Extreme weather

Climate change often receives the most attention in the media when extreme weather is in the news. It seems that every hurricane, flood,  or heat wave sparks a new round of headlines. The public seem to respond to this effect; a 2014 study found that following personal experience of Hurricanes Sandy and Irene, students in the north-east of the US showed increased concern about climate change. Previous negative attitudes towards ‘green’ politicians were even reversed.

However, it’s less certain that these links are scientifically accurate. Is climate change actually causing the rate of extreme weather events to increase?

Over the last few years a number of papers have been published in which the links between specific extreme weather events and climate change have been investigated. However, not much has changed in the way these events are reported in the news. This week a report was published discussing the both the science of extreme weather events and, perhaps even more interestingly, how this is communicated.

Contrary to my impression, the report found that even when links were well established, extreme weather events were often discussed without any mention of climate change- particularly in the US. However, it did note that climate change reporting is dominated by extreme weather events. This is doubly concerning, highlighting how under-reported climate change impacts are. The report also found that prominent public figures played a large role in influencing public opinion, even if they were unqualified to comment

In light of this, the report makes some recommendations about how to best communicate scientific understanding of climate change. The main points are that the reporting should focus on what we do know, rather than what we don’t, and that pessimism and despair should be avoided as they tend to prompt inaction.  This advice may seem common sense, but in reality is rarely followed for a number of reasons. For example, talk of ‘uncertainty’ and ‘error’ is common in science, but these words have subtly different meanings in everyday usage that tend to confuse the public.

This advice could be applied to many areas of science, but is particularly useful for climate change where public understanding and concern lags far behind the science. Let’s hope that these recommendations are widely read and followed, and that it’s enough to counteract the new wave of ‘sceptics’ coming into power in 2017.