Yesterday I posted a link to Nick Kristof’s op-ed on alarmism in the environmental movement. I agree with the spirit of the piece, if not the tone, and I certainly wasn’t bothered as much as a lot of other people. I spent a lot of time thinking today about how people within the environmental movement, who presumably have a lot of ideas and opinions in common, might feel so differently about the same piece of writing.

The first thing in some of the different responses that I saw was a stark disagreement about what exactly Kristof means when he talks about ‘alarmists.’ Perhaps arrogantly, I don’t think of myself as an alarmist. Others seemed to feel that Kristof was effectively calling all environmentalists alarmists. I assumed that he was talking about activist groups like Greenpeace.

He claims that because of the environmental movement’s “awful track record,” it has “lost credibility with the public.” Perhaps this statement should have given me pause, since I don’t think that our track record is the issue; I think people are sick of being told that the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

We’ve been quite successful at trumpeting our issues – people know that environmentalists want to prevent climate change, that we disagree with the Clear Skies initiative, and that we don’t want to drill in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. But they don’t know why. I don’t mean to suggest that every American should be an expert on these issues – that idea would be extremely naïve. But I do think that we have a problem when a fiction writer says one thing and a climate scientist says another, and Average Joe doesn’t know who to believe.

This all coalesced for me tonight when I ran across a BBC article about a public poll in the UK that asked people for their opinion on science and scientists. The UK has a very different cultural and political climate than the United States, but even so, I think these numbers are telling:

The report's key findings:

• 70% of UK adults trust scientists to tell the truth
• 80% of adults think science makes a good contribution to society
• 56% of adults have taken part in a science-based activity outside work in the last year
• 40% of adults consider themselves well informed about science
• 70% of people think the media sensationalises science issues.

The author seems to be of the opinion that these numbers are generally high. I think that 80% is a startlingly low figure for adults who think science makes a valuable contribution to society. I also find the idea that 70% of UK citizens think the media sensationalizes science issues quite disturbing, albeit unsurprising. My intuition is that in the U.S. the first figure would be lower and the second figure would be higher.

I would argue that the lack of obvious public support for environmental issues like climate change is a disconnect between science and the public. And I’m inclined to blame this disconnect almost entirely on mainstream media rather than environmental groups or the science establishment. Unfortunately though, we cannot expect media coverage of science to change, so regardless of whose “fault” the problem is, it’s up to the environmental movement to fix it. And like Kristof, I can’t accept that alarmism is the solution.