Must climate communication be so dense?

Hi and welcome to Climate conversations. I'm Jack Ford and hello to Li Ling Tan. Hi there, Jack. Funny. You brought up that kiss rule which of course stands for. Keep it simple stupid. It's actually the first lesson I learned in journalism school back in the day. But you and I know that it's definitely easier said than done, right? Yeah, that's the key to the job. A lot of the time. I bet you've come across more than your fair share of climate jargon over the years. Are you fluent in

that yet? I wish I'm hardly fluent. Not only is the language convoluted. It's really an assault on clarity. Jack and there are usually no glossaries or terms and concepts. You have to look at reports just to understand reports and it is mental. So I complained about it to two leading climate experts, Professor Winston Chao and associate professor Terry Van Kelt from Singapore Management University. I'm sure you're familiar with them. And I told them, I said the language is like Klingon

from Star Trek. I got a bit of pushback from that. Have a listen. No, it's not Klingon. This is why, you know Klingon. Uh I prefer the other. It's more Vulcan than Klingon. I disagree that it's Klingon. It's us being more Vulcan like so when we do the live long and prosper, he's showing me the sign, show you the Vulcan sign. You can. No, that's the wrong one. I can, I can't, you can, you can. So this tells you how much of a truckie I was dear.

It doesn't get dorkier than that. And we'll have more from my climate conversations with them later in the podcast, Jack. What's giving you awake these days? I've just arrived back in Bangkok. I've been in the Pacific for a couple of weeks doing stories about sea level rise and impacts on culture and community in some of the most isolated countries in the world. And then I was kind of just observing the news. I had a friend who was stuck in Dubai who I met at the airport and he was telling

me about just how crazy. The situation was with the flooding that we've seen in the Middle East in Dubai, in Oman, parts of Afghanistan as well in one day, 250 millimeters of rainfall. That's 10 inches for our older listeners and my parents always speak in inches, not millimeters when it comes to rainfall and that was double the country's average annual rainfall in one day. Insane. Yeah. So let's turn that little factoid into our quiz of

the week, Le Ling. This is a challenge for you and everyone listening. I want you to compare that 250 millimeters of rainfall in Dubai to Singapore's wettest ever day. Do you think that Singapore has ever had more or less rain on that day versus Dubai's historic flood answer at the end? Ok. Alright. Let's go to the newsroom and look at some of the most interesting stories in the sustainability space this week, Li Ling. What has caught your attention?

More doom and gloom? I'm afraid Jack, a new United Nations report says Asia suffered the most disasters from climate and weather hazards last year and floods and storms were the main culprits. Now, the report also found that Asia was warming faster than the global average with the impact of heat waves in the region becoming more severe.

The thing is it came just as another heat wave was hammering countries here in South and Southeast Asia schools in the Philippines and Bangladesh was suspended and and I think where you are, Thailand it's near to 40 degrees or even top 40 °C, not to hop on the weather. But here we are again, Jack, it just won't let up. Yeah, I don't think that report would really surprise anyone and landing back in Bangkok and feeling the heat out there today. It is extreme.

So I'll be feeling the temperature from inside today better inside than outside. Now, the other news that's kind of a big deal is the one that you wrote about Thailand's plan to roll back laws around fishing. And it could be quite a significant reduction in penalties for activities like illegal fishing. We're talking about leniency around laws over the use of destructive trawler nets and also relaxing regulation related to catching protected species but

also less protection for workers. This sounds like a major step back for the industry. No. Well, it's a kind of a surprising story that I think most people here weren't aware of that. Thailand was really proposed, these very sweeping changes to the laws that were enforced back in 2014 under the military government because of the concerns about the lax standards that existed and the really dangerous conditions that existed for migrant workers, mostly working in

the fisheries industry. And now there's this big push from commercial fishers saying they want to repeal all of those laws really winded back. And activists and environmental groups are particularly concerned. So are the export markets in the eu potentially in the United States, Australia as well. And obviously, the small scale Fishers want to keep the current laws, the larger players say now it's impossible to do business and that they're no longer profitable.

So I had an interview with Dominic Thompson from the Environmental Justice Foundation who's done a lot of interesting analysis about what these potential law changes might mean.

