AGU Chapman Conference on Communicating Climate Science: A Historic Look to the Future

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The American Geophysical Union has been uploading videos from their June 2013 conference onto youtube.

The videos are at http://www.youtube.com/user/AGUvideos/videos?sort=dd&tag_id=&shelf_index=3&view=0

The conference website is http://chapman.agu.org/climatescience/

The goal of this Chapman Conference is to bring together scholars, social scientists, and journalists to discuss both the history and recent advances in the understanding of climate science and how to communicate that science to policymakers, the media, and society. A research agenda of the conference will focus on the efficacy of scientific communication, with ideas on improved practices arising as an outcome from collaborations spawned at the conference.

This exploration will take place through: 1) discussions covering the history of climate science and successes and failures in communicating scientific ideas to the policy makers and public; 2) an assessment of where we are with respect to current knowledge of climate science and its communication and acceptance by society; 3) a comparison with experiences in other areas producing similar difficulties between scientific knowledge dissemination, societal acceptance of that knowledge, and governance.

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1. Alan Robock: Trying to Tell the World about Nuclear Winter -- Denial Ain't Just a River in Egypt

This is a particularly important one since there is so much denial about it.

Presenter: Alan Robock
Sunday, June 9, 2013, 1:45 p.m. - 2:05 p.m.

Session: New and Bleeding Edge Topics in Climate Science I

Abstract Title: Trying to Tell the World about Nuclear Winter -- Denial Ain't Just a River in Egypt

As difficult as it is to communicate to the world about global warming, I have found it even harder to communicate about the climatic consequences of nuclear war. It is not that there is an active disinformation campaign against our work. It is rather that it is just ignored.

New research by myself, Brian Toon, Mike Mills, and colleagues over the past six years has found that a nuclear war between any two countries, such as India and Pakistan, using 50 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs each could produce climate change unprecedented in recorded human history. This is less than 0.05% of the explosive power of the current global arsenal.

We also found that a nuclear war between the United States and Russia today, or even after reductions planned for 2017 under the New START treaty, could produce nuclear winter, with temperatures plunging below freezing in the summer in major agricultural regions, threatening the food supply for most of the planet.

The clear policy implication is that we need to rid the world of nuclear weapons much faster than is now happening. Despite peer-reviewed publications in major journals, including Science, Nature, PNAS, JGR, ACP, Climatic Change, and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and articles in encyclopedias, Scientific American, and Physics Today, there so far have been no policy responses from nuclear nations.

There has been a webpage for several years with all the information on our work at http://envsci.rutgers.edu/nuclear, and I give many talks on the subject and have even begun using Twitter. We gave a briefing in Congress a couple years ago, and wrote to the President's Science Advisor. But there has been no response or even acknowledgment of the work. The subject is difficult to deal with for many, and it feels better to just ignore it and hope it goes away. Numerous attempts to write op-eds in major newspapers have failed, and policy journals will not consider articles. Any suggestions as to how to proceed will be most welcome.