 So, now I'd like to introduce Jeff Keel, a senior scientist at NCAR. Jeff has worked here for 36 years and he's currently the section head of the Climate Change Research Section. Jeff received the AGU Climate Communication Prize in 2012. He has doctorate degrees in both atmospheric science and psychology and is interested in how to better communicate climate science to society. Jeff has studied numerous topics related to climate science, including how Earth's past climate can inform us about the future. Please join me in welcoming Jeff, and we'll have Q&A in discussion after his talk. Thanks, Becca. Well, it is an honor to present at this auspicious occasion. I think it's a great idea that Smithsonian and UCAR are joining together to convey messages about this extremely important issue of climate change. And so I've chosen to talk today about the importance of the science, but also the challenges that we all face in communicating the science to the public. I know a lot of you in the audience participate in communicating this science constantly, and I'm sure you'll resonate with a number of the things that I'm going to say today. Let me also just point out, I was telling Harold that I grew up just north of the Smithsonian as a kid. One of the big treats was to drive south and spend a Sunday or a Saturday in downtown Washington going to the Smithsonian. So I'm sure going to those exhibits played an influence on me ending up as a scientist and standing up here speaking to you. So the outline of what I want to cover today is, first of all, why climate communication is important, briefly, something on that. Then I'm going to give you the core concepts that I like to communicate. Often it's stated that this is a very complex issue, and one of the difficulties in connecting people to climate change is due to the complexity of the issue. I actually take issue with that. I think the basics of this issue aren't that complex. They're fairly straightforward. And it's always good to start with the things that we understand the best and give you the biggest picture and actually the most important picture of what's going on and how we're playing a role in that. And then the rest of the talk, as many of you know, I've been interested in this topic for a number of years looking at what are the barriers that exist to communicating this issue. For many years, we worked under the so-called information deficit model, which was, well, we're just not good communicators. And if we could figure out how to convey that information in a more refined way, the public would grasp the science and their awareness would be raised and behaviors would change based on that awareness. And that just isn't how communication works. And I want to explore that with you. It isn't how communication works around issues that are highly emotionally charged like climate change. It works really well when scientists talk to other scientists, because we are just looking for information. And then I'll briefly give you some ways of breaking through some of these barriers and then summarize. So why is this important? Well, I think everyone in this room knows why it's important, but it was interesting that this weekend I was reading, I read the Guardian newspaper and there was a report from the Davos conference that was going on last weekend. And Mario Molino was asked to come to the conference. He won the Nobel Prize a few years ago for his contribution in understanding humans' impact on ozone depletion. He said that he warned that scientists need to do more to help the public understand the threat of climate change. Molino also called on fellow scientists to speak out. We in science are doing a lousy job in communicating the extent of the risks we are facing. This is actually something that those of you know about Naomi Areskas' work. She's a historian of science. Naomi has been writing a number of articles, both opinion pieces and peer-reviewed journal articles, on how scientists are failing to communicate the risks involved in climate change. And so this is an extremely important issue from a societal perspective that we get this message out. Does the public want this information? This is a poll taken a few years ago by the Yale group. And the question was, would the public like more information on the issue of global warming? And you can see that the combination, I need some more information. I need a lot of more information. 47% of the American public would like more information on this issue. So there's definitely a need or a desire to know more about this issue. And so it's incumbent upon us to provide that information in a way that can be understood. There is a challenge, however. Many of you know this. This is a topic, especially in the United States. It's a very difficult one to convey. This is, again, another poll, a Gallup poll, where people were asked about whether the warming is caused by humans or it's natural. And you can see that 40% of the American public still believe that the warming that's observed is mainly due to natural causes. Whereas the scientific consensus on this is the majority of the warming is actually due to humans. So we have a long way to go to convince a substantial number of people about the science and how we understand the changes that are occurring. Another topic or issue that keeps coming up is the perception of how many scientists, the scientific community, how it agrees on this issue. There's been a number of studies surveying the scientific community asking the question, you know, is the planet warming and is most of that warming due to human activity? And 97% of the community, scientific community, is in consensus around that issue that indeed the planet's warming and humans are the dominant cause for that warming. But then when you ask the public what their perception is of the scientific community, you can see there's quite a spread. In