Many thanks to Anna for pointing out a review by Gavin Schmidt of Kerry Emanuel’s new book What We Know about Climate Change. The first part of the review is not actually about the book; it’s about scientists reviewing popular science books.

As a general rule, scientists should not be asked to review other scientists’ attempts at popularization. We tend to focus on details or on minor points of emphasis that are close to our specialties, but completely miss the central point — whether the communication leaves its consumers better informed or more appreciative of the science than before.

Since scientist-reviewers are presumably quite well informed, they are singularly poorly placed to judge the impact of popular science on the lay public. This also explains why most popularization efforts from scientists (my own included) fall flat, and, perhaps, why Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth got more people to sit through a 90-minute presentation on climate than the efforts of all of the world’s climate scientists combined.

Despite this, scientists are regularly asked for such services, and in truth we are happy to oblige. Sometimes we find great distortions of the science that need to be contradicted, but most often we find genuine attempts to inform and educate. Some are well written, and some not; some well fact-checked, some not. We usually come to the conclusion that the latest offering would help improve the public’s understanding of the problem if they could only be brought to read it.

In previous posts, I have nit-picked the How it all ends guy. There were some glaring errors - my favorite is that greenhouse gases do not reflect. I even did an entire post about reflecting greenhouse gases long before I even heard of these videos. Perhaps as someone interested in science I believe the details are important. Maybe I think others should have a basic grasp of the science before they start making policy decisions.

The current administration is anti-science. There are many areas besides climate change that the Bush administration has anti-scienced. (Did I just use a noun as a verb? Yes. Live with it.) The evolution-creationism “debate”. Stem cell research. And of course my favorite topic, climate change.

Am I under a delusion that if someone understands the basics that it will improve their decision making skills? I’ve taught enough 101 classes to know that even the smart ones don’t seem to get it. Yes, there are those that can parrot back to you what is in the book. But that doesn’t signify understanding. Someone could know that the average global temperatures are rising, but if they don’t understand the reason for it all they have accomplished is the memorization of facts.

The problem is that very few scientists are comfortably able to speak outside their own field or sub-field. For instance, on this blog I try to write authoritatively about climate change. However, climate change is not my principle area of research. I write about it here because it is more interesting to the public than my research (aerosols and cloud physics). If I wrote exclusively about my research specialty, I’d be the only one reading the blog. And I don’t need to read it; I wrote it.

Do I know enough about climate change to accurately write about it? I think so, that’s why I blog about it. Are there others that know more than me? For sure. That’s part of evaluating science. You need to be able to trust the person that’s telling you the science. How do you know whom to trust? By evaluating their previous performance.

This post has been all over the place, but we’ll tie it up here. The point is that it is important to understand the details. It is the details that show whether you are intimately familiar with the topic or just have the cursory understanding of a 101 student. By critiquing the topics where we know there are mistakes, we are encouraging people to correct them. I would be extremely happy if the How it all Ends vidoes would be revised to edit out the mistakes that say it’s a reflection of energy because it would be closer to what is actually happening physically.

I understand that most of the public doesn’t care about the details. But that doesn’t mean that when communicating with the public that it is okay to get the details wrong.

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