[rob_c]

Yes, Im painfully aware of this. Christ I wouldn't be making the point of I wasn't this aware of it! (My own personal anger aside here)

I have a strong educational background and a head on my shoulders. However from the mainstream public perception it just "disappeared one day" and transformed into "fossil fuels will be gone" which turned into "global warming" which is now "climate change".

This is obviously complete nonsense to anyone with a science background but is the result of decades of broken outreach combined with poor public education.

[origin_path]

Why do you think it's nonsense? There are at least two competing narratives about climate change:

1. It's huge, an emergency and we're all basically fucked, in fact there's nothing we can do the problem is so vast.

2. It's actually not that big of a deal, most of the warming is natural cycles, a bit is human made but we're not sure how much, a mix of changing power sources and adaptation is entirely possible and if anything the path we're already on. There are likely bigger environment problems to focus on.

The second is the position you'd expect people to take having seen environmental problems be fixed without much fuss in the past. And obviously not every academic "crisis" is fixed via regulation. Think about Limits to Growth and all the claims that the world would run out of food that were popular in the 70s and 80s, or really for much longer than that. Governments didn't do much there and yet there was no crisis in the end, in fact we ended up with a crisis of obesity.

[rob_c]

Sigh.

I'm not talking about the "narratives" around the "conversation".

The first problem is that this changes as it's almost 110% political.

The comment I'm making is that bad education causes problems 10-20 years down the line. Inconsistent exaggerated stories which are not presented in context are dangerous and in the case of multi-genrrational issues undermine the whole effort to get anything done.

Talking about the "we'll run out of food" as another example is showing how people don't trust the people saying this. The problem here is that the word "academic" often has to be put in quotes. It's so doo-gooder pro science but who shouts a lot and causes more problems for researchers. (For another example most of my time doing outreach is undoing the damage caused by fools "explaining" the highs boson)