Climate Change: What it Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren (American and Comparative Environmental Policy series)

Joseph F.C. DiMento and Pamela Doughman. The MIT Press/publshr>: 2007. 232 pp. $19.95

2007 was the year of the climate. It brought a shift in US congressional power and with it an opening to serious discussions of federal policy, an Oscar for former US vice president Al Gore's docu-drama An Inconvenient Truth, and the release of the latest assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded to the IPCC and Al Gore for their scientific and communication efforts on the issue, and the year ended with the UN conference on climate change in Bali, Indonesia. News coverage of global warming in 2007 was unparalleled, and surveys of the American public showed high levels of awareness of the problem, unprecedented agreement on its reality and human causation, and increasing worry about what it may mean.

Into this context falls DiMento and Doughman's Climate Change: What it Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren, which aims “to educate students and members of the general public about the scientific and political issues concerning climate change by providing balanced and well-documented information and observations about the problem”. It assumes that the public needs and wants more information and that, although understanding such a complex issue is a challenge, it can be made comprehensible and meaningful to lay publics. An honourable goal indeed, and one shared by countless climate change communicators who hope that greater understanding of the issue will somehow lead to active engagement.

The editors' central assumption — that more or better information will lead to right action — is a common one. The same idea underlies Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. In psychology, this notion is called the information (or knowledge) deficit model. It has repeatedly been proven wrong, or at least inadequate. Time after time, researchers find that information never suffices to motivate an appropriate behavioural response or active engagement with a problem and its solutions. To help people make potentially difficult changes, information and explanation must be augmented with practical help, support to overcome action barriers, social accountability, empowerment, and visions of a feasible positive outcome — in this case, a worthwhile future. Unfortunately, then, this book rests on a shaky basic premise. And at least for this consumer, the editors and contributors are no Al Gores.

Although scientifically the book stands on well-documented if uneven ground, it lacks the engaging storytelling, persuasive clarity and rhetorical finesse of its Hollywood-powered precursor. To be fair, it didn't have the budget, publicity machine, political star, or graphic means, and for this it can't be faulted. But it comes from professionals whose mission is to communicate science in support of public decisions. One may rightfully expect those with that particular mission to hold a deeper understanding of how to communicate effectively.

First among the rules for effective communication is to ask who the audience is and what it needs at this time. The American public and its many diverse sub-audiences are not generally fluent in matters of science. According to repeated surveys by the US National Science Foundation, the vast majority of Americans, although they profess generic interest in scientific discoveries, show no deep interest or acuity in climate change (or any other) science. I would be hard pressed to believe that this anthology will be found on the bedside tables of the masses.

But what about the 'interested' public, those who seek out information about a particular topic? What can they find here that they didn't already see in An Inconvenient Truth? Assuming readers make it past the sketchy introductory chapter, which lays out the difficult landscape of climate change science, policy, and the media communication in between, they then get a summary of climate science and of selected global, regional (read: North American) and local (read: Californian) impacts.

The highlights among the essays that follow include New York Times science reporter Andy Revkin's insider take on why the news media communicate climate change the way they do. Together with Naomi Oreske's accessibly written recap of her Science paper on the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change, Revkin's piece holds the collection's most provocative and enlightening insights.

The book closes with rough overviews of international, national and local policy responses, along with a dense yet interesting chapter on the implications of climate change for human security. This should have been the key to unlocking the meaning of climate change for us, our children and our grandchildren. The chapter raises interesting questions that could contribute something new to public debate — for example, “the moral obligation ... we have when a process of global change in which we are deeply implicated places great burdens on people who have had a fairly negligible impact on the global change itself”. Sadly, where the book should have started, it ends, and with an oddly argued, repetitive chapter on risk assessment and the economics of climate change, which opens a can of worms rather than closing one.

I was hoping for a book that would make climate change more meaningful to non-scientists, yet this one barely begins that task. And I doubt that this contribution to communicating climate change will hold readers' interest, given the more engaging competition. At a time when the science of climate change is ever more alarming and the need for public engagement and deep social change ever more urgent, this book does little to advance public debate. I will hold out that hope for the authors' future work.

Susanne C. Moser is a geographer at the Institute for the Study of Society and Environment in the US National Center for Atmospheric Research. smoser@ucar.edu