fact, roughly 40% to 50% of the American public feel that there's no consensus in the scientific community on this issue. So again, it's a perception issue. The reality is there's a tremendous consensus around this issue whereas the public's perception is that there's very little consensus in the scientific world on this issue. So these are the things that we're up against in terms of communicating, connecting to the public and convincing them or at least working with them to understand what the scientific community has been doing and what's happening in the world. So I'd like to now cover briefly the core concepts that I always like to communicate. If I'm sitting in an airplane beside somebody and they ask me what I do, if I'm at... Some people defer that question, but I think it's incumbent upon us to tell people what we do and then if they ask, convey some of these ideas. You can also use this with family members. Okay, the number one thing. And by the way, all of these are based on observations or a fundamental law of physics. It's not based on climate models. It's not based on projections, conjectures. It's hard observations in one law of physics. I often say that if you reject the science of climate change, you've rejected quantum mechanics, you've rejected nuclear physics, and you've rejected a fundamental law of the universe. So it's your choice. You can accept climate change and accept all those other laws of theories of physics or you can reject climate change and then you've rejected 80% of the physical sciences. So the first observation that's very well documented is carbon dioxide's increasing in the atmosphere. It's been increasing substantially since the Industrial Revolution. This is a series of observations put together going back to 2,000 years ago. And you can see that for close to 1,700 years there was no change in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And then once we started to dig up fossil fuels and burn them, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere started to rapidly increase. And it's increasing at a fairly rapid pace, an unprecedented pace, I feel, which I'll argue in a little bit. That's the first fact. The second fact, because the issue always comes up, how do you know that's due just to humans? And so scientists are very clever. We can actually, luckily nature provides us with at least two flavors of carbon in its system. There's a lighter flavor of carbon and a heavier flavor of carbon. And plants, organisms, love the light flavor of carbon over the heavier flavor. So, since fossil fuels are made of organisms that were buried tens to hundreds of millions of years ago, they're going to favor be rich in the lighter amount of carbon. And indeed, if you measure the amount of light carbon to heavy carbon, you can see that the top figure shows you that the amount of light carbon in the atmosphere is actually increasing. There's even a simpler way to understand this. When you burn something, you use oxygen. If a volcano shoots carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it's not a combustion of a product. It's just the injection of carbon right into the atmosphere. But when you burn something, you're going to use a little oxygen. And as we burn fossil fuels, we are consuming a little bit of oxygen in the atmosphere. And that's the bottom panel. You can see the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere is declining. The only way you can understand that is that we are burning fossil fuels. Now, not to fear, not to panic. We're not going to consume all the oxygen in the atmosphere and the oxygen that's starved. These are very tiny amounts. It shows you the precision and accuracy which with scientists can develop instruments that they can actually detect that tiny reduction in oxygen as we burn more and more fossil fuels. So these are the two indicators that definitively show that the increase in carbon dioxide we're observing has to be due to the burning of fossil fuels. It cannot be due to any other process. And then the other fact which we've known for over 150 years is that carbon dioxide is a very efficient greenhouse gas. It absorbs the thermal radiation that's coming off of the surface of the planet. And the guy that did the first experiments on this is an Irish scientist, Joseph John Tindall. And John Tindall actually is very interesting. He was also a popularizer of science in London in the 1800s. He gave many popular lectures at the Royal Institution in London. He would pack the house and he was sort of the early Carl Sagan of connecting the public to science. And this is an interesting quote he published in a paper in 1859. The bearing of his experiments, that is the CO2 is an efficient greenhouse gas, upon the action of planetary atmospheres is obvious. The atmosphere admits of the entrance of the solar heat so solar radiation can get through the gases, but checks it, it's exit. So CO2 won't allow the thermal radiation to escape the space. And the result is a tendency to accumulate heat at the surface of the planet. So since 1859 we've known that increase in carbon dioxide is going to warm the planet. And that's a very important point when you're communicating to the public. Often the public's perception is that this is a very recent scientific issue, that it's only been around for 20 or 30 years. And to actually tell people that Tindall did his work in the 1850s, that in 1896 the first scientific calculation was done by Svante Orranius in Sweden, that there is a long history to our scientific understanding of this issue. It's not something that scientists just dreamt up 20 years ago. And that all of those discoveries that were made 100 or more years ago have been confirmed and refined over and over. And by the way, that's something that I'm beginning to finally appreciate more recently into some of the talks that I've given to the public, is this is not