AT A recent dinner at the University of Oxford, a senior researcher in atmospheric physics was telling me about his coming holiday in Thailand. I asked him whether he was concerned that his trip would make a contribution to climate change – we had, after all, just sat through a two-hour presentation on the topic. “Of course,” he said blithely. “And I’m sure the government will make long-haul flights illegal at some point.”

I had deliberately steered our conversation this way as part of an informal research project that I am conducting – one you are welcome to join. My participants so far include a senior adviser to a leading UK climate policy expert who flies regularly to South Africa (”my offsets help set a price in the carbon market”), a member of the British Antarctic Survey who makes several long-haul skiing trips a year (”my job is stressful”), a national media environment correspondent who took his family to Sri Lanka (”I can’t see much hope”) and a Greenpeace climate campaigner just back from scuba diving in the Pacific (”it was a great trip!”).

Intriguing as their dissonance may be, what is especially revealing is that each has a career predicated on the assumption that information is sufficient to generate change. It is an assumption that a moment’s introspection would show them was deeply flawed.

It is now 44 years since US president Lyndon Johnson’s scientific advisory council warned that our greenhouse gas emissions could generate “marked changes in climate”. That’s 44 years of research costing, by one estimate, $3 billion per year, symposia, conferences, documentaries, articles and now 80 million references on the internet. Despite all this information, opinion polls over the years have shown that 40 per cent of people in the UK and over 50 per cent in the US resolutely refuse to accept that our emissions are changing the climate. Scarcely 10 per cent of Britons regard climate change as a major problem.

I do not accept that this continuing rejection of the science is a reflection of media distortion or scientific illiteracy. Rather, I see it as proof of our society’s failure to construct a shared belief in climate change.

I use the word “belief” in full knowledge that climate scientists dislike it. Vicky Pope, head of the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change in Exeter, UK, wrote in The Guardian earlier this year: “We are increasingly asked whether we ‘believe in climate change’. Quite simply it is not a matter of belief. Our concerns about climate change arise from the scientific evidence.”

I could not disagree more. People’s attitudes towards climate change, even Pope’s, are belief systems constructed through social interactions within peer groups. People then select the storylines that accord best with their personal world view. In Pope’s case and in my own this is a world view that respects scientists and empirical evidence.

But listen to what others say. Most regard climate change as an unsettled technical issue still hotly debated by eggheads. Many reject personal responsibility by shifting blame elsewhere – the rich, the poor, the Americans, the Chinese – or they suspect the issue is a Trojan horse built by hair-shirted environmentalists who want to spoil their fun.

Many people regard climate change as a Trojan horse built by hair-shirted environmentalists
The climate specialists in my informal experiment are no less immune to the power of their belief systems. They may be immersed in the scientific evidence, yet they have nonetheless developed ingenious storylines to justify their long-haul holidays.

How, then, should we go about generating a shared belief in the reality of climate change? What should change about the way we present the evidence for climate change?

For one thing, we should become far more concerned about the communicators and how trustworthy they appear. Trustworthiness is a complex bundle of qualities: authority and expertise are among them, but so too are honesty, confidence, charm, humour and outspokenness.

Many of the maverick, self-promoting climate sceptics play this game well, which is one reason they exercise such disproportionate influence over public opinion. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on the other hand, plays it badly. Rather than let loose its most presentable participants to tell the world how it achieves consensus on an unprecedented scale, it fails even to provide a list of the people involved in the process. It has no human face at all: the only images on its website are the palace or beach resort where it will hold its next meeting.

Since people tend to put most trust in those who appear to share their values and understand their needs, it is crucial we widen the range of voices speaking on climate change – even if this means climate experts relinquishing some control and encouraging others who are better communicators to speak for them.

Another key to achieving a widely held belief in climate change is collective imagination. We will never fully appreciate the risks unless we can project ourselves into the future – and that requires an appeal to the collective emotional imagination. In the past years I have been delighted to observe a growing partnership between scientists and the creative arts, such as retreats for scientists, artists and writers.

