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If you’re the type who wonders why self-serving flapdoodle is winning the climate change public-opinion contest, I think you’ll enjoy reading through a roundtable that just finished up over at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Princeton’s Rob Socolow (of climate change wedges fame),  Roger Pielke of the University of Colorado and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), and former marine biologist turned provocative Hollywood filmmaker Randy Olson have had a varied conversation that makes one overarching point:  It’s harder than one might think to counter distortion of science in the public arena.

I’m not going to recount their generally brilliant essays; you can read them  here. (To comprehend the conversation as a whole, I suggest starting at the bottom and reading up, as the essays are posted in reverse chronological order, i.e. most recent first.) I do think it worthwhile to restate a point I’ve made previously. I could reword it here, but I kind of like what I wrote before:

I do believe that the large environmental nonprofits — the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, Audubon and others — need to take some of their huge income streams and devote significant chunks of money directly to the task of making climate change uncool and stupid, in the way that cigarette smoking has been made dumb and unhip. Congress won’t aggressively act on climate change until public attitudes strongly support action. The ability of advertising — funny, smart, hip, multi-platform advertising — to change attitudes, and particularly political attitudes, has been proven, over and over again. … It’s time for the environmental lobby to pull money out of Washington and put it into a major, long-term, brilliant ad campaign focused on the most conceited, mean, greedy and uncool kid in school: Carlyle Dioxide.

The fossil fuel energy entities that have been pushing the idea that the science of climate change is horribly uncertain — perhaps even fraudulent —  use expert communicators (often politicians) and expert means (slick ad campaigns and a full-court media press) to get their message across to the public.  There is a full-fledged public relations campaign afoot, and it has persuaded many Americans that climate change is a mirage ginned up by pointy-headed academics and other crafty liberals to further the twin goals of undermining The Free Enterprise System and Ayn Rand’s reputation.

To explain the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is real, caused by humans, and a major threat to the planet, we have had … Al Gore and a bunch of scientists who are, by and large, unskilled in communicating with a general public. By all mean, let’s work to  improve the communication skills of scientists. But let’s remember something: Scientists are and should be primarily creators of knowledge. Conveying that knowledge accurately to the general public is the job of others, including the media, of course, but also the advocacy groups that supposedly believe in the science underlies their causes.

I don’t know how much more of a caricature Stephen Bloom can make of himself. This professor at the University of Iowa writes an Atlantic piece that waxes slightly sarcastic about his adopted home state. The rubes of Iowa complain, sometimes in crude ways that verge on anti-Semitism, as rubes across America are wont to do when their cherished misconceptions are challenged. Professor Bloom starts expressing fear for his life (even though he’s not in Iowa) in a way that lets Jim Romenesko depants him without unhooking a belt or pulling down a zipper. And now he’s in “an undisclosed location,” comparing his journalistically courageous self to Jack London, James Agee, H.L. Menken, Grant Riceland, Marvel Cooke, Jim Murray, cartoonist Paul Conrad, Tom Wolfe, Mike Royko, and Hunter S. Thompson–and then in the next breath saying he’s “nowhere even close to any of these titans.”

Which is undeniably true. The level of self-parody is ably illustrated in this paragraph:

I worked for a long time in daily newspapers and understand the pressures of delivering an account of something one knows little about in a very short time. I also understand the basic frightened stupidity of your average assistant city editor, who will always lead the news in the direction of appeasing the powers that be. But this story in the New Orleans Times-Picayune is a journalistic travesty, even by the low standards of the Times-Picayune.

Let’s track back a bit. Here are the basics of a previous post of mine about my brother-in-law, Folwell Dunbar (conflict alert: yes, he’s my brother-in-law), caught in the act of serving the public interest:

You could put this one in the “no good deed goes unpunished” file, or simply roll your eyes, sigh and mutter “Louisiana” on the exhale. If you read my last post, you know my brother in law, Folwell Dunbar, is a public-interest hero. While working at the Louisiana state agency that regulates charter schools, Folwell reported being offered a $20,000 bribe by someone apparently connected to Abramson Science and Technology Charter School in New Orleans, which he was in the process of auditing. Folwell turned down the bribe and did exactly what a good public servant should do — he wrote a report documenting the offer, and he reported the attempted bribe to the police. During the audit, he found the school had been grossly mismanaged and recommended that the state board of education take away its charter.

The state did nothing for a year, but then the New Orleans Times-Picayune dug up Folwell’s report via a public records request and wrote a story about it. Suddenly, the state decided it was time to suspend the school and investigate its performance.

When you have someone who wants to build a nuclear reactor in his kitchen, you just go with him. Even if he’s Swedish. Especially if he’s Swedish.

I started working as an editor for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists about three weeks ago. I knew I’d be editing leading scientists and dealing with complex subject matter. And I knew that the Bulletin, founded by experts who had created the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project, had an interesting history that included a National Magazine Award for General Excellence and, of course, the Doomsday Clock, reset each year to say how many minutes the world is away from midnight, aka nuclear armageddon. But I didn’t really know the prominence of so many people associated with the Bulletin. I didn’t know, for example, that the magazine’s Board of Sponsors includes, if I count correctly, 19 Nobel laureates, or that the Science and Security Board reads pretty much as a Who’s Who of the entire scholarly and governmental world of, well, science and national security. I also didn’t know just how ubiquitous the Doomsday Clock is. It seems as if everyone I tell about my new place of employment answers with some variant on, “Oh, that’s the place with the Doomsday Clock, right?” And as if to emphasize the enduring appeal of the clock, the newyorker.com’s News Desk posted this charming item today, “Clocks and Countdowns,” which compares the silliness of an ABC.com clock that counts down to federal default (“an overeager Hill intern logging the smirks and groans of everyone in a suit”) to “the wise, professorial father” that is the Doomsday Clock.  “From the perspective of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, we think about very  big, serious questions every day, and try to prevent the worst from happening,” Bulletin executive director Kennette Benedict, a personage of note herself, having directed the international peace and security program at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, is quoted as saying. I’m trying to think of downsides to a job that involves working with extremely smart people who are trying to — literally, practically — save the world. I’ll let you know if I come up with one.

Even though calling jellyfish pigeons of the sea is a compliment to the jellyfish, when you get a see-through picture of one, sometimes you just say, “oh, what the hell” and go with it.

It’s so charming and heartwarming and eye-popping and chuckle-inducing, all at once, to see a magazine offer a framed, 21.5 by 28.5-inch print of its current cover artwork for a mere $799, that I just had to go with this ad from The Walrus‘ website. Note to everyone: I love The Walrus. It’s a great magazine, doing God’s journalistic work, and in Canada yet. I’m sure the illustrator for this cover is an acclaimed one. But still.