How to improve public awareness and consequently the efficiency of science policy interface?

Science publication are still too often only accessible to highly specialized researchers. Decision making process need a full understanding of scientific facts and public awareness is another key element of this process. How could we favorise the emergence of new publications targeted to non-specialists audience ?

There are large disconnects between the world of scientific (including social-scientific) experts and the general public on subjects such as risk, vulnerability, and socio-ecological change. This presents challenges to generating the political change we need for embarking on more sustainable development pathways. In what ways does this disconnect affect the creation of appropriate policy, and how do we deal with it?

The public is growing increasingly distrustful of politicians and of what academic Tim Mitchell calls “the rule of experts.” For real, transformative changes, we need mass buy-in and political pressure. What is our responsibility, as academics, in terms of making our research accessible, relevant and usable by the public? How do we bridge this gap?

How can we rapidly develop carbon negative energy systems and deploy them globally?

Sub-questions: What options for carbon negativity are there? What are the thermodynamic limitations on the various carbon negative alternatives? How can we break the linkage of large grants going to unproductive and ineffective entities? How can small farmers become the engine for carbon negativity that Sir James Lovelock suggests they must? Are there alternatives to the current IPO model for this kind of development cycle? What are the real time constraints for effective activity in the carbon negative arena? How can we explain these constraints to the general public?

Sir James Lovelock has identified the apparent only real carbon negative energy opportunity – processing organic residues into stable biochar and using that char as a soil enhancement near where the residues occur globally and enabling small farmers to profit from this activity. He has not connected this to distributed energy generation and there are many factors that would benefit from both rapid documentation and codification for global use. The recent changes in Arctic thermal profiles raise serious questions about how long we really have to react. There is no question that lowering the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere can only be accomplished with either massive reduction of emissions for an extended period so that normal carbon negative processes can catch up with the past emissions or we will have to find ways of accelerating the removal of CO2 with thermodynamically beneficial systems. What alternatives do we really have?

At the same time we need to also put in place a series of practices that will be stable over the long haul – ie: they must become sustainable. It appears that Sir James has hit on a realistic possibility to do many of these things at once, and he has seen that the normal corporate practice of enriching a few by doing things that we all should be doing for ourselves is no longer a tenable solution. How do we get to real sustainable practices in time to do things right?

How do we keep all of this research relevant to society?

Earth System Science has something of an identity crisis – the general public, and certainly many scientists don’t know what it’s about while we think it’s at the basis of our future existence on this planet. Do we, the research community, have spokes-people focusing on communication? How can individuals improve – or create – a commonly understood reputation for this field? Without this reputation we will struggle to find funding, students, jobs.

If continuing and unsustainable growth in the global human population is accepted as the principal cause of accelerating environmental/natural resource degradation, what is keeping the global science community from more forcefully engaging the key political establishments to educate and drive the radical changes required, to lead the world towards a level of reasonable sustainability? How can we get them to take on such a role?

Without leadership and urgent government action, to date sadly lacking, we are likely to reach crisis point, leading to global catastrophe. Continual waffle and ‘feel good’ measures such as ‘cap & trade’ legislation are unlikely to achieve any real positive/timely result.

Given that political administrations tend to be driven by poling statistics/insuring incumbency, it would seem that the general public must somehow become engaged in a grassroots driven campaign to give voice to the very real issues raised by the global science community. Without a sense of urgency we will reach a point of ‘no return’ and, ‘too little too late’ to achieve any meaningful result.