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Nobel Prize winner demands
more honesty from peers in green debate
By Ashlee Vance
The
Register
Monday February 4, 2008
Scientists hoping to educate the public about environmental
concerns could do themselves and the public a favor by abandoning
hyperbolic scare tactics in favor of straightforward talk, according
to a prominent scientist.
Steve Chu, the director of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and
a Nobel Prize winner in physics, chastised some of his peers for
presenting speculative worst case scenarios in their discussions
on environmental issues. Researchers often come up with gloomy
possible forecasts about changes in environmental conditions and
talk about them as fact. Such tactics do little to help the public
understand the true nature of the "green debate."
"I think more scientists have to explain the risks (of global
warming and the like), and do it in a way that is intellectually
honest," Chu told a group of venture capitalists and scientists
visiting the lab this week.
(Article continues below)
Rather than trying to incite action through fear, the scientists
should be clear about what their data indicates. For example,
instead of presenting an extreme change in conditions as an inevitable
outcome to the public, researchers should discuss the range of
possibilities they're seeing and let Joe Average decide how he
feels about the results. As Chu sees it, the public can judge
how seriously they take the difference between there being an
90 per cent chance and a 50 per cent chance that, say, Greenland
will melt away. Give them that shot instead of presenting Greenland's
liquidity as a certainty.
Still, Chu fears that the public has yet to grasp the extent
of the challenges facing the environment. He pointed to British
Columbia which has "lost 40 per cent of its pines" due
to warming. "The Rockies and Sierras are also starting to
lose huge amounts of watershed trees." Without trees, you
end up with floods and general craposity.
"I don't think the public really knows about this stuff
to the extent that they should," Chu said. "You need
a steady drumbeat of scientists who are willing to go out and
talk to the public. I am doing my share. I'm out twice a week."
In addition, the government needs to take a firmer stance against
lobbyists.
The homebuilders association, for example, will go to Washington
and lobby against putting new materials in homes that cost a bit
extra upfront but pay for themselves quickly as energy savers.
Why? Because the materials add "one-tenth of one per cent"
to the cost of new homes. "So that is a loss of a competitive
edge against already built homes," Chu noted.
"Policy makers have to be told to just forget about these
guys," he said.
Chu's comments came during a talk on the work that Berkeley and
others are doing to improve energy efficiency in a variety of
markets.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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