just about global warming or climate change. It's how the public perceives how science is done. There is actually a very poor understanding of how scientists work. I remember going to a talk recently where a number of the audience were very upset about this issue. They did not agree that humans are changing the climate system. And the argument that they kept making over and over to me in a very heated way was, you scientists keep changing your story. You keep changing your story. The planet's warming, but the surface temperature's not going up. And as I tried to convey how the scientists came to the understanding, I realized that there is this lack of understanding of how science is done, that Galileo made some observations. And then Kepler came along and deduced certain laws about those observations. And it was only until Newton came along that he could actually derive those laws that Kepler deduced. And that the story wasn't even complete then. That 300 years later, Einstein came along and said, well, Newton had it just about right, but there are some small corrections that need to be made. And that's how science is done. Now the point here is that none of those scientists after Galileo overturned or refuted his original observations. They refined and brought deeper understanding to them. And I think that's something that needs to be conveyed about this issue of global warming. The work of John Tyndall has been substantiated and improved upon over the last 150 years or so. Okay, the next fact, the third fact, fourth fact, is increasing, if you increase a greenhouse gas, it's going to trap that energy, and that energy has to go into the climate system. It can't go anywhere else. And so this is the amount of energy that the heat's taking up over time. And you can see that certainly since the 1980s, there has been this upward trend in how much energy is being absorbed into the oceans. And interestingly enough, if you look at the latter part of that, it's been continuing to go up. There's a so-called hiatus that the warming has stopped. The planet is no longer warming. It's not true because you have to look at the whole system. You can't just look at the surface. If you look at below the ocean surface, that's where the energy is going. And it has to do that. It has to do that because of the next thing. So all of these are observations that I've shown you. Now we're getting to the law. And that's the law of conservation of energy. I always like to point out to audiences that unlike laws written by Congress, this cannot be changed, altered, or repealed. The universe has given us this law, and we all have to live by it. You can't cheat this law. And so if you're going to trap energy, it has to warm the planet. And this is the latest figure produced by the guys, our colleagues at NASA GYS. The temperature trend up to the end of last year, just a few weeks ago. And you can see that indeed everything, the planet is warming, the continents are warming faster than, this is the rate of warming, so it's temperature per decade. And you can see that the continents are warming faster than the ocean regions and that the high latitudes are warming faster than the low latitudes. By the way, all of those things were predicted by the early modeling studies that were done 30, 40 years ago. I mean, Sukhi Minabi's early work and Warren's early work in the late 60s and early 70s, they all predicted that this would be the pattern that you would expect from an increase in greenhouse gases. So those are the points that I really like to get across. And as I say, I always like to emphasize there's been no modeling in this, because a lot of people, they'll use that as well. It's all based on models. What if the models are wrong, then you'd have to throw out your ideas about climate change. Now, the other fact that's very important to convey is that although we call it global warming and the focus is on temperature, we all know in this room that it's not just temperature. This is the other evidence that you can bring into the courtroom that really nails the case for the fact that it's due to increase in greenhouse gases. Because glaciers are melting, both in mid-latitudes and certainly at poles. One of some of the more interesting signatures that we're seeing is how the biosphere, life on the planet is actually responding. There's been really nice studies of the timing of trees blooming on the east coast, where you see shifts in the timing of the blooming that spring is coming earlier. I'm sure you've lived on the east coast long enough. You've probably noticed that, that cherry tree blossoming is occurring much earlier than it was 30, 40 years ago. And so these are all signatures pointing to the single fact that the most comprehensive theoretical explanation for what's happening to the planet is due to the warming world, due to the increase in carbon dioxide, and that as I showed in the first two slides, especially the second slide, that that's due to us. Now, the other things that are happening, of course, gets a lot of press, a sea level rise. This is due to the fact that the warming ocean is expanding and also the ice that's melting on continents is running into the oceans. So again, you get this secular increase in sea level height through time. There's no flattening out of it. The change is still going on. It will continue to go on as long as the planet continues to warm. It will actually go on even after the planets if we actually kind of rest the warming. It will continue because there's memory in the Earth's system. And it's going to remember for a very long time what we've done to it. And then the last thing that I'd like to emphasize is that we often get fixed on looking at changes in the average state. And of course, it's more than about averages and there's a lot of research on now, extremes. And this is a very nice plot that Jim Hansen and his colleagues