Warief Djajanto Basorie, Jakarta
How well do you understand the language of scientists? Put another way, how well are scientists able to communicate their work to the public at large? The brief answer is perhaps not so well.
A major scientific topic today that gets daily media coverage is climate change. Climate change is the rise in global average temperature that affects weather patterns like rainfall. You have too much rain and get floods that inundated half of Jakarta in February 2007. You could also get too little rain that leads to drought and crop failure.
To back up, that rise in global temperature is due to increased emissions of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide and methane. These gases work as a clamp that prevents some of the sun's heat from being reflected back into space.
The majority scientific opinion is that the Earth's climate is warming and this has a damaging impact on people's lives. It is also the majority opinion that human activities are the main cause of global warming. Carbon dioxide comes mainly from the burning of fossil fuels: oil gas, coal. Cars, planes and ships use a lot of fossil fuel. So do power plants and industry.
Former U.S. vice president Al Gore underscores the high currency of this global issue that affects every human being on this planet. His purposeful advocacy to boost public awareness and action to check harmful climate change earned him the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, is the leading body for the assessment of climate change. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) established the IPCC in 1988 ""to provide the world with a clear, balanced view of the present state of understanding of climate change"", a recent IPCC brochure insists.
The Geneva-based IPCC produces detailed but dense reports written by more than 3,000 scientists from more than 130 countries. Do the reports communicate clearly the most current scientific and socio-economic information to the common public's understanding of climate change? Or is the language in the studies too technical and only understandable by the scientific community?
I visited the IPCC's homepage, www.ipcc.ch, to find out. I encountered the technical summary of the Fourth Assessment Report to be released in Valencia, Spain, on Nov. 16, 2007. The Fourth Assessment Report provides an overall scientific view of the current understanding of climate change. It unifies the three previous working group volumes published earlier in the year, in February, April and May.
Volume I covered the physical science basis of climate change. Volume II analyzed the impacts on natural and human systems. Volume III looks at the mitigation options of climate change. Mitigation is the act to make something less severe. That ""something"" could be the impact of a natural disaster like heavy storms, heat waves and rising sea levels.
On page 11 of the technical summary I read this section on potential for mitigation: ""Potential is used to express the degree of GHG reduction that can be achieved by a mitigation option with a given cost per tonne of carbon avoided over a given period compared with a baseline or reference case.""
I could not understand it. Even the press release issued in Bangkok on May 4 for the launch of the third working group volume is not easy to follow: Stabilizing GHG levels at 535-590 ppm would require global CO2 emissions to peak by 2010-2030 and return to -30 percent to 5 percent of 2000 levels.
How can you make the IPCC homepage more reader-friendly? Citing the quote on mitigation, I posed the above question to IPCC information officer Carola Saibante, who came to Jakarta with a team of IPCC scientists to brief journalists here recently ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali from Dec. 3-14.
Saibante explained the IPCC sticks with scientific language. ""Dissemination is important but it is not our role to translate the language (of the scientists).""
She added the IPCC is improving its website but admits she is ""frustrated"" by the restrictive, exclusive use of the scientific language of the reports the IPCC issues.
An agenda item relevant for thought in Bali should be on how to produce reader-friendly versions of scientific climate change documents. After all, the impact of climate change affects everyone. The global public has the basic right to comprehend the studies the scientists release so that every individual can decide how best each of us can act to make any climate change impact less severe.
Today's scientists can take a cue from Isaac Asimov, an American scientist who popularized science through more than 475 books and anthologies. Asimov's last book was published after he died in April 1992. Frontiers II (Plume, New York, 1994) is a collection of science columns by Asimov and wife Janet. One article, ""Air -- the Circulation Above"", focuses on the greenhouse effect. It offers readers two things to do to counter the dangers of the greenhouse effect: (1) Take care of the planet Earth. (2) If that fails, build protective habitats elsewhere on the Moon, Mars or in rotating artificial worlds.
The writer is a freelancer in Jakarta. He can be reached at wariefdj@yahoo.com.