And so it really does do Thailand a disservice when Thailand has done such an amazing job over the last eight years of building this international credibility as almost this regional if not international leader in terms of fisheries management and human right? For within the fishing, it really does beg that question mark that lingers over this entire issue of why is Thailand doing this at this point?

at CN A Singapore desk. One of the toughest part of my job is to decipher all the complicated language and climate reports and then deliver the information in a way that normal human beings actually understand people who don't belong in the climate circuit. Case in point, the Intergovernmental Panel on climate change or IPCC itself a mouthful of a name for what's basically a UN group

made up of super top level climate science experts. It's behind this super important update every few years on the state of the planet and how we're ruining it. What needs to be done. It's critical stuff, but the report can go on and on for 42 pages and it reads like this in addition to robust multidecadal warming, the globally averaged surface temperature exhibits substantial decade and inter annual variability.

I don't even know what that means, but we have sitting in the room with us two people who may or may not be guilty of such crimes against clear communication. Hello, Professor Winston Chow and Professor Terry Van Geld. Now, one of these two gentlemen actually sits on that IPCC panel. He is Singapore's most prominent climate scientist, Winston Winston Chao and his title at the UN panel is co-chair for working group two of the IPCC seventh Assessment

Report Cycle Bureau. Yes, it's a mouthful. I apologize for that. And you are also Professor of Urban Climate and Lee Kong Xian research Fellow at Singapore Management University's College of Integrative Studies. That's also quite mouthful. Yes, it is. And of course, next to you, this is Terry Van G Velt. You are Associate professor of urban sustainability and also Lee Kun Qian fellow at

SM US College of integrative Studies. So both of you are colleagues now, Terry, you are also an interdisciplinary social scientist focused on bridging the sustainability science policy divide and we'll get into that in a bit. Both gentlemen are here for this podcast as part of the inaugural Ideas Festival. It is to highlight how important the social sciences are in solving the world's toughest problems. All the details are at www dot ideas festival.edu dot SG. All right.

All the name cards on the table now. But are you scientists or social scientists? Professor Winston, you go first. I guess it depends on what time of the day or depending on who I meet in which I decide whether I'm a scientist or social scientist. So that in one sense, speaks to the heart of communication. We used to struggle with a lot with the IPCC reports.

What you just mentioned in the introduction actually is supposed to be the executive summary of the report 40 over pages long filled with headline statements, key messages which are full of jargon. How many pages is the actual report very, very long we measure in terms of kilograms and it weighed I think about 29 kg. Oh my goodness. Yes. So in this cycle, my co-chair colleagues and I we are resolutely determined to try and reduce that weight substantially.

But then again, it is reflective of the vast amount of very detailed scientific and social scientific research into climate change that has developed over the past seven years. So the challenge is trying to find that sweet spot between distilling the important messages, conveying it in a clear way, but yet also maintaining that level of comprehensive assessment that will bust sort of insights into climate science or climate research that the I PC C's audience demands. What

about you, Terry? Unlike Winston, I'm not a trained scientist. So my background is in economics and then kind of different types of social sciences. A lot of it is very quantitative with numbers though. So I also have to grapple with this report and I never go into the the technical side of things. It's always that executive summary that I look at. So to the extent that I engage with the scientific literature, it's to understand what I need to understand, to be

able to work out the impacts. So in that sense, I'm much more like the normal person than Winston. I think the implication is that I may be special in that sense, not normal, abnormal, well, not really. I mean, Winston, you're practically a household name in the climate crowd, right in a room full of non experts though. What's the biggest challenge in getting the message across about climate change in the environment? How do you read the room and adjust? There are a few challenges.