made a few years ago where they essentially looked at northern hemisphere summer temperatures and took all the data for each month and plotted a histogram of it between 1951 and 1980 and it fits this beautiful bell curve. And then they've done this for the later decades, 80 to 90, 90 to 2000, 2000 to 2011. And you can see that that histogram, that distribution is shifting further and further to the right. So that the probability of extreme warm events to occur is increasing as we warm the planet. So it's not just that on average the planet's getting warmer, the extremes in temperature, the heat waves that we're experiencing are intensifying which have tremendous societal implications. So, one last point that I always like to make and I have to sadly say that when I ask this question to my scientific colleagues about 50% of them can answer the question correctly. And that is, you can easily show that if we were to continue burning fossil fuels at the rate that we have been burning them, we do that for another 90 years that the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide is going to be about 1,000 parts per million. So if you can do the calculation for the mortgage that you're paying on your house, you can do this calculation. And so the question is, when was the last time that Earth's atmosphere had 1,000 parts per million carbon dioxide in it? And the answer, it's here. Here's the reconstruction of atmospheric carbon dioxide using geochemical data starting, here's 5 million years ago, back to about 50 million years ago, and here's 1,000 parts per million. And so you have to go back about 35 to 40 million years before the planet had that much carbon dioxide in it. So you think about this. Think about it in terms of rate. It took Earth about 40 million years to go from 1,000 parts per million to roughly the present values, pre-industrial values. It's taking humans about 200 to 250 years to return it back to that state. So the rate of change that we are exacting on the planet is actually unprecedented from a geological perspective. And since life on the planet is actually very sensitive to the rate at which the system changes, probably more sensitive to the rate at which it changes than the absolutes, this has tremendous implications for what's going to happen to us and in particular the biosphere over the next 80 years. And that's the other fact. When I started giving talks on climate change, I wanted to talk about your grandchildren experiencing these changes. Now you can firmly state that any child baby that's born today has a very high chance of living for 80 years, at least, because life expectancy has continued to increase. So a child born today is going to experience that world. It's not your grandchildren. It's your children that are going to experience that world. And the question from an ethical perspective is what kind of a world do we want to bequeath to those children? What do we want to pass on? Do we want to pass on a world that has a thousand parts family and CO2 in it? Now, I always like to ask this question. How are you feeling? As depressed as usual. Any other responses? Scared. Numb. Angry. So, if I had been standing up here talking about dark matter, I doubt those would be the responses. So this is a very special issue. It's an issue that evokes feeling, emotion. And that's where we're going to go now. So I'm going from climate scientist to psychologist now. Switch my hands. Okay, so what are the barriers to getting this issue across? Well, there's a fundamental one, which is an educational one, basic understanding of science, as I say here in this cartoon. Why don't the greenhouse gases escape through the ozone layer? How do we understand how the climate system works? And frankly, we haven't done a great job at that. And there's good news, but the new science standards that were passed or approved a few years ago include a module on climate and climate change. And so I'm actually working with some people in Berkeley to help develop some modules on improving our K through 12 understanding of science change. I don't want to talk about that topic today. I want to actually focus on these other ones. The social and cultural dimensions, the economic dimensions. I'm not really going to say a lot about that. I'm going to say more about the psychological dimensions. So what are some of the social, cultural, and economic factors? Well, there's been a tremendous amount of research over the last ten years, last five years in particular, on the effect of value systems on our ability to take in the science of climate change. Value systems can include religious beliefs. For some listening to the science, in particular, agreeing with the fact that humans have the ability to change Earth's climate it goes in direct conflict with the religious belief. James Imhof just recently said only God has the power to change the planet's climate. So that's a religious belief that is challenged by the science. This is the same issue that people who teach evolution face. It can also be other value systems, as we'll look at in a moment. It can be a threat to independent agency. In particular, this problem, as you all know, is large. If we're going to actually solve it, we're going to have to mitigate or reduce the emissions of carbon into the atmosphere. That's not going to be done on an individual level. It's something that has to be done at a national and international level, which means imposing certain laws or standards on people. And that can really bristle and hit people in a very strong way. In particular, in this country. I mean, after all, we fought a war over the ability to live the life that we want to pursue. And so there is a cultural ethos here that this issue conflicts with. When I talked to my colleagues in Europe, they see this very stark contrast to how negotiations and how things are looked at. How decisions are