It is clear that the cautious language of science is now inadequate to inspire concerted change, even among scientists. We need a fundamentally different approach. Only then will scientists be in a position to throw down the ultimate challenge to the public: “We’ve done the work, we believe the results, now when the hell will you wake up?”

George Marshall is founder of the Climate Outreach Information Network in Oxford, UK

What is changing?
The concept of value, particularly in the economic sense, is hard to define. On the one hand, it is an assigned numerical quantitative concept, a fair exchange equivalent if you like. On the other, it is an ephemeral, speculative and qualitative concept – a representation of a degree of importance. In practice, the concept of value swings somewhere between scientifically accepted definition and the ideal of what we accept as important. It is this acceptance that gives credibility to value. Acceptance is why 80,000 fans packed the Santiago Bernabeu to see a single player valued at £80 million, on estimated wages of £200,000 per week, at a time when unemployment in Spain is at 18%, the highest in Western Europe. Acceptance is why select governments can print more money and effectively exchange it for a promise of a greater future value. While all these transactions can be backed up by economic models and statistics, when the ideal is called into question – be it the value of a currency as in the case of Zimbabwe, the value of financial transactions such as collateralized debt obligations, or the value of a player, such as David Beckham – it quickly becomes apparent just how fragile value really is.

Why is this important?
As the recession continues to unfold, the question of value is becoming more and more important. Acceptance is no longer guaranteed, which is putting value at risk. Already regulators and shareholders no longer simply accept that remuneration packages of top executives is indicative of the value they bring; banks no longer simply accept that the value of property is as ’safe as houses’; people no longer accept that the capital injection into banks, as opposed to other businesses or even the public at large, was the right strategy; nations no longer accept that the US dollar should be the de facto global currency. Given the role that value plays in society in terms of helping to create a system of priorities, fuelling innovation, and bringing stability – the risk to values is significant. The chaos, upheaval and potential injury that the demise of an entrenched system of value may bring is challenging businesses, consumers, civil societies and governments alike. For the time being, the assumed ideal of value as we accept it remains largely unchanged, albeit without the same sense of naïve sanguinity. But then assumptions can be challenged in the strangest of ways, as a 16 year old reminded JP Morgan. Should value continue to remain at risk, the difficult question is, should the Emperor be told that he has no clothes on, or should the little boys just keep their mouths shut?

A small milk producer north of Stockholm is expected to be the first company to sport the “climate-certified” tag. One way it cut its use of energy and nutrients was by switching from chemical-based fertilisers to manure.

The scheme is voluntary and firms must prove they have reduced greenhouse gas emissions in order to earn a label. “The only thing we’re guaranteeing is that improvements have been made,” says Anna Richert, an adviser to the Federation of Swedish Farmers (LRF), and head of the team developing the criteria for labelling products. “This could mean reductions in emissions of anything from 5 to 80 per cent.”

Danielle Nierenberg of Worldwatch Institute, a Washington DC based think tank, says that there is still a shortage of firm figures for emissions produced when growing, processing, shipping and selling most foods. “Because we don’t have a lot of good scientific data, I think there’s a risk that companies will claim things they can’t back up, and greenwash products that might not be climate friendly,” she says.

Richert says this won’t happen because each product will be certified independently. “We’re quite certain the system won’t be abused.”

Despite the financial recession, venture capital investment in green technology rose, for the first time in six months, during the second quarter of 2009 – and the biggest winner was transport-related technology, according to the report, issued this week by the Cleantech Group and Deloitte.

The problems faced by the traditional automobile industry, particularly companies in the US, are well documented. But for many investors, now is an “historic opportunity” to take a chunk of the market themselves by supporting new clean transportation options, says Brian Fan, senior director of research at Cleantech.

Chock full

Those investors were perhaps buoyed by government initiatives to support green technology, including President Obama’s high-profile multi-trillion-dollar budget request for 2010, which was chock full of funding for US science and technology ventures.

