You have to understand how to be an effective communicator. And they realized that that's not how the political system works. I think many of them thought they were like medical scientists - you make your pronouncement, and then the patient does what he's told to do. I think many climate scientists have gotten better at communications because of Climategate. And I think that's just not right.ĭo you think this has always been true - that climate change has always been a potential political winner - or has it become more true over time? That said, there are ways to talk about it that aren't useful, and I think people have mistaken the blowback from bad communications for thinking there's no way to communicate on this issue. And so there is a way to talk about this issue that does work politically.
If you talk to Jon Krosnick or Ed Maibach or Robert Brulle, they will tell you that this is an issue that the public broadly gets-and that there is an underlying respect for science and scientists. I have talked to the leading social scientist over the years. And then I realized, "this is more dire than I thought, and climate scientists are not doing a good job of communicating it." So it was the underlying reality that gave me an urgency to stop doing what I was doing - clean energy consulting - and start doing communications full time. I started when my brother lost his home in Katrina, he wanted to know if he should rebuild, so I talked to a lot of climate scientists. Joe Romm: Well, I didn't pursue this topic because I thought it was a political winner.
So we stopped to chat with Romm, who will present at the briefing, about his unusual take on this subject.Ĭlimate Desk: You've been writing for a long time about how climate is a winning political issue. Now, a raft of new polls are showing that this issue has the potential to move independent and swing voters - the subject of the first Climate Desk Live Capitol Hill briefing on October 10. Indeed, Romm has called Obama's failure to speak out about global warming, loudly and often, his " biggest communications mistake." But there's been a recurrent theme over the years at Joe Romm's popular blog Climate Progress - the argument that political leaders, and perhaps most prominently President Obama, need to step up and explain to the public why global warming is such a dramatic threat to our livelihoods and future. He's been called " America's fiercest climate blogger." And as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a former Clinton administration official on clean energy, and an MIT-trained physicist, the subjects he covers are vast - ranging from energy policy to the role of rhetoric in communications, as discussed in his new book Language Intelligence.
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