made. Is it the rights of the individual that are more important than the rights of the whole? There's, of course, the issue of threat to meeting basic needs. The message is to mitigate this problem that could destabilize the economy. That's a threat to my ability to meet and provide for my family. All of these are losses. From a psychological perspective, you can look at these as perceived loss. Loss of belief, loss of faith, loss of freedom, loss of economic needs. And then, of course, there's a very direct one which is threats to private sectors. One private sector in particular is going to be very much concerned about mitigating this issue. And that's the one that makes the most money from it, which is the fossil fuel industry. That's easy to understand. If I worked for the fossil fuel industry, I don't think I would be advocating for the elimination of my job. So those are the cultural issues, belief systems, and so where we're going here is scientists always think, well, if I have the right information, I give it to people and I will raise their awareness around this issue. And, of course, it's far more complex than that. We have belief systems. We have social norms that affect our values. And those values can be so strongly held that we can neglect, deny, or just ignore the scientific information that's provided. And this is the system that we have to work in. It's not a bunch of scientists sitting around a table making decisions. Here's a quantitative analysis of this problem. This is some work that John Cook at Skeptical Sciences carried out. I think this is a part of his PhD thesis. He wanted to understand this issue about why only 50% of the public, 50% of the public say that, you know, there's a tremendous confusion within the scientific community. There's no consensus. And so he used a measure of, he calls it free market support. You could think of it as conservative liberal. You could think of it as, you know, different paradigms for value systems. The point here is that even for the most liberal-minded people, those who have very little strong support for free markets, even they, that populace, about 64% of them, said that, you know, 64% of the scientific community felt that planets warming in humans are the cause of it. If you go to the other end of the spectrum, which would be extremely strong support of free market systems, in other words, strong independence, I independent rights supersede those of the whole. Then about 30%, people felt about 30% of the scientific community felt that the planets warming in humans are doing that compared to the actual number, which is 97%. So John's essentially saying that for this group, on this end, yes, it is information deficit. That if we could provide the correct information in a way that this group could understand, they would move up here. But for this group, this amount of that misunderstanding is due to cultural bias. And there's been a lot of research, a lot done by Dan Cahane at Yale and other groups, that are looking at how value systems affect our ability to take in science on this issue. And it's a huge factor. Yes, John? Yes? I don't know the answer to that. Yeah, that's a good question. Okay, so value systems, something you need to be aware of when you're communicating. So what's the implication of this from a science communication issue? It basically comes down to this, that you need to know your audience. I mean, anybody who's a public speaker knows this fact. You don't give the same presentation to a group that has this value system to a group that has this value system. Now that irritates some scientists because they feel like, oh, you're asking me to pervert or contort my science so that I can convey the information to a different group. I'm not asking that. You can convey the same scientific information, but it's in a different way. You take account of the fact that this audience is coming from a particular perspective, or they value certain things over others, and you factor that into the presentation that you make, the way you create your slides, the information that you use. This group actually has a tremendous interest in history because they look back to the past to understand what we should be preserving and conserving. So you can use history with that group more than you would use for that group. What are the psychological dimensions? Well, there are a lot. I don't have time to cover all of these, so I'm just going to take one. Affect response and regulation is the one I'm going to focus on mostly, but there are some really interesting ones, especially in developed countries, our self-identity and how it's tied to consumption. This is actually a cultural anthropology. If we're asking people to reduce consumption, that has a direct effect on their perception of themselves, how they value themselves. If my self-identity is strongly tied with how much I own, how much I can consume, if you're asking me to change that, you're essentially asking me to change my self-identity. Related to the non-human environment, there's been longitudinal studies for the last 50 years. The last one that was done was in the 70s. 50 years ago, the average American spent two and a half hours in direct connection with nature. The last time that study was done about 20 years ago, it was 12 minutes. So now, most of us here in this room, since we can go out back and walk and touch a pine tree in a matter of a minute, can't relate to this too much, but we're talking about a lot of people who get up in the morning, get in their car, drive to work, get in their car, drive home, and they really don't have direct access to the non-human world. And then there are typological character structures. There's some really interesting work on how typology affects communication. If you're familiar with Myers-Briggs, scientists tend to clump in a particular Myers-Briggs class. It's not hard to understand. And