Max Boykoff’s climate change & media coverage figure on US Media Coverage of Climate Change/Global Warming used in a recent CNN news segment: Media’s global warming fail.

Roger Pielke’s Book, The Honest Broker, highlighted in an NPR article

Are Scientists Naive About Politics?
by Adam Frank

Climate change is not the only place scientists and politicians get in trouble with each other. Energy policy, endangered species, stem cells, heck, even defining what constitutes a healthy diet can cause tension between the domains of policy and the domains of research.

Scientists say they just want to stick to the data and politicians say the world isn’t that simple. So, who is right and who is really being simplistic about the way the world works?

I have been sweating over this question ever since starting the 13.7 blog. Trying to take my role as a science communicator seriously, I struggle to balance my values as a human being with my commitment as a scientist to let the world speak for itself.

Turns out this balance is exactly the crux of the biscuit when it comes to science and policy.

Recently I stumbled across The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics by Roger A. Pielke, a professor with the Environmental Studies program at the University of Colorado. His book is short but cuts deeply across the core issue for our era: we can’t escape the impact of science in culture and yet we don’t understand how to use science in consciously and wisely shaping culture.

The topic is important enough for more than one post. So, for today, let’s start with a simple question. What do you think the relation between science and policy should be? Most folks, including most scientists, would answer this question with the so-called “linear model” of science and policy. As Pielke puts it:

The linear model is often used to suggest that achieving agreement on scientific knowledge is a prerequisite for political consensus to be reached and then policy action to occur. Read more …

Weinkle, Maue & Pielke paper referenced in Washington Post on super typhoons

Everything you need to know about “super typhoons”
by Brad Plumer

What are the long-term trends in tropical cyclones?

It’s not very clear. Last year, three researchers at the University of Colorado and the Naval Research Laboratory did their best to reconstruct a worldwide database for hurricanes or typhoons that made landfalls between 1970 and 2010.

Their conclusion? “The analysis does not indicate significant long-period global or individual basin trends in the frequency or intensity of landfalling [tropical cyclones] of minor or major hurricane strength.” Here’s the chart:

(And, for those curious, here is a preliminary estimate by the authors extending the data out to 2012.)

The authors of that paper, Jessica Weinkle, Ryan Maue, and Roger Pielke Jr., note that the economic damage from tropical cyclones does appear to be increasing worldwide. But this may be a function of people building more buildings in areas prone to hurricanes and typhoons, rather than an uptick in storm intensity or frequency. Read more …

Max Boykoff and Shawn Olson referenced in Guardian article

Climate contrarians are more celebrity than scientist
A new study identifies climate contrarians as a keystone species in the denial ecosystem
by John Abraham

By now, we must all be aware that it no longer takes hard work and talent to become a celebrity. The media (and public) are drawn to loud and flamboyant caricatures, not careful and studious characters. To most this means not much more than the annoyance of hearing about the latest celebrity “scandal.” But for all of us here on planet Earth, it has very real consequences.

New research clarifies exactly what those consequences are: Celebrities in scientists’ lab coats have played a role in the public discourse on climate change that far outweighs their scientific credibility.

In the journal Celebrity Studies, Dr. Maxwell Boykoff and Shawn Olson trace the history of climate contrarians back to the 1980s and discuss their potential motivations and strategies. The study identifies these contrarians as a “keystone species;” climate contrarians are more influential than their scant numbers and limited expertise would suggest, and exert an outsized media impact. According to the authors, it’s these keystone species that hold the ecosystem of climate denial together. Since, as we all know, 97% of climate scientists affirm the reality of human-caused climate change, what is it that motivates this handful of contrarians who make no small effort to attract so much more than 3% of the media’s attention? Read more …