Over the past three months, venture capital invested $600 million in green transportation – biofuels, and new vehicle and battery technology. The big winners include V-Vehicles, a San Diego based startup that raised $100 million to build fuel-efficient cars in Louisiana.

Reyer Gerlagh, an economist with a specialism in environmental policy at the University of Manchester in the UK, thinks the new trend is good news. “Venture capitalists not only shape their own future by their self-fulfilling beliefs – they’re probably also very influential in shaping other’s beliefs,” he says.

That’s important, because venture capitalists are far too small to make a difference alone. “The amount of funds required to turn our energy system around are beyond the scale of venture capitalists,” says Gerlagh.

Solar slump

Andrew Simms, policy director at New Economics Foundation (nef) agrees. “The big technological changes almost never happen without substantial injections of public money,” he says. Despite government rhetoric, he thinks the amount spent on green technology is lower than it could be.

The boost in transportation spending is likely a hangover of last year’s oil crisis as much as a result of government cash injections, he says. “That sent out a profound message about the need for the next generation technology.”

Although green technology was up 12 per cent on the first quarter of 2009, rising to $1.2 billion, that’s still 44 per cent down on a year ago – and venture capitalist investment in some areas continues to fall.

Solar power has been particularly badly hit. Investment dropped from $1.2 billion in the third quarter of 2008 to $114 million by the second quarter of 2009.

But Mark Jensen, managing partner of the Venture Capital Services Group at Deloitte, and a co-author of the new study, remains positive. He says solar power investment is down because companies are investing in smaller and less expensive projects – including improvements to solar chips to boost efficiency – rather than focusing on thin-film solar or concentrated solar-thermal technologies.

What is changing?

At the G20 meeting in April this year the development of an international currency based on the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights to replace the US dollar as the ‘global’ reserve currency was raised in order to increase stability. It had the support of China, Brazil and Russia (along with various ‘globalist’ finance experts) who for a variety of financial and political reasons want to reduce their dependence on the dollar, which in the wake of the crisis is seen as vulnerable.

China has also suggested turning the Renminbi (or Yuan) into a regional currency in East Asia to create a more balanced global triangle of Dollar, Euro and Renminbi. The recently signed trade agreement in East Asia may reinforce a move in that direction. China and Brazil are also discussing using the Yuan to express their bilateral trade, instead of the dollar; Russia suggesting that trade in her oil supplies be accounted for in Roubles.

Other forms of payment locally and in electronic worlds are also emerging or re-emerging as people’s faith in banks and other financial institutions falters. Store based loyalty card points and Air-miles are probably the most familiar and widespread forms of ‘alternative ways of paying’. But other alternatives are growing in number: Second Life has created an alternative international currency for use within its ‘borders’; mobile phone users are given free air time in return for watching advertisements; Local Area Trading Schemes and time-banks have emerged again as a way of helping local economies where jobs are in short supply, but time and skills can be traded; m-payment by mobile phone is increasingly popular especially in Africa and other developing economies where personal banking is very under developed, and provides an alternative way to access and transfer your ‘currency’, in small amounts.

Why is this important?

Currencies developed as a means of providing ‘common tender’ so that people could trade, but also governments could govern, raise taxes etc. Political influence therefore goes with currency control. Could we see the emergence of an international political framework through which a global currency was controlled? Given the ineffectiveness at times of the UN and EU at achieving international agreement, might this be a recipe for further instability rather than the stability it is meant to provide?

The emergence of the Renmibi as a regional currency on a par with the Dollar or the Euro could hasten the shift of economic influence to the Eastern economies and strengthen the move to a multi-polar world. Such a regional currency might also force fundamental changes within and opening up of China’s own financial system. China’s willingness to express such views is an indicator of that potential influence; as is Brazil’s and Russia’s.