yet, if you look at the typology of, say, politicians, exactly the opposite. So if a scientist goes to Congress and sits down with a congressman, typologically they're coming from a 180-degree perspective. So if you can factor that typological difference into the way you're communicating with that person, by the way, this is how you can bring people together in marriages, work through typological differences, you can actually communicate far better. Understanding the typological character structure of the person you're speaking with has a huge, can play a huge role in whether you're going to get through to that person. So let's just end with the affect. A lot of research again. This is Paul Epstein, a psychologist at Yale. Two ways of perceiving and processing. He says there's no dearth of evidence in everyday life that people apprehend reality in two fundamentally different ways. One, variously labeled intuitive, automatic, natural, non-verbal, narrative and experiential, and the other analytical, deliberative, verbal, and rational. Okay, why is that the case? Think of it, think neuroscience here. Think of the brain, the evolution of the human brain. That's the evolution of the human brain. The limbic system and the neocortex. Those are the two systems that Paul Epstein's talking about here. There's no way to deny that. There's no way to get around that. I tell people, the scientists who speak to the public on this issue, they want to keep the affect out. And I said, look, the minute you stand up on that podium, the affect's in the room. The minute you say global warming or climate change, the affect is really in the room. You cannot get away from it. And then Paul Slovic and colleagues has done tremendous amount of research on how affect plays a role in our ability to take in information and make decisions. Effect has rarely been recognized as an important component in human judgment and decision making, perhaps befitting its rationalistic origins. The main focus of descriptive decision research has been cognitive rather than affective. And yet, we cannot turn this part of the brain off. If we did, we'd die. In war, we'd be very boring people. So, the reason I asked you how you're feeling after I presented you with this information is here they are. Fear, numbness, defiance, helplessness, anger, powerless, guilt. These are all emotions that arise when you give a presentation on climate change. When you're sitting at an airport waiting for your plane besides you ask you, what do you do? And you start talking to them about, well, the climate's changing and all this stuff starting to come up. And interestingly, if you pull off a shelf, a textbook on trauma, these are all signatures of trauma. So, we are in the unfortunate situation where we are traumatizing the public by providing this information. And there's no getting around it unless you water your science down to the point where it just says nothing. And I think this is where Naomi is coming from in Mario. They're essentially saying that perhaps we scientists are actually trying to avoid this and we're downplaying the risks involved in climate change. That would be an interesting study. I mean, that's where the research that Naomi is actually carrying out right now. She's claiming we are doing this. We are trying to essentially avoid these reactions. But we can't. I mean, this is a human nature. So, how do you break through this? First of all, you're not going to eliminate it. I've often asked, how do I work with this? I actually allocate about 20 minutes of my presentation time to give people a voice in how they're feeling. And I don't try to alleviate their feelings. I don't try to do therapy on them. I just listen. Everybody in the room is listening to everybody else. And there's a tremendous power to people having a voice in how they're feeling. I gave a talk a year ago out at the University of California. A woman stood up and said, this is the first time I've actually been able to tell people how I feel about this. I thought I was the only person that felt this way about this issue. Helpless. So, that there's a healing actually in that. And that's a part of how we process this stuff. So, here are just some. None of these are my ideas. I mean, there's a tremendous excitement if you go to an AGU conference now. Think of all the sessions that are on science communication. And I've been going to AGU sessions for 35 years. I can assure you 35 years ago there wasn't one session on climate communication. It's only in the last 10 years where this has just exploded. Or AMS. Science organizations are actually paying very serious attention to these issues and how we can improve our ability to communicate. So, construct narratives rich in images. Why do I say that? Because that's the way the human brain works. We are called the storytelling animal. And there's a lot of evolutionary research around why we are so effective storytellers. It gives us actually there's an advantage, an evolutionary advantage to being able to be storytelling animals. And why images? Because that older part of the brain reacts far faster to images than the neocortex does to words. So, that old picture is worth a thousand words. That's exactly true. It's based on, you can confirm that through neuroscience research. Recognize the importance of the felt sense of experience. Don't talk in abstract concepts. I showed you a lot of plots at the beginning of this. I would never show as many plots to the public. I would use other types of images. But most of you are very well educated and scientists. And so I knew I could get away with showing you some bar charts and line charts. You know, things like the bank account. That's a tremendous narrative to use. Everybody has a bank account. And you can even use it now to explain the hiatus. If you have a checking account and a savings account, let's make the magical