--- Matthew Burgess, quoted in Stephanie Hanes, "A climate scientist questioned his findings. It didn’t go well.", CS Monitor, Jun 2024
Excerpt
Matthew Burgess, a self-proclaimed “moderate Canadian” and assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, says the politics he noticed within academia prompted him to study polarization around climate change – and to look for common ground.
“It felt like the conversations in the hallways were about how we need to change all of society over decades. But the only ones who were trusted or who could do anything about it were the left-most third of the Democratic Party,” he says. “That’s a dumb theory of change.”
He decided to do outreach on college campuses about polarized climate discussions. He says he spoke with conservatives and progressives and everyone in between, finding eager audiences among each and a willingness to be open – that is, to trust.
“Scientists sometimes overcomplicate the problem of being trusted,” he says. “The best way of gaining trust is to be trustworthy.”
That means acknowledging the downsides of climate action, he says. It means acknowledging where scientific expertise ends and personal, subjective opinion begins. It means acknowledging the big, ethical questions that come along with it. For instance, is it fair to prevent lower-income countries from developing the same fossil fuel-based energy systems that helped make the U.S. and Europe rich?
It also means keeping partisanship and incivility off social media. “The worst thing to happen to climate scientists on Twitter was climate scientists on Twitter,” he says.
And it means better explaining how science actually works.
