about the impacts. And I tend, I like to, when I teach my class, you know, what's of value to you, right? So what do you like doing? What's your life, if I'm just meeting you, right? Like, what's your life, what do you do? Okay, so these are some of the impacts that might affect you.