One is reading the room. If you know who your audience is, it helps a lot in tailoring the specific message that's required. If you know what drives the individual, you can then see what's the best message. You can have to either persuade them to change their minds or to get an understanding as to what drives you, what is the biggest

concern about climate change. And then see if that particular interest can either be reflected in that report or if you know some nuggets of information, you can tell them to help, get them to change their frame of thinking in terms of climate change. They don't want to be told that they are stupid. They don't want to be told by some lab coat in an ivory tower that climate change is happening and this is going to be bad, etcetera, etcetera. It could be downscaled using the scientific jargon

into something very relevant for that person. So this person might be worried about, let's say they are going to lose out in terms of the green transition. They are in a line of employment that will go the way of the dinosaurs as we move from a non-renewable to a renewable, you know, circular zero waste economy and hearing that message then can be fed back towards the decision

of what sustainable development is. Hence all these retraining reskilling initiatives that the Singapore government has put into place can help allay these concerns in some manner, shape or form. But it is important to understand that that is the key concern of that person or that constituent. It's all about connection, right, connecting with the person you're speaking to, especially since the subject matter is so heavy, so vast and and often alienates a lot of people on the ground,

which brings me to Terry. Now, a lot of your work involves bridging the divide between climate science and policy. What does bridging this divide mean? And how do you narrow that gap through the way you communicate? So two questions there bridging the divide. Well, the divide is exactly what you read out earlier, that body of text and making that into something that we can actually work on that we can engage with that will help us

understand what pathways we've got to go forward. And that's a complex process because the general trends are almost undisputed, but the variations of impacts the different scenarios, the risk profiles that is uncertain. So what I see as my primary role in this space is to try to make the future impacts of

climate change into tangible scenarios. OK. So if we continue down this path with this set of assumptions, then we are likely to have this scenario and this scenario will mean this for our economy, for people, for infrastructure and so forth. It's taking that scientific data and turning it into something

that people can understand and visualize. Yeah. And just going back to what Winston said about communicating that I find that if you give too much information, if you give too much certainty, a lot of people recoil because there is a lot of uncertainty inherent in this process. Terry, you've lived in Cambridge, you've worked there, you've lived and worked in Hong Kong now, Singapore. Do you find yourself having to adjust? And how do you do that in these different contexts? For sure there's

differences in culture. But I think the same kind of difficulty goes through all of it. Most of what we see are very small changes, things like, you know, not using plastic straws, right? So that, I mean, that's my biggest gripe because I think the plastic straw is wonderful, but we basically have these small movements in all of these different places that have the right intention, but almost have an unintended effect of taking us away from the big changes that

are needed. So in psychology, it's called moral licensing. I have done something good. So I don't need to do anything else. And we see that a lot with the kind of small changes that we make and I'm not saying these small changes are bad, they're good but we do need to make the big changes. And the big changes unfortunately will mean system wide changes, a lot of change to the way we live, the way we consume, the way we produce. And those are painful.

So across any kind of culture, any kind of society, you have the same fundamental issue. The small changes are perhaps good as an educational sort of entry point for people to become active, to become agents of change for climate change. One other concern is that there's also a thinking that says that we must rely totally on technology to save

our skins from climate change. What about when we have big solar mirrors in space or we inject sulfates into the atmosphere for geo engineering or we just rely on more efficient technology

to save us from carbon emissions. That actually is also a trap that I think is preventing the much needed systemic changes that cherry and many other scientists say is required to give you an example of the kind of radical thinking that I think is needed if we had to hit the more ambitious targets that we have, you look at the car industry. So I love cars. I don't want a future without cars, but plainly speaking, transitioning to evs doesn't solve our problem, electric vehicles because

EVs are still resource intensive. If you think about the data center needs of these cars as well. The real solution is to get rid of that and to have a different form of transportation as well, that's pretty radical. Get rid of evs when we're all get rid of all cars. Cars. Yes. But that's the kind of radical solution I'm saying we need to hit the very ambitious targets. But who's going to support that? I

don't support that. Some sacrifices have to be made. But the question is who are making the sacrifices getting rid of evs altogether or moving to public transport that might work in some countries? It won't work in, for instance, less developed countries. It's a very difficult way to tell countries that, you know, if we are to reach a 1.5 degree sea limit, you pointing to these countries,

you must also sacrifice or something along those lines. You know, at the IPCC, when you are at these meetings, what is the dynamic like? Because a lot of what we've been talking so far about is communicating to the average person. What about communicating up? You're face to face with global powers? How do you communicate to them? The divide between the crude leader, more developed, less developing divide comes into play. All these other national or regional interests come into play as well.

