Did anyone waste watercooler time on the World Bank’s recent global warming warning? The one that said the planet will probably experience a 4° Celsius rise this century? Of course not. Neither did anyone use work time to talk over the UN Environment Programme report, released ahead of the current international climate negotiations in Qatar. It says the atmosphere now contains onefifth more carbon than in 2000, with no visible fall in emissions to come. Bad news, obviously. But we were busy discussing who might replace Roberto Di Matteo at Chelsea.
A report published in August showed that our interest in climate change has declined over the past five years. Only one-third of us even like to read or think about it. But Climate Science, the Public and the News Media does offer one useful pointer. People prefer climate coverage that is simple, bold and to the point. Even academics and broadsheet readers said that they preferred tabloid coverage of climate issues, and it had more immediate impact on their opinions.
We have to get past the idea that the only way we can cover climate science is by using long, balanced, reasoned arguments. So, why not take a leaf out of football’s book? Football has no trouble getting people’s attention. When Di Matteo was given the boot from his position as Chelsea manager, conjectures about his replacement sent the internet into overdrive. You could offer your contribution in online polls, or you could place a bet on Harry Redknapp or Avram Grant to take over at Stamford Bridge.
Every day, swaths of newsprint are dedicated to opinionated discussions of football that cut across divides of class, income or occupation. Season ticketholders for major football teams include politicians, comedians, television presenters, mathematicians, carpenters, journalists, roofers, bankers – every section of society.
But it’s not the movement of a football into a goal that is so interesting. It’s the people who make it happen. It’s the managers and their tactics. It’s the players and their skills and fallibilities. It’s about trajectories of success and failure, predictions that are proved right or wrong. Climate science has all these. And we could even make it worth a flutter.
Some people are already betting on the climate. At intrade.com, for instance, you can bet the average global temperature for 2012 to be the warmest on record. You can bet on the global-temperature anomaly for this month being greater than 0.45°C, or on global average temperatures for 2012 being the warmest on record.
Model behaviour
At the moment, Intrade’s bets are largely taken up by people advocating different climate models: it’s a way of putting your money where your mouth is. But surely there is scope to develop this on a bigger scale, and with endorsement from people in the know. If a Nasa chief started buying shares in a certain prediction, if a geographer saw a climate solution worth investing in, if a forestry researcher bet on a new ecological trend spiralling out of control, that might be more interesting than hearing the raw facts. It might even be a stimulus that made people look up the facts for themselves.
Perhaps it’s horrible to encourage us to place bets on the climate catastrophe, but it might be the thing that finally gets our attention. And at least there’s publicly accessible information to base your decisions on; you stand to make some quick cash by looking up Nasa satellite data before you commit. It’s definitely better than losing your shirt trying to second-guess the whims of a surly Russian billionaire.
Michael Brooks’s “The Secret Anarchy of Science” is published by Profile Books (£8.99)
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