By Mark Paterson, Managing Director, Currie Communications
Climate scientists are under siege.
They have made errors of judgement in preparing the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. (http://tinyurl.com/yan2399). We don’t expect them to be sloppy. Science is the art of being exact, right?
And in a debate about the future of the planet, there is no margin for error. So, at the moment (post-East Anglia, post-Copenhagen, post-ETS ) climate scientists have a problem, a credibility problem.
Now that their reputation is tarnished why will people continue to believe what they say?
The issue is that they have seemingly lost sight of what we most value from them: independence, rigour and accuracy. Sure, the mistakes are few, yet when politicians and key opinion leaders treat their research as evidence for change to people’s lives, our trust in scientists’ integrity is paramount.
The lesson here for the rest of us is that it does not matter what we talk about, how, when or to whom, the vital thing is to remember why people listen. What’s the core promise in the relationship?
It’s non-negotiable. It’s an unwritten clause in the communications transaction that you ignore at your peril. If you don’t know why your audience stops to listen to you, find out or prepare to be treated with contempt.
As for climate scientists, they face the tough challenge of redeeming themselves. Ahead of the next IPCC report in 2012 they can expect more scrunity of their work than at any other time in history.
