scientists setting the stakes --- @Veronica - I like those ideas a lot! I think we also need to help scientists understand that the way they frame their results can impact the policy process in ways that are actually the opposite of what they are hoping to achieve. A scientist may say that they have a 95% certainty that human-derived CO2 emissions are driving climate change, and someone who does not want to take action on climate change may see that and say "see? not even the scientists are sure, so we don't need to take any action". Whereas if scientists realized that in the policy realm they need to frame their results along the lines of "CO2 is a pollutant in our atmosphere, there is more of it in our atmosphere than there used to be, and we have X, Y, and Z methods for determining that much of it is coming from human activities." One challenge here is that science is fundamentally descriptive in nature not proscriptive, so scientists are comfortable describing things as they are but have a hard time being comfortable with taking the next step, which in this example would be to say "therefore we SHOULD reduce carbon emissions as much as possible and as quickly as possible", but that is likely the conclusion they are hoping the policymaker will draw, so they need to make sure they are framing their descriptive results in ways that guide the conversation in that direction.

Source author: Ryan Haupt ryan.haupt@nysf.com