assumption that every year your income increases by a certain percentage. Then what are you going to do with that money? Well, if I just had a checking account I just put it in the checking account. I have expenditures, but let's assume they're fixed. What if I have a savings account? Then I have the choice. Maybe for a few years I'll put less in checking and more in savings. Now if I just looked at my savings, I would say that my savings has slowed down or even stalled. But that's not my total value, the monetary value. If I include the deeper part, the savings, then I see a monotonic increase in my monetary wealth. So that's what the climate system is doing. The energy that's going into the system isn't going into the savings account. Some of the more of it is going into the savings in the checking account. Make climate scientists real people. We have this tendency to put on a persona of it's not as bad as putting a lab coat on, but it can get close to that. I encourage you to talk about what got you into the science, why you're looking at the problem you're looking at. Close to ten years that I did paleo research. What's that tied to? I can definitively say that's tied to the fact that I grew up in Pennsylvania. Coal mining is big in Pennsylvania. When those guys dig those coal mines, they just dump the slag on a huge hill. You can go out on those things and find the most beautiful fossils. I filled my entire parent's entire basement with fossils. You couldn't even walk on the floor. That's a connection to me as a scientist of why I'm interested in this. Use stories relating the history of the discovery. I've given you an example of that with John Tyndall. You can use Earth's history as a means to connect to warm worlds of the past. Then convey that models are useful tools. Finally, offer a sense of solutions. A lot of this hopelessness and helplessness is that there's no solution to this problem. Yet there are more and more solutions people are coming up with year after year. So it's not a hopeless problem. There are solutions that you can focus on. What I'm proposing is that rather than using this old model of we take observations, we have our theories and models, we give that information to the public to raise their awareness, that we have this whole layer in between where we have to develop rich narratives that include images and metaphors that factor in our audience's value systems. In essence, this is what in communication theory is called framing. So become good framers. Let me just leave it here. Present the things that we really understand well. As scientists, we have a tendency to talk about all the things we don't understand first. That's a very bad thing to do with the public. Recognize the psychological process, the effects in the room. You've got to work with it. Carefully find the right images that are going to work for the message that you're going to conduct. And leave the audience with a feeling of options and opportunities. Thank you very much. If people have questions, we just need to use the microphone. So Natalie and I have those. Questions? It was a great talk. It was really interesting. Thank you. My question is, I think that a lot of studies now show that when people are told something that goes against their value system, they have a tendency to dig in even more. And so my question really is, how much do we really need to convince people that climate change is real? And how much can we just do an end run around that and get them doing the right things without having to convince them that things are real first? My naive stage, I would have said you've got to convince them. I think we are at a critical point in the evolution of this planet. I truly do believe that this is the greatest crisis human civilization has ever faced. And it's imperative that we address it. And so if someone wants to reduce carbon emissions because of national security or because of it's good for their personal bank account, I'm all for it. The other thing that I didn't mention here which is very well recognized is the messenger issue. For example, last year I was on a panel with Bob Inglis, who was a conservative Republican. And Bob completely accepts the science of climate change. He completely rejects the science of evolution. I don't care about that. And Bob is going to his constituents, his fellow conservatives, and arguing that we have to do something about this for the economy. He's not trying to convince them about the science. He's arguing this is an economic issue. And if he can do that, more power to him. I really have taken a very practical approach to this. That if someone accepts that we have to do something and they don't accept the science, well, that's okay. I'm not going to try to convince them otherwise. Because as you say, the value system will overrule my opinions according to them. Yes, Kevin? Jeff, it's certainly very easy to get people depressed and scared about this issue. But it's also fairly easy to convert that into anger and outrage. And that is a more logical step towards actions and things to be done. One of the things you didn't deal with was what is the consequences of this? What are the actual predictions and where the pressure points in society really occur? And one of the options then also is to deal with high scenarios and low scenarios and what actions that people might take could actually do to get you from a high scenario to a low scenario. Of course there's some depressing parts of that too because the main actions you take today actually have benefits about 30 or 40 years from now but they can make a big difference 50 and 100 years from now. And so that's one of the things which is certainly worth dealing with. So that deals with the mitigation side of things. But then the other side of it is the adaptation which is recognizing the kinds of changes we expect to see and planning for the consequences. And