For instance, small island states which Singapore is a part of for this group. 1.5 is non negotiable because anything above that means that all islands will lose their land and is an existing potential threat. But how do you balance these interests with other people or other nations that want to continue developing and pointing out that it's hypocritical for this block of countries to tell us not to develop because you have

reaped the benefits of fossil fuels and we haven't. So we need that objectivity and that is our biggest strength to offer to these governments in these discussions about climate action. But there's one more level of complexity that we can go into here. And so the IPCC, what Winston works in, that's unique in my opinion, because you have a range of academics from different disciplines coming up with a consensus in many ways, that's not the norm.

So the norm in most disciplines and across disciplines is not consensus. Often. I think that the outside world sees the academy as being unified, but it's actually very fragmented. So we still need to improve in the Academy of talking to each other, engaging with different viewpoints. So it's not just changing the view of the person you're talking to, it's trying to get other people to understand each other's perspective as well. It goes back to communication,

it does. Now, I didn't want to let you guys go without asking you about your virtual reality project. This is effectively a communication tool, right? Yeah. So it's a project that Winston myself and a couple of colleagues at NTU. So Sonny Rosenthal and Adam Switzer are working on. We're basically taking the climate science data and we're trying to see the different futures that can exist with different assumptions and what that will look like for Singapore and possibly

our Southeast Asian neighbors as well. Basically, we're creating a choose your own adventure book in virtual reality. It's like a game. And so we'll use the climate data map different scenarios. And at each node, the person, the participant will be able to react differently. I'm going to pick this strategy to go forward or this strategy and then we will see the different outcomes that can happen and it's all

with the headset. So like rising waters that from the point, the view of the user, you have the rising sea levels, you have the rain. And yeah, we're toying with the idea of a tropical cyclone which there's some for it could happen. It did happen in Singapore in 2001. But yeah, low likelihood high impact would we be ready? We'll find out that's part of the, hopefully one of the outcomes that we have in the research

and bringing the future to the present. There was Associate Professor Terry Vange Velt and Professor Winston Chao from Singapore Management University. But really, Jack, we're already getting a taste of those scenarios in real life in the present, aren't we? With the heat wave here and the rain we saw in Dubai and the region? Yeah, we don't need technology and virtual reality to understand these phenomenon. We just need to walk outside it feels like.

All right. Uh I hope you've been thinking about your quiz answer. A reminder of the question who has had the wettest day on record? Is it Dubai? Now, after those incredible floods that we saw recently or is it Singapore? I think it's Dubai just going by the video and the footage we saw, I can't recall a time when I saw something like this happening in Singapore and we also know that the region that Dubai is in, they see more extreme fluctuations

in weather conditions. So I'm going to guess Dubai you've locked in Dubai. The answer is Singapore in December 1978 over a 24 hour period, 512 millimeters of rain, about a quarter of the annual average fell over a 24 hour period. So that's nearly double the 250 odd millimeters that fell in the UAE specifically in Al Ain, which is about an hour south of Dubai. So back then, Singapore experienced a pretty destructive flood. At the time, seven

people actually died. Thousands were stranded and it goes to show the importance of coping with extreme events. Singapore today has services that can absorb water more easily and more extensive drainage networks. That's infrastructure that the Middle East may not have just now, which totally makes sense for Singapore given it's in the tropics and not in the desert. So today we're going to unpack El Nino something you've

definitely felt over the past year or so. It's a natural phenomenon driven by warmer than normal waters in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. The result is these climatic conditions that normally bring warmer temperatures and less rainfall to affected regions and most of the impacts are actually just felt in our part of the world through Asia, as well as Australia and the US. But broadly El Nino and also its counterpart, La Nina can

cause havoc to rainfall and temperatures around the world. And El Nino normally comes around every 3 to 5 years. Climate change is supercharging these events. They can typically last about 12 months. The good news is that Australia's Weather Bureau has said that the El Nino weather event that we've been feeling over the past year or so has now ended so cooler weather, hopefully just around the corner. That's all we have for this week. We hope you've

enjoyed this episode. As usual. We'd love you to please go and follow us, give us a rating or a review on whatever podcast platform you're using. We'd really appreciate it and we'd love for you, our listeners to share your two cents and ask us your questions from wherever you are, put them in the comments section. So we'll be looking out for them until then I am Li Ling Tan and I'm Jack Boyd. Thanks for joining us. We'll be back with climate conversations next week.