CU Connections
February 18, 2016

Science professor discovers game changer in frontier of sports governance

You might know Roger Pielke Jr. as a University of Colorado Boulder environmental studies professor, Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) and the founder of the CIRES Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. But in recent years, Pielke has begun to focus more of his research on another often-discussed topic: sports and policy. And now he has proposed instituting a new center on campus, the Center for Sports Governance.

The idea for the center has percolated over the past few years.

“At some point in my (policy) teaching, I started using examples from the world of sports, in particular the issue of sex testing in the Olympics and how it is determined who is eligible to compete in the women’s events, which has been interesting and complicated and a fraught political topic for about a half-century,” Pielke said. “I also used the issue of Oscar Pistorius, who runs on blades, as an example of what is called technological augmentation and how athletes make their bodies better or stronger. The question is, how do you come up with rules for that?

“The students were really into it. They liked the sports examples. Sometimes when you talk about governance and policy, unless that is your thing, it can be kind of dry, but sports really made it come alive.”

From there, the topic of sports governance became something of a hobby for Pielke, and then it grew to occupy some of his professional time. Later, he decided to jump in with both feet.

Pielke earned three degrees at CU-Boulder in the late ’80s and early ’90s. He went on to work as a scientist for the National Center for Atmospheric Research before being recruited to CU, where he was asked to found a center focused on science and technology policy in 2001.

His father was one of the first atmospheric scientists to conduct three-dimensional modeling of the atmosphere.

“When I was a child, I learned how to program computers in FORTRAN. I thought every kid learned how to do that. When I got to college, I realized I had that kind of a skill so I landed a job at NCAR as an undergraduate as a computer programmer,” he said.

At NCAR he rubbed shoulders with brilliant scientists.

“This was when ozone depletion was a big issue, and I remember the scientists would sit around and say things like, ‘If only politicians better understood science, the world would be a much better place.’ And I thought maybe I should know something about this political world if I was going to have a career in science.”

During his mater’s work in public policy at CU, he was advised by Rad Byerly (who passed away two weeks ago), who was invited to go to Washington, D.C., to be the chief of staff for the House Science Committee. Pielke said Byerly “must have felt bad leaving me behind” and so he brought Pielke with him to the Hill.

“The a-ha moment came to me one day when the senior staff was sitting around, critiquing a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who was asking for more money for science. They said, ‘If only these scientists better understood Washington, the world would be a much better space.’

“I realized that both sides thought the other needed to understand more about the other. That’s when I decided to get a Ph.D. in political science focused on policy for science and technology.” Read more …

New York Time Dot Earth
February 8, 2016

by Andrew C. Revkin

In a 2011 post on the limits of climate science communication in shifting public policies or personal behaviors, I called myself a “recovering denialist,” laying out my reasoning this way:

My denial, I said, lay in my longstanding presumption, like that of many scientists and journalists, that better communication of information will tend to change people’s perceptions, priorities and behavior. This attitude, in my view, crested for climate scientists in the wake of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Despite substantial introspection and external analysis since 2007, the United Nations climate panel has seemed persistently locked in an antiquated view of how to improve its communication efforts, largely oblivious to the “new communication climate” out there.

Thankfully, on Tuesday and Wednesday, the climate panel is holding its first “expert meeting” on climate communication, in Oslo (there’s a long list of earlier special sessions on a variety of scientific issues).

Here’s the goal:

The main objective of the meeting is to increase the efficiency and impact of communications of I.P.C.C. findings across the world.

This workshop is long overdue, and a hopeful sign that panel leaders (and, just as importantly, the nations that created the I.P.C.C. in 1988, pay for its operations and look forward to its sixth set of reports later this decade) recognize there’s work to be done.

But there are some warning signs pointing to lingering problems.

Fear of the “Internets” | Until Saturday, resistance from some participants almost prevented the workshop from being streamed online so that interested people anywhere in the world could watch the presentations. After questions were raised (by me and presumably others), a public webcast was set up, along with a Twitter hashtag (#IPCCoslo), allowing participants and viewers to exchange thoughts in a wall-free way.

The link to the video player is here.

It’s great to see the change. In a note to the panel headquarters over the weekend, I explained my concerns this way:

There’s simply no downside to opening the curtain on an important discussion of how this valuable institution could improve communication of its findings — and operations — to the full range of stakeholders who, through their governments, pay for the IPCC’s operations….

This reminds me of when the National Academies’ “Science of Science Communication” conference in 2012 was held in a building with no wireless Internet access. But this is worse because of the global scope of the issues and audiences.

There’s a long list of interesting background papers* and a packed agenda, from the opening discussion to closing sessions including one on climate change and children. The head of the communication office, Jonathan Lynn, will kick things off with a look at “constraints and opportunities.” The constraints, as his advance summary indicates, include the protracted release process for multi-part panel reports (which is almost as draining as the endless parade of presidential debates and primaries here in the United States). As Lynn puts it, this dissipates impact: “This means that the problems of climate change may be presented months before the potential solutions.”

But several scholars focused on climate change and communication see big omissions.

I received similar input from Max Boykoff of the University of Colorado, Boulder (see a relevant recent paper here). Read more …