New Year Resolutions: A fresh start for climate change?

Source: Lebel, A. T (2011)

A new year, and yet another long list of resolutions for us all to try and in my case fail to stick to. So instead, I have decided to set myself targets. Must be the academic ' I must try harder' system getting to me but a review of the recent media regarding climate change suggests that the public as a whole are becoming  blasé with regard to tackling climate change. The annual release of the British Social Attitudes survey last month suggested that public support for climate change had fallen dramatically from 50% concerned that climate change is not high enough on the political agenda a decade ago to 34% today. (Guardian, 5th January, 2012)

But how can this be possible? Comprehensive reports such as those of the IPCC and an overwhelming majority of the scientific literature suggest that climate change is occurring. Some such as Crutzen (2002) state that we have entered a new epoch, called the 'Anthropocene' due to the significant changes that human activity has caused to the environment. However, as it made apparent in the Durban conference in November, governments are still reluctant to act stating more research is provided. Aside from the political and economic factors embedded within the conference, current reluctance can be partially attributed to anti-science. The requirement for media to provide neutral coverage of a story mean uncertainities in models and gaps in data are being equally disseminated to the public. The complexity of the earth's system means that models can never completely remove uncertainity from projections on future climate change and therefore if government's wait until models are certain of their predictions attempts to mitigate against climate change will already be too late.

Clear examples of this anti-science have been highlighted by Peter Gleick (2012) in his release of the second 'Bad Science of the Year Awards' for 2011.

So from this, I have decided if there's one thing that I can do this year is try to increase other people's awareness on climate change and show them how it's not an inevitable outcome of economic development. The Guardian (5th Janurary 2012) argue that many people have heard of climate change but through exaggerated headline grabbing articles or on neutrally weighted documentaries. 

 Many people claim that one person can't make a difference but then if you can convince one person and them another it may just start a chain reaction. Therefore, new year, new start, new target, 2012 could be the year to make real progress on reducing climate change.

Reference:
Cruzen, P.J. (2002) 'Geology of mankind', Nature, 415,1: 23

The Guardian, (2012) 'The climate change message is not being heard. Here's how to change tack', The Guardian, 5th January 2012, (www) http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/05/climate-change-message?newsfeed=true (Accessed 5/01/12)