The emergence of new ways of paying for things with mobile phones and online schemes means that local schemes, or special interest schemes, become more feasible. If local businesses become active partners in local trading schemes and alternative currencies are widespread, could we see an apparent fall in conventional measures of economic performance and tax revenue as many small parts of the whole become ‘invisible’ to the system of national accounts – with attendant knock on effects to ‘formal’ currencies – national or global? Might that also increase the potential for the grey economy to flourish? In ageing societies, where older people may need to work longer but face little opportunity to do so, would such schemes provide an essential lifeline in local communities and enhance local activism and identity? Would such schemes enhance local activism and more sustainable, low carbon lifestyles based around communities?

While the ‘international currency’ may not emerge, simply questioning to this degree the role of the dollar as the global reserve currency is indicative of momentous changes afoot. Coupled with local and electronic alternatives, changing how the financial system works and is regulated may go further than we expect.

What is changing?
Business and consumer confidence is gradually rising; business commentators and politicians have been talking up ‘emerging green shoots’ based on a number of indicators. Stock markets are rising again, albeit slowly and still far below the highs of the recent past; banks are lending again; investors are buying bank shares; house prices are falling less quickly, if not yet stabilising; numbers of job losses too are slowing, although many thousands more are still expected to face unemployment; business confidence indexes have risen several months running; oil prices are rising on the back of increased demand. All are possible indicators of improvement. However, the potential for a catastrophic failure of the system is still there.

Proponents of Kondratieff long wave theory are some of those most concerned about further decline. According to them, we are in the ‘winter’ of the fourth wave. The time when past excesses, accumulated debt and the loss of momentum from the last wave of technological innovation combine to create catastrophic system failure; and we have a way to go yet.

Even if the economy and the financial system do stabilise and improve, there are still many unknowns and other ‘things waiting to happen’, which could combine to make the so called ‘perfect storm’. California is in deficit, by some $16 billion. In the wake of the voting down of new tax measures, that deficit may soon rise to $21 billion. Whereas nations can ‘ease’ money supply, states cannot. What if California, the world’s 8th largest economy, defaulted?

While major western banks seem to be stabilising, and ‘stress tests’ are providing transparency, other banks may still have high levels of toxic assets, which may yet implode and cause a major failure. Major reforms of the financial system remain a slow and somewhat distant prospect.

‘Quantitative easing’, as printing money has been renamed, on an enormous scale combined with unprecedented levels of national debt and bailouts may result in a return to inflation, or stagflation. Away from the immediate pressures of the economic and financial problems, many other issues are sufficient to destabilise and reverse any progress. Climate change remains a major threat. Despite calls to action, new targets and green initiatives, experts continue to express concern that irreversible damage has been done, and that the effects will come sooner than we think. Food security is a growing concern, especially if rainfall becomes more unpredictable and creates even more refugees. Concern about the flu pandemic has, for now, subsided, but it remains a potential threat to that all important confidence if it builds over the next months, and re-emerges in the autumn.

Why is this important?
According to the Kondratieff framework, we may not see any real return to growth for five or six years, possibly longer. Before that, we will have to move through a period of ‘creative destruction’ as the old system gives way to the new on economic and technological fronts. An easing of economic tensions now may result in less pressure for reform, less willingness to recognise the need for change – thereby, ironically, reinforcing the likelihood of a second downturn. But is total system collapse what is needed for genuine system reform to emerge, new rules, new indicators, new structures, new consumer behaviours, a new technological underpinning to our economy? Given the levels of national debt, at what level of unemployment might social security systems and unemployment payments cease to be viable? Or would quantitative easing simply continue to foot the bill – with what long term effects?

Despite all the discussions of consumers downsizing, how resilient are we as citizens and consumers? Many of us have far higher expectations and standards of living than people had in the 1930s depression. Economists and other commentators often ignore the less rational aspects of economic behaviour. The amplifier effect of 24 hour media, which intensifies popular and market mood, can lead equally well to the ‘madness of crowds’, as it can to the wisdom of crowds. The levels of unrest last year and earlier this year may pale to insignificance if things get worse.

Faced with such uncertainty, contingency planning and innovation are critical. While we may be seeing ‘green shoots’, equally we may not be; hoping for the best while preparing for the worst may be the best form of defence.

