Following the G8 summit last week, which I covered for Nature News, I headed back to Tokyo (thankfully through the right airport this time) to join a panel on climate change at the British Council organised by our Nature Asia office.
The idea of the Nature Climate Café was to inform and engage a diverse audience in some of the issues around climate science and policy. Each of the panellists, including myself, Dr Seita Emori of the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Japan and Mitsutaka Fujita, a freelance journalist, gave a brief talk on climate science, climate prediction and communicating climate change.
I spoke about climate science and what we’re doing at Nature on communicating climate science and its wider implications. Emori san, who primarily works on climate prediction and is well used to engaging with the public and the media, is the host of a newly produced (and quite Gore-esque) simulation on climate change, available both in Japanese and English. He gave a visually compelling talk on the impacts of a warmer planet, while Fujita san challenged the audience with a thought-provoking exercise on how print and broadcast media differ in their communication of climate change.
Once the more formal talks were over, the audience had a chance to fire questions at us and that’s when we got down to the real discussions.
One of the issues that really popped out of this for me was the difference in how the mainstream media represents climate change in Japan and Britain (just to be clear I’m talking generalities here, so the Daily Telegraph is out). The general feeling was that on the whole the Japanese media reported the outcome of the G8 summit more favourably, with about a 50/50 split on whether it was a weak or strong statement, than the British (and international) media, who mostly gave it the thumbs down. A couple of people commented that this is likely due to Japanese journalists not challenging the status quo.
Also of interest was a question from the audience on whether journalists should include sceptics for balance when reporting on climate change, a point on which Fujita san and I differed somewhat. When asked, quite a number of the attendees were sceptical about the importance and/or cause of climate change, but then despite the fact that most British papers don’t feel the need include a random sceptic for balance, a recent poll suggests that the majority of Britons are still confused on the issue.
Also discussed was whether the G8 summit was successful. Emori san did a nice job of explaining the rationale for various emissions reduction targets and pointed out that all too often the media wrongly claims that the IPCC has called for a 50-80% cut on 1990 levels by 2050. None the less, many of the IPCC scientists have called for this level of reduction in their own capacity, which is a point I thought worth mentioning.
I personally found the panel extremely worthwhile. The audience was really engaged and interested, and we were bombarded with a range of questions afterwards from the importance of cows letting off methane to the role of solar variation. At my end, I found the translation a little tricky sometimes, but I hope it mostly worked in reverse and that we managed to make climate change that bit clearer for those who joined us.
Olive Heffernan
Image: Nature Climate Cafe. Credit: Chris Gilloch.
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