Summer Institute 2023: The public climate debate - climate skepticism and denial – Stefan Rahmstorf

The public climate debate - climate skepticism and denial

Speaker: Stefan Rahmstorf, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany

Keynote from Tuesday, June 20, 2023 during Summer Institute 2023 on Bounded Reality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

The public climate debate is very different from the kind of discourse we are used to in the scientific community, and even for many climate scientists, it is hard to understand what is going on. My talk will discuss issues, such as the public perception of climate science and climate change, the organization and funding of anti-science propaganda groups, common characteristics of science denialism, false media balance, as well as many real-life examples. It also discusses what we can do and names
some helpful resources.

About Stefan Rahmstorf
Stefan Rahmstorf is a Professor of Physics of the Oceans at Potsdam University and head of the Earth System Analysis department of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. Rahmstorf was a lead author of the 4th Assessment Report of the IPCC and advised the German government from 2004-2013 in the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU). In 2007, he became an Honorary Fellow of the University of Wales, and in 2010, a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. In 2017, he became the first scientist outside the US to be awarded the Climate Communication Prize of the American Geophysical Union,
and in 2022, he received the Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication. He is Europe’s climate scientist with the most Twitter followers. He is a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher for the past five years in a row and has published over 140 scientific papers (36 of which in Nature, Science, and PNAS) and has co-authored four books. Available
in English are: Our Threatened Oceans and The Climate Crisis.

Reading
Rahmstorf, S. (2017). RealClimate: Fake news, hacked mail, alternative facts – that’s old hat for climate scientists. RealClimate | Climate Science From Climate Scientists. https://www.realclimate.org/index.php...

Supran, G., Rahmstorf, S., & Oreskes, N. (2023). Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections. Science, 379(6628). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abk0063

About Summer Institute
The Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality brings together talented young researchers and renowned scientists from around the globe and aims to spark a dialogue about decision making under the real-world constraints of limited time, information, and computational power. The Summer Institute offers a forum for young scholars from various disciplines to share their approaches, discuss their research, and inspire each other. The program will cover the fundamentals, methodology, and recent findings on bounded rationality.

More information
https://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/forsch...