Discussion | Communicating Climate Change Science

How can researchers effectively communicate climate-change science to policy makers, the general public, and researchers from other disciplines? Researchers often come up against the challenge of effectively communicating complex data to an audience beyond academia. In the case of climate-change science, this challenge is a special one. Now a highly politicized issue, climate change has camps of interested parties among specialists, policy makers, and the general public. In such an environment, what should researchers do—and what do they need to do—to make the scientific data widely accessible and interpretable?

Appearing as panelists are Ned Gardiner, Gavin Schmidt, and Sabine Marx. Ned Gardiner is the Climate Visualization Project Manager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s Climate Program Office and works to advance NOAA's climate communications, concentrating on data visualization in many contexts, including the NOAA Climate Service Portal (www.climate.gov) and public events around the world. Gavin Schmidt is a climate modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, where he studies why climate has changed in the past, why it is changing now, and what risks that implies for the future. He is a co-founder of the blog RealClimate and co-author of a popular science book Climate Change: Picturing the Science with photographer Josh Wolfe. Sabine Marx is the Managing Director at the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions. Her research focuses on the use of climate information in agriculture, public health, and disaster preparedness and management. She is especially interested in the integration of climate science and social science, communication of climate information, and outreach to decision makers. Robin Bell, Senior Research Scientist in Marine Geology and Geophysics at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, moderates.