Audio and Highlights of the Harvard Kennedy School Panel w/ Andrew Revkin on Climate Change, Skeptics, and the Media [Framing Science]
On Thursday, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, I served as one of the panelists at the event "The Public Divide over Climate Change: Science, Skeptics and the Media." The two hour session drew roughly 100 attendees, was organized and moderated by Belfer Center fellow Cristine Russell, and featured Andrew Revkin of the New York Times' Dot Earth blog and Thomas Patterson, Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at the Kennedy School.
Audio of the panel is available at the Kennedy School web site and the event was covered in detail by the Columbia Journalism Review and the Harvard Gazette. Separate press summaries are posted at the Web sites for the sponsoring Shorenstein and Belfer Centers at the Kennedy School. In the rest of this post, I highlight several key points made by the panelists and attending faculty from Harvard with the minute mark of the audio included, so that readers can listen in.
Highlights From the Prepared Remarks of Panelists
In Russell's introductory remarks as organizer and moderator (4 min mark of audio), the veteran journalist set the tone for the panel, by emphasizing the tremendous acrimony from both the left and the right on climate change and the need to identify ways to improve overall public dialogue on the issue.
Andrew Revkin (13 min mark) noted that he was making his first public remarks since accepting a buy out from his position as chief environmental reporter at the New York Times. A master of using metaphor to convey a complex concept, Revkin compared public opinion on climate change to "waves in a shallow pan" that will tip to either side based on focusing events or news trends leading to "a lot of sloshing but not a lot of depth." Revkin also predicted that in coming years, information about climate change will come less and less from journalists and their news organizations, and instead from other parties, notably either scientists themselves (through their organizations, universities, or own social media strategies) or through advocates including climate skeptics and environmentalists.
In my remarks (25 min mark), I opened by suggesting several important themes for discussion before then moving to present findings from current research with Ed Maibach on how a diversity of Americans respond to information about the potential health impacts of climate change. My opening remarks focused specifically on understanding the apparent impact that "ClimateGate" has had both on the public but also on the political outlook of scientists, particularly the use of ClimateGate by skeptics to drive a new public accountability narrative about scientists. I have pasted the text of those remarks in a separate post. To view video and a version of the slides that I presented at Harvard, go to the 32 minute mark of a similar presentation I gave at a recent panel at the meetings of the American Geophysical Union.
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