so that's another aspect where you can do a lot that people I find respond to. I didn't discuss but I'm glad you asked it. What do I tell people? If you look at the Greek word crisis, the root of that word, it's a term from a legal system. It means decision, a decision point. And of course the Chinese word for crisis is strongly tied to opportunity. And I really feel that that's the way we should look at this problem. We can take this situation as an opportunity to create a far better world than the one. And so I have been essentially promoting or discussing how we can take this and change and essentially transform society so that it becomes a far better world to live in. And it's really up to us to make that decision. And that there are very great thinkers and engineers that are working on ways to actually accomplish that. So rather than getting depressed or even angry because anger in the end I think anger is a very destructive emotion. You're either angry at yourself or you're so angry at somebody else that you can't cooperate. The path that I'm pursuing with colleagues in my presentations is let's create a flourishing future. I even avoid the word sustainable because sustain. What are we going to sustain? There's a myth that the leading myth in our culture is growth, perpetual growth. It's deeply embedded in us. This is the narrative that affects us. And it's been around for a long time. And it's a myth that can no longer work. It's based at least on one premise which is now burned itself out. And that is it's based on infinite resources. There are no infinite resources. So how do we create a flourishing world where as many people as possible as many beings as possible, not just humans? So actually that's what I talk about. And that tends to resonate with people. It really gives them the sense of empowerment. And if they certainly have children or they're concerned about future generations they tend to come up to playing a part, actively participating and designing a world that's going to be better than the one that we have now. If you're a cynic or a quote-unquote realist you'll reject. But I'm frankly tired of going out and giving talks and leaving people with a sense that this is a problem that has no solution. I actually think it is, has a solution. The greatest tragedy in history will be if we choose not to create that. Okay, we'll take one last question and we'll have to make this one a quick one. Because we're over on time. Jeff, thank you. I actually was going to quibble with you if you hadn't mentioned the opportunity piece. So my name is Brett Kinkaren. I'm the city's senior environmental planner working on climate change. Welcome. Thank you. And I think the way we are talking about reframing our work is to make it about climate well-being and security. And that the other thing I would want to challenge just a slight amount in your talk is that the premise that we can't do anything ourselves that it's a collective issue. I totally agree that there are large system changes that have to take place. And I don't agree with that. I don't agree with what I said. Okay. Let me clarify. I think it's going to take more than us acting as individuals. But I encourage individuals to do everything they can. Because, again, there's an empowerment to that. They're participating. It's public participation. And it does have an effect. And it creates the template for the change that we then created a larger system. So I'll just leave with this. We're working on a framework that provides every person the opportunity to essentially create their own climate action plan. Because every one of us, because we know that the primary problem is energy. And therefore the primary solution is that every one of us at every level need to change our energy systems. Now, for many of us, that's going to be difficult to make an immediate change. But if we see ourselves as a part of a transition that's going to take 10 or 15 years and we look at the next time I buy a car, the next time I replace my furnace, the next time I buy anything that's using energy or think about how I'm producing my energy and I make the investment instead of something that's taking me in the wrong direction, something that's taking me in the right direction, where I'm headed is that world you're talking about. A world of opportunity, a world of freedom, a world of much higher quality than we have right now. A lot of this is about imagination. Something that gets downplayed, but I think is a critical part of any society and education that we have to imagine that world and then we have to make it creative. That's, you know, it really is that simple. Marta? Could Marta have one? I joke sometimes that I'm Jeff's publicist because he's such a humble guy. I just want to put in a plug that next Thursday at 5, Jeff and also Jane McMahon, who's an artist, are going to be speaking upstairs in the Damon Room along with an exhibit of Jane's photographs that are about the hydrologic cycle in relationship to climate change. And there will be refreshments. So if any of you are out and about next Thursday at 5 o'clock, there'll be a conversation about art and science and climate change and psychology. Thanks. So let me, I'm going to take the last word. I always like to say this at the end of these presentations. You know that you are all messengers, right? And it doesn't, you don't have to be invited to give a talk like this to get the message out. You can get the message out at a coffee house at an airport, on a bus, you know. That's, I think, our civic responsibility because we have carried this information and we hopefully care enough that we become the communicators. Every one of you is a communicator. And it's really, I'll even be stronger, it's your ethical responsibility to communicate this to as many people as you can. Even that cantankerous uncle at Thanksgiving. Thank you. Thanks a lot.