18 / SEEDWORLD.COM DECEMBER 2017 “There’s a lot of disinformation being spread, and a notion that scientists are somehow biased because they get research money to study cli- mate change. It really is ludicrous — a scientist by definition is skeptical, and if someone could prove human-caused climate change isn’t happening, that would be done in a heartbeat,” she says. The evidence continues to pile up showing human-caused climate change is real and having dire consequences for the globe. Thirteen federal U.S. agencies recently released a comprehensive report concluding that, based on extensive evidence, it is “extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.” The U.S. Global Change Research Program Climate Science Special Report, approved for release by the White House itself (despite President Donald Trump’s continued doubts about the real- ity of climate change), goes on to state that, “In addition to warming, many other aspects of global climate are changing, primarily in response to human activities. Thousands of studies conducted by researchers around the world have documented changes in surface, atmospheric, and oceanic tem- peratures; melting glaciers; diminishing snow cover; shrinking sea ice; rising sea levels; ocean acidifica- tion; and increasing atmospheric water vapor.” Despite the overwhelming evidence for human- caused climate change and massive support for measures to curtail it, efforts to undermine those messages are prominent. That disinformation is so effective due, in part, to the American political climate. Trump famously tweeted in 2012 that cli- mate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese to steal American jobs. Combine that with a lack of efficiencies in science education and the general public’s mistrust of science, and you have a recipe for climate change skepticism. “It used to be that scientists were trusted. Now people take a scientist’s results with a bit more caution,” Cadle-Davidson says. That’s due to a number of factors, a big driver being a perception that scientific research is funded by corporate entities with nefarious intentions. “Big corporations are seen as pushing science to make a buck, and that’s also damaged what we do, because the public sees that corporations are out to make money. I see this over and over again in the area of seed-applied biologicals. If you show people your data, the question is, ‘Yeah, but who paid for that research? What’s your motivation? Someone paid for you to do that, therefore you have a bias in the data.’” And why, she asks, wouldn’t the public be skep- tical? “Big Tobacco paid for research on smoking and its impact on human health, and it hid the negative results for years. Obviously, that’s different than climate change, but the point is the public feels like they’ve been burned by big companies, and that has spilled over into the climate change arena.” Noted psychiatrist and historian Robert Jay Lifton recently published The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival, in which he argues that our society is going through a time of increased recognition of the reality of human- caused climate change, a psychological shift he refers to as a “swerve.” A swerve, Lifton says, is driven by a combination of evidence, economics, and ethics. In a recent inter- view with Diane Toomey of Yale University’s online magazine Yale Environment 360, Lifton says denial of climate is a kind of natural progression that the human mind goes through on its journey to accept- ing something a problem as real. Accepting human- caused climate change as real comes with such profound implications for humanity, that he says it’s natural for humans to reject it at first. “With climate images, when they’re fragmen- tary, we may have an image of a storm here, of sea rise here, a little bit of flooding there, the drought. But when that becomes a formed image involving global warming and climate change, we take in the idea of carbon emissions leading to human effects on climate change and endangering us. And in that same narrative, there can be mitigating actions to limit climate change,” he tells Toomey. The good news, he goes on to say, is that cli- mate change denial will eventually run its course. “[Climate change deniers] have to know in some part of their minds, that climate change is quite real and dangerous. It’s becoming, I’ll argue, more and more difficult to take the stand of climate rejec- tion, because there is so much evidence of climate change and so much appropriate fear about its consequences. …It won’t go away. The climate rejecters are fighting a losing battle.” That said, Wagner-Riddle notes the shift won’t happen overnight, and the fact climate change sci- ence can be hard to convey to people in a simple way is a major challenge for scientists to tackle. “With the ozone layer, which used to be the topic of the day, people didn’t have much trouble accepting that refrigerants used in fridges and air conditioners caused the ozone hole. That is a straight line — you have these products that end up in the stratosphere and destroy ozone,” she says. “With climate change, there’s many factors at play — greenhouse gases produced by humans, solar cycles, changes in the earth’s orbit, volcano Claudia Wagner-Riddle, professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Molly Cadle-Davidson is chief scientific officer for ABM based in Geneva, New York. “If you show people your data, the question is, ‘Yeah, but who paid for that research? What’s your motivation? Someone paid for you to do that, therefore you have a bias in the data.’” —Molly Cadle-Davidson