So much to say, so little certainty.

I could blame it on my graduate career, on my existing neuroses, on blogging while female, on the phase of the moon, whatever. It comes down to this: I hate being wrong. The idea of writing something and putting it up on the internet and having it be shown to be wrong makes my skin creep something horrible.

But it's unavoidable, isn't it? Speak for any length of time, and you'll inevitably be wrong, lacking in nuance, or plain offensive. The solution isn't to shut up; the solution is to listen and take criticism well.

Today's little dose of randomness: why farmers don't believe in climate change.

This is a factoid that gets pulled out all the time, how the people who have the most to lose from climate change are usually those who are least likely to believe it. It seems ridiculous at first, idiotic and self-defeating. Except. . . except when I think about it this way:
- Climate change is bigger than you or me. I can try to do my bit, but I can't control whether or not others will kick in.
- If my livelihood, my life is in the balance, how scary is that? I'm staring down my doom and there's no easy fix!
- How much easier to believe that there's something else at work? Cyclical change or bad science, it's not that I'm doomed, it's that other people are mistaken.

Well, then, that doesn't seem like a stupid response at all, now. That seems like a perfectly human and reasonable response to some serious existential dread, an artful dodge, a comfortable reframing.
If you already "believe" in climate change (i.e. have seen the evidence and trust it), you think that you need to scare people into action. But when you don't already buy into climate change, getting the britches scared off you doesn't do anything other than scare off your britches and piss you off. It's a common problem with science communication - we go for what would work for us, forgetting that if people already believed like we do, there'd be no need for science communication.

So here's the good news: if we can seriously clamp down on our carbon dioxide emissions, the best-case models estimate a foot or less of sea rise and no disappearance of the Arctic sea ice. It's by no means a sure thing, but the sky isn't falling yet either. Yippee?