Published on Jan 6, 2016
Speaking at a science conference in Washington, DC, Chief NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt says, ‘we really want to allow less science and more cultural understanding’ to successfully message the climate narrative in places like Texas.
NASA’s Schmidt: “Now, you know there’s some communities I can’t talk to because, you know, I’m a liberal, Jewish atheist from New York City, right? So if I go to Texas and try and tell people about climate change, I’m totally the wrong messenger, right? Because we don’t have any shared values quite frankly. […] A lot of times we think, ‘oh, more science, more science’, and really we want to allow less science and more cultural understanding, and that might take us a lot further.”
Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP)
2016 Winter Meeting
Washington, DC
January 6, 2015
NASA GISS DIRECTOR GAVIN SCHMIDT: “You have to get to the real problem. And, the real problem is not that they don’t believe the scientists. The real problem is not that the graph was in the wrong color. The real problem is not that the animation wasn’t interactive enough. There’s another problem, right? It’s a question of values, right? What they see when you show them a graph is a rejection of some deep value that they hold dear, right? And, if that’s the way it’s going to go you’re never going to get anywhere, right? So, if you’re talking to somebody you have to find the value issue where you can actually kind of dig down and see what’s going on. And, stories can help with that, because stories can help demonstrate that we share very many of the same values. ‘We all love our children,’ well mostly, and you know and ‘we don’t want people to die,’ and ‘we’d all like to have a nice life.’ I mean, once you build it from shared things, you can go forward.
Now, you know there’s some communities I can’t talk to because, you know, I’m a liberal, Jewish atheist from New York City, right? So if I go to Texas and try and tell people about climate change, I’m totally the wrong messenger, right? Because we don’t have any shared values quite frankly. But, some people do, right? So, Katherine Hayhoe, right? So, you know she married an evangelical pastor, and I don’t know if you saw ‘Years of Living Dangerously’? She’s featured on one segment there talking to townsfolk in Plano, Texas, and she’s one of them. She’s from Canada, so she’s not quite one of them, but she’s almost one of them. So, she can talk with them in ways that don’t threaten their kind of who they see themselves as. A lot of times we think, ‘oh, more science, more science’, and really we want to allow less science and more cultural understanding, and that might take us a lot further.”
