Journalists, especially science writers it seems, have a lot of trouble grasping seemingly simple issues.

Here's the background: research Sterman published last year with co-author Linda Booth Sweeney of Harvard found that even MIT grad students make rudimentary mistakes when asked how to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Nisbet sums up:

In the experiment, MIT students with advanced training in either the sciences or economics were asked to read descriptions from the IPCC summary for policymakers that depicted the long term accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. When asked then to sketch what they estimated to be the emissions path needed to stabilize atmospheric CO2, nearly 2/3 of the elite MIT students erroneously reasoned that greenhouse gas emissions can stabilize even though emissions would continue to exceed the rate of removal from the atmosphere.

The students typically thought that stabilizing carbon dioxide emissions at current levels would likewise stabilize carbon dioxide concentrations at current levels. The right answer is that emissions need to be cut drastically - by over 50%, given the numbers in Sterman's example. This is an instance of the more general problem where “people have difficulty relating the flows into and out of a stock to the level of the stock”, says Sterman.

Sterman takes something of a logical leap, though, in connecting this mistake with poll results showing that majorities in the US, Russia, China and India - all important emitters - favor a ‘wait and see’ or ‘go slow’ approach to lowering emissions. (More on recent climate poll results in this post, by the way.) He writes:

For most people, uncertainty about the risks of climate change means costly actions to reduce emissions should be deferred.

But that’s an answer to the question of when to take major measures against the risks foreseen by climate experts. It’s not about what those measures would look like, in terms of emissions trajectories.

It can’t help that greenhouse gas stocks and flows mystify the average MIT student, even after the IPCC tries to explain them. But that problem is separate from the difficulty of getting support for an immediate, rapid response to changes that scientists expect to unfold over the long term.

It is a fact that most of humanity has only the dimmest grasp of stocks, flows and accumulation, but that's not the only issue with climate change politics. Most people in the world favor deferring political action about climate change for a whole host of reasons, not least distrust of climate change advocates and their potted scientists who have openly admitted that they exaggerate the threat and its timing for instrumental reasons, and are sensibly suspected of doing as much and worse as part of career management and grantsmanship. Journalists, of course, have no credibility at all for too many reasons to enumerate.

But there's an even more basic error in emissions reduction advocacy since it is based on sketchy science, fails to consider technological evolution, and all but ignores the most important response to increasing concentration: removal. The arguments of advocates and politicians make no sense to any but those who are already on the bus and fully engaged in motivated reasoning. For the rest of humanity when the bathtub is filling at a rate faster than the drain is emptying it you don't just stand there and condemn the plumber (Joe?) who made the filler handle so hard to turn, you start bailing the tub into the crapper. The problem with that for advocates is that they are using the concentrations as an excuse to ratchet up social and economic control, so reducing concentrations without granting them the power they yearn for does not satisfy their true objective.

But if the polls are flagging up one climate science message that hasn't come across, it's this: on a complex planet rife with both physical and bureaucratic inertia, decisions made today take decades to have a meaningful effect.

It's far worse than that. Decisions made today will have no unambiguously measurable effects no matter how long you wait. This is because so much happens in the meantime, and motivated reasoners airbrush history and spin false narratives in service of the ongoing objectives, that the connection between current actions and future realities will be no more clear than those of the past are to the present. It's all hype, hustle, grift and current politics. Nothing is revealed.

How can you tell if a politician (or journalist or other advocate) is lying? You know the answer.