Agriculture accounts for an estimated 14% of Greenhouse Gases; land use changes such as deforestation and soil degradation cause an additional 17%, according to the FAO. As a result, there are strong calls to include agriculture within the next round of climate change discussions. Elsewhere, meat production alone is estimated to be responsible for 18% of Greenhouse Gas emissions, with the far more damaging methane being a large component of that.

In 1961 global meat supply was an estimated 71 million tonnes; by 2007 that had risen to 264 million tonnes. Total global consumption is expected to double by 2050 – for a variety of reasons: increased wealth- especially in emerging economies, population growth and changes in per capita consumption. In many western countries per capita meat consumption already far exceeds recommended levels causing additional problems such as heart disease and obesity.

Reducing meat consumption is therefore being recommended as a way of not just reducing global warming, but also the costs of meeting the target of maintaining Green house gases at 450 parts per million.

Why is this important?

Meat production requires up to five times more grain – and attendant land, water and fertiliser use – to produce the same level of calories as from grain direct. Halving meat consumption would, according to one study, reduce emissions more than if we halved car use; according to another moving to a meat free diet by 2030 would free up land the size of Russia and Canada combined for other uses, including carbon sequestration.

If meat’s global warming impacts receive attention, so too may other environmental impacts such as water use, effluent and high levels of antibiotics. Concern about conditions in intensive chicken farms recently changed buying patterns in the UK; if other forms of intensive farming, which have kept prices down for so long, come under greater scrutiny, we may see the beginnings of a shift there too. We may also see a greater questioning of how farming is funded or the nature of country side and landscape. Concerns about food security may drive the debate further up public agenda.

Such debates may also stimulate innovation to find new solutions: new technologies to create new forms of meat; or animals which produce less methane; and better meat substitutes.

As the saying goes, there is no such thing as a free lunch; for too long we may have paid no attention to the wider environmental costs of our food. The time to pay the bill in higher prices, lower consumption and changed production methods may have arrived.

Profit and loss

Now, Karl Leo of the Institute for Applied Photophysics in Dresden and his colleagues have made the first devices to outperform fluorescent bulbs in the efficiency stakes.
To do that they had to reduce the sources of loss – stages in which electrical energy goes in but does not exit in the form of usable light.
They did this first by optimising the design in the emitter layer, where losses happen because charge carriers recombine rather than dumping their energy into the polymers that give rise to coloured light.
Another significant source of loss happens at the edge of the diode structure where the light is actually produced; if it is not extracted efficiently, photons can bounce around inside it or be re-absorbed.
The team solved that problem by designing a particularly efficient, nano-structured interface to suck out more light than previous efforts.
“The combined result is that we achieve an efficiency which is for the first time higher than a fluorescent tube,” Professor Leo told BBC News.
Also, unlike previous white OLEDs, that efficiency does not decrease as the devices are turned up to produce higher-intensity light.
Very much like prior white OLEDs, however, the significant problem is that the devices degrade within an hour or two, because the polymers that produce the blue part of the light are unstable.
However, Professor Leo said that promising first results on stable, phosphorescent blue polymers are starting to emerge.
“I’m personally convinced that it may take a few years, but chemists will solve this problem and find materials which are stable enough,” he said.

Roll call

John de Mello, an optoelectronics expert at Imperial College London, described the work as “impressive”.
“I think if you went back five or 10 years and said this is where we’re going to end up, there would’ve been all-round scepticism,” he said.
“But they’ve shown that by taking existing materials and known methods, tweaking them a little bit, and addressing several issues in parallel you really can bring efficiencies up to parity with fluorescent tube lighting.”
Professor Leo suggested that by further improving the design of the part of the OLEDs that whisks the light out, efficiencies up to twice that of fluorescent bulbs could be reached.
For the moment, the devices are comparatively expensive because of the manufacturing methods the group employs.
But OLEDs, when the materials and designs are right, can be produced in so-called “roll-to-roll” manufacturing in which vast sheets are made, making them economical on a commercial scale.
“Commercially this is really an opportunity,” said Professor Leo.
“I’m pretty convinced that in a few years OLEDs will be a standard in buildings.”

