People have been learned to cope with change by thinking it’s not all bad, but climate change is all bad, according to a climate scientist at Argonne National Laboratory who says it’s time to replace the termclimate change, itself a replacement for global warming, with a new term: climate disruption.

“Positive mental attitude is a really wonderful way to deal with change,” research meteorologist Doug Sisterson told about 200 people at the University of Chicago’s International House Tuesday night. “We’ve learned that we want to be optimists and have a positive mental attitude, and the way we deal with that is by thinking ‘Not all change is bad.’ Well, talking about climate change, it’s not good. So maybe it’s wrong to portray climate change with a positive mental attitude.

“Maybe we should start talking about climate disruption, because the things I’m talking about would seem to be highly disruptive. And so maybe the better way to characterize what’s happening with these extreme weather events is to think of it as climate disruption. Maybe it more accurately represents the journey we are about to be embarking upon.”

Sisterson is not the first to propose adopting the term climate disruption. John Holdren, the senior advisor to President Obama on science and technology issues, proposed the term global climate disruptionin 2007, in 2010 and again last year.

“I’ve always thought that the phrase ‘global warming’ was something of a misnomer,” Holdren said last year at the annual AAAS Forum on Science and Technology Policy in Washington, D.C., “because it suggests that the phenomenon is something that is uniform around the world, that it’s all about temperature, and that it’s gradual.”

Tuesday night, Sisterson said it’s hard to talk to people about global warming when the effects of a warmer planetary average may include colder colds.

“We’ve been talking about global warming, but as you can see on a global scale increased greenhouse gases lead to a warmer planet on average, but it really doesn’t tell the whole picture. Because it’s complicated. In fact, temperature itself is probably not the biggest thing that we’re going to have to worry about about global warming,” he said.

“We expect to see changes in precipitation patterns and sea-level rise that will have much greater impact to humans and our animal friends and biodiversity than the temperature alone. As a matter of fact, we’re pretty sure that we’re going to see increased weather extremes. Perhaps you’re noticing some of them as well.”

Climate disruption edges closer to a term originally used by climate scientists in the earliest studies of human impacts on climate—inadvertent climate modification—with perhaps slightly more elegance. But there’s little sign that Holdren’s efforts and Sisterson’s more recent efforts have had much effect, even on the organizations they represent.

A Google search of Argonne’s website, anl.org, finds six references to climate disruption compared to 1,930 mentions of climate change. Worldwide, Google finds 236,000 references to climate disruption and 107 million references to climate change.

According to Google Trends, climate change only recently caught up withglobal warming as the preferred term in searches worldwide. NASA and other public agencies may have helped tip the scales  by preferring climate change in official reports.

Sisterson has worked with 5,000 climate scientists who have used the Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility, which he manages. He is also something of a climate-science evangelist. He has appeared on a TEDx Talk, in a video, and he co-authored a book with molecular scientist Seth B. Darling called “How to Change Minds About Our Changing Climate,” which he said provides scientific evidence to debunk the 15 most common arguments made by climate deniers.

“There are various ways to concern yourself with getting the message out,”  Sisterson said Tuesday night, an event that was part of Argonne’s public lecture series, Argonne OutLoud. (The full video of his talk is available here.)

“We used to lobby Congress, and we used to lobby lobbyists. And scientists now would say the best thing we can do is lobby the public—lobby you. If we can be clear about the science we’re doing, communicate science-based evidence to you, you are our best advocates.”

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Americans Want America To Run On Solar and Wind

Doug Sisterson

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Americans “overwhelmingly” prefer solar and wind energy to coal, oil, and nuclear energy, according to a Harvard political scientist who has conducted a comprehensive survey of attitudes toward energy and climate for the last 12 years.

Americans see natural gas as a bridge fuel that falls somewhere in between, offering some benefits over traditional fuels but more “harms” than solar and wind, said Harvard Government Professor Stephen Ansolabehere during a December appearance at the University of Chicago.

“Americans want to move away from coal, oil and nuclear power and toward wind and solar,” said Ansolabehere, introduced as “the leading energy political scientist in the world” to climate scientists, physicists, economists and public-policy experts at The Energy Policy Institute of Chicago (EPIC). Ansolabehere described solar and wind energy as “hugely popular, overwhelmingly popular.”

So popular, in fact, that they easily cross the partisan divide that polarizes Americans on so many other issues. About 80 percent of Americans said they want solar and wind energy to “increase a lot,” and another 10 percent or so want it to increase somewhat.

“In order to get 90 percent, that means a lot of Republicans like solar and wind—more than coal. Everybody likes those sources. This is non-partisan.”

Ansolabehere began surveying Americans on their energy preferences in 2001, when engineers and scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including now-Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, asked him to gauge public support for a plan to address climate change by building 300 new nuclear power plants.

Ansolabehere found that even Americans who worry about climate change don’t support nuclear power. While such a result would not be surprising post-Fukushima, it surprised the engineers, who were envisioning a nuclear renaissance.

“People who were concerned about global warming did not want the technology that they were going to put forward. For the engineers, this was a show stopper.”

Ansolabehere’s findings might also be a show stopper for the Obama Administration’s “all-of-the-above” energy strategy.

“There are very few conservationists, people who want to use less electricity overall,” he said. “There are also very few people who say all of the above, and this is an interesting note because I don’t know if you remember a few years ago the Obama administration decided this would be a good thing to campaign on, this all-of-the-above strategy. It might have been a good idea to placate West Virginia coal miners, but in fact there aren’t a lot of people who want all of the above in the energy sector.”

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz still routinely uses the phrase “all of the above” to describe the Energy Department’s approach to energy sources.

People prefer solar and wind because they believe them to be less harmful—not to the global environment, but to the local, Ansolabehere said. People are less motivated by concerns about global warming than they are about local pollution and health risks.

“People think of solar and wind as relatively harmless, coal oil and nuclear as harmful and natural gas as somewhere in between.”

And Americans are more motivated by perceived harm than they are by perceived cost.

But Ansolabehere also found that Americans do not have a good grasp of the true cost of solar and wind, nor are they willing to shoulder that cost. They believe solar and wind are cheaper than nuclear power and oil, which they perceive to be the most expensive sources.

“The average member of the American public has the picture about right,” he said. “People have the relative harms about right. People have the relative costs for traditional fuels about right. They’re way too optimistic about [the cost of] solar and wind, and the caution is that if you inform them, you’re going to get lower support.”

Ansolabehere and Georgetown public policy professor David M. Konisky detail these findings and more in a recent book, “Cheap and Clean: How Americans Think About Energy in the Age of GLobal Warming” published by MIT Press. They discovered that Americans also have strong opinions about the best way to control carbon emissions and how much it should cost:

• Americans Favor EPA Regulation Over Carbon Tax, Cap And Trade
• People Will Pay To Stop Climate Change—But Only $5

Stephen Ansolabehere at the University of Chicago

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