Richard C. J. Somerville and Susan Joy Hassol on “Communicating the Science of Climate Change”:
Another common mistake made by scientists is leading with what they do not know instead of what they do know. For example, they are often asked if a particular heat wave, heavy downpour, drought, wildfire, or flood was caused by climate change. Instead of repeating the common mantra that “we cannot blame any particular event on climate change,” they should explain the connections: In the case of heavy downpours, they can explain that a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, so any given storm system can produce more rain. Scientists have measured an increase in atmospheric water vapor and definitively attributed it to human-induced warming. They have also measured an increase in the amount of rain falling in the heaviest downpours, a change that climate models have long projected.
Please, please, please don’t do this. The authors are making precisely the mistake they are warning against: failing to recognise the gap between what a scientist means and what a member of the public hears. If a scientist answered in the way the author suggested, the layman is going to hear “Yes, (sciencey words atmosphere vapor sciencey words) climate change was absolutely the direct cause of that storm”. This is, of course, completely wrong, and is why so many non-scientists say things like “it’s been such a cool summer – so much for global warming!”. If a layman is failing to understand an explanation of an uncertain or probabilistic event, the solution is to work harder to make the uncertainty clearer, not to pretend the uncertainty does not exist.
A geneticist I know tells the story of a group of non-scientists who were given information on the inheritance of an autosomal recessive disorder from a pair of heterozygotic parents. They were given a basic sketch of Mendelian inheritance, which clearly predicts the probability that a given child of the parents would have the disorder is approximately one in four. Later, the non-scientists were asked what the chance was that the parents’ firstborn child would have the disorder. Every single one either answered “the child will definitely have the disorder” or “the child will definitely not have the disorder”.
Explaining uncertainty and probability to non-scientists is hard enough already. Don’t make it harder on yourself by even hinting at deterministic links where they don’t exist.
