[ravenstine]

Well that and Bill Nye's attempts to convince people of global warming have been totally unscientific, ranging from an "experiment" where he filled a sphere with CO2 and took the temperature, to literally igniting a globe and saying "the planet's on fucking fire".

Putting Nye aside, can anyone name an actually good public educator for climate change? I don't think I know of one that didn't go off the rails.

Then there's all the claims around climate change that simply turn out to be untrue. People said that polar bears were drowning because of global warming, yet the polar bear population isn't struggling to say the least. Glaciers were supposed to melt by now, and when they didn't, the signs that said they would were simply removed. Some cities and small islands were said to be at risk of sinking into the ocean by a decade ago, yet they remain dry. This doesn't even include some of the insane claims made by public servants.

I think that anthropogenic climate change is real, and a problem. But I don't think the average person is an idiot for distrusting what they're being told about it. They're regularly lectured by people who are wrong about climate change over and over again. Inversely to conservatives, most liberals I know don't actually understand science at all but treat it as a religion.

Public science communicators can start by no longer making predictions like "By 2020, there will be no more glaciers here." They've not proven to accurately predict anything at the decade-resolution, so they need to just stop doing it.

[Miraste]

I'm not sure why you've chosen glacier forecasts to pick on. At least in aggregate they're one of the most predictable effects of climate change--look at this mass balance graph [0]. If public communicators said glaciers would be gone by 2020 (which I've never seen someone say) they were wrong, but the science behind it is clear and glaciers are on the way out.

[0] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

[hwillis]

> yet the polar bear population isn't struggling to say the least.

What do you mean, "to say the least"? The polar bear population has just barely remained stable since hunting was ended. They should be growing -populations are increasing in places that are cold enough- but because their range is shrinking quickly the bears are just being forced closer together instead of reproducing.

https://arcticwwf.org/species/polar-bear/population/

> Glaciers were supposed to melt by now, and when they didn't, the signs that said they would were simply removed.

You are specifically referring to Glacial national park; nobody is saying that about all glaciers because the 40m sea rise would be, uh, noticeable.

124 of the original 150 named glaciers in the park are gone. It's hard to see how that's really a failure. Inaccurate yes, but far from wrong. The fact that you see it as a boondoggle is due to messaging and sentiment, not because it was untrue in any important way.

https://glacierhub.org/2019/08/20/new-signage-at-glacier-nat...

> Some cities and small islands were said to be at risk of sinking into the ocean by a decade ago, yet they remain dry.

You started by talking about "public educators"... this claim originated with a 2003 pentagon report that was nonscientific and opened with the phrase "The scientists support this project, but caution that the scenario depicted is extreme in two fundamental ways. First, they suggest the occurrences we outline would most likely happen in a few regions, rather than on globally. Second, they say the magnitude of the event may be considerably smaller."

https://grist.files.wordpress.com/2004/02/abruptclimatechang...

The report was very explicitly based on a scenario with no scientific justification- they basically said that the Younger Dryas event happened suddenly after a period of warming, so maybe something like that could happen again. Then they tried to estimate political ramifications. It has nothing to do with predicting warming, yet people and notably the press just ran fucking wild with it. It's lunacy.

> Public science communicators can start by no longer making predictions like "By 2020, there will be no more glaciers here."

While there are obvious failures of messaging, the vast majority of misinformation originates with bad actors. Small signs that you don't see unless you physically visit Glacier national park? Sure- bad messaging to a tiny population. National news about Europe being underwater, twisted from a thought experiment that was itself fully fabricated? Nothing to do with scientists or even popular science.

[ravenstine]

> What do you mean, "to say the least"? The polar bear population has just barely remained stable since hunting was ended. They should be growing -populations are increasing in places that are cold enough- but because their range is shrinking quickly the bears are just being forced closer together instead of reproducing.

From your very own link:

>> Although most of the world's 19 populations have returned to healthy numbers, there are differences between them. Some are stable, some seem to be increasing, and some are decreasing due to various pressures.

Polar bears overall are deemed "vulnerable". It's a bad thing because we'd like to see more polar bears, I suppose, but that's not even close to extinction. That's not to say I don't think they could go extinct in the next century. But there are plenty of polar bears, which is what someone who doesn't know better is going to read and then doubt climate change. The polar bear argument hasn't helped the climate change cause, except to embolden people who are already sold on it.

> You are specifically referring to Glacial national park; nobody is saying that about all glaciers because the 40m sea rise would be, uh, noticeable.

I don't think you've actually met many climate change deniers or skeptics.

When people in positions of authority forecast things beyond their ability, and then those forecasts turn out to be completely wrong, that's what people remember. The average person doesn't give a shit data and evidence. That stuff's boring! All they know is that yet another authority figure made an arrogant prediction that turned out to be wrong.

> 124 of the original 150 named glaciers in the park are gone. It's hard to see how that's really a failure. Inaccurate yes, but far from wrong. The fact that you see it as a boondoggle is due to messaging and sentiment, not because it was untrue in any important way.

Doesn't matter. The story was that yet another prediction about climate change was wrong. I know that you are intelligent enough to look at the numbers, but that's not how the average person thinks and that's not how climate change deniers are going to communicate their "evidence" to their followers.

This is why scientists and politicians making hard predictions is a horrible and destructive idea. If everyone was an intellectual, the situation might be different, but we're stuck trying to communicate the issues to non-intellectuals. If you say that "By 2050, there will be no more ice caps", and then it turns out 10% of the ice caps are still there by that point, people will say "Look, those scientists were wrong again!"

Do you understand?

> The report was very explicitly based on a scenario with no scientific justification- they basically said that the Younger Dryas event happened suddenly after a period of warming, so maybe something like that could happen again. Then they tried to estimate political ramifications. It has nothing to do with predicting warming, yet people and notably the press just ran fucking wild with it. It's lunacy.

Yes, for sure. That completely supports my point.

> While there are obvious failures of messaging, the vast majority of misinformation originates with bad actors. Small signs that you don't see unless you physically visit Glacier national park? Sure- bad messaging to a tiny population. National news about Europe being underwater, twisted from a thought experiment that was itself fully fabricated? Nothing to do with scientists or even popular science.

Then there's an assload of bad actors, and the vast majority of them are sanctioned by the mainstream media. And if this misinformation primarily originates by bad actors, then the scientific community has absolutely failed to communicate this to the public.