The developers of Google Ocean – built using visual satellite images, sonar waves bounced off ships and data pooled from scientists and individuals – say it could also help highlight the effects of climate change on the seas.

But three months after its launch, the site has high-resolution images of less than 5 per cent of the sea, much of it from around the United States and Japan where research facilities are collaborating closely with Google.

The site has time-delay photos that show the melting polar ice caps, Google’s chief technology advocate, Michael Jones said Friday on the final day of the World Ocean Conference in Indonesia.

Jones said the company is still recruiting teams to collect content that will improve nascent efforts to map the underwater world. He urged governments, scientists and divers to upload reviews, photos and even video footage.

“Those kinds of visualizations help people — not just a fellow scientist but everyday people — develop a certainty about the importance of changes that could affect their lifestyle or their ability to live at all,” he said.

Next to nothing has been uploaded on, for instance, Southeast Asia’s coral reefs, the largest and most biologically diverse in the world, which experts warned this week could be wiped out by the end of the century as water temperatures rise.

“If we help people see (the ocean) by helping scientists to show it, then people can at least have a dialogue about it,” Jones said.

Like many of the important issues facing society, climate change involves a complex intersection of science, culture and politics, and a huge array of consequences impinging on a wide range of vulnerabilities. Yet on all sides, people are bombarded with simplistic slogans, misleading headlines and soundbites shorn of the caveats that make them valid.

The media is the main conduit for people to learn more, but the disconnect between the need for education and the journalistic mission to provide news means that climate stories are often missing the context needed to understand the bigger picture.

Similarly, many photographers working in environmental fields have become frustrated at the limited palette of images used to illustrate these stories. One described it as “extreme weather all the time and a polar bear”. None of this does justice to the complexities of the issue and instead reduces it to the level of cliché.

Anyone trying to glean a full picture from traditional sources faces a daunting task. Indeed, many people will recognise quickly that there is a huge amount of information that is never made explicit. Stories about results from climate models never describe what a climate model is, descriptions of dramatic new observations rarely discuss what makes them interesting, and commentaries on policy debates seldom rise above reporting the partisan posturing.

Given some of the missteps that have occurred in recent decades, in how mad cow disease and vaccines have been dealt with by both the government and the media, there is a latent mistrust of statements from authority about science – whether they are from the academic world or the government. This in turn leaves the field wide open for peddlers of disinformation to fill the blogosphere and opinion pages with conspiratorial fairytales that take advantage of some people’s confusion.

A few years ago, I helped start the blog RealClimate.org, which allowed the public and working scientists to interact directly and to provide some of the missing background for stories that hit the headlines. But, over the years, it has become clear that there is a hunger – at least among some readers – for more than what a few ephemeral blog postings can provide. Yet few people have the time or inclination to go back to college, and most books on the subject are either dry technical treatises or political calls to action, neither of which are particularly conducive to greater general understanding.

So is there room for a new approach? I think the answer is yes, and it lies in recognising that people need to be engaged in the subject, given access to the how the information is obtained and trusted to deal with the complexities and uncertainties that still abound.

Great imagery – whether from photography or satellites – can be immensely useful in drawing people into an issue and revealing subtleties that would otherwise escape attention. Direct access to the scientists can build respect for the logistic, physical and intellectual challenges they face in the field and in the lab. Eschewing the polemics in favour of objective explanations can provide a welcome respite from the constant bickering that all too often passes for debate in climate change discussions.

One manifestation of this approach is a new book, Climate Change: Picturing the Science, which photographer Joshua Wolfe and I have put together. The book brings together our two communities to demonstrate in words and images how we are exploring what is happening now, what happened in the past and what might happen in the future. We don’t expect this suddenly to transform the public’s understanding of the science or the policy debate, but it is a resource that many will hopefully find accessible and useful. Citizens deserve a more mature discussion, and together, scientists, journalists and photographers should provide it