The public is still in the dark about global environmental change and its potentially enormous implications for humanity. Though issues such as global warming present crucial challenges to policy-makers both nationally and internationally, ordinary people remain somewhat perplexed.
Their understanding of climate change has not been well served by the media, which tends to concentrate on reporting "dramatic news" rather than the slow unfolding of science and policy debates, according to Cambridge University's Committee for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (CIES). Sir Robert May, chief scientific adviser to the British government, told a CIES symposium at the Royal Society that one of the biggest problems facing scientists in discussing the issue of climate change was that we had all been misled by school curriculums to believe that science itself offers "a set of hard answers".
Sir Robert pointed out that the IPCC (the UN's Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change), which found that there is a "discernible human influence" on the climate system, reaches its conclusions on the basis of consensus, as there could never be unanimity among its 3,000 scientists from around the world.
"What the IPCC is about is narrowing the bands of opinion on a global scale," he said. "The way it goes about its business is to embrace dissent and different opinions, bring in non-experts, make the data available and then deal with the resulting messy discourse in the marketplace. That's the way science happens."
The media respond to breaking news, "much as the human eye seeks out movement, even if it's only a fly buzzing around a room", as Sir Robert put it. Thus, even though the AIDS pandemic was still growing, it had become yesterday's news. There was also a tendency to seek out "crackpot views" on climate change.
Mr Roger Harrabin, an environmental specialist with the BBC, told the symposium that news editors "respond with a reptilian brain, using their instinct instead of their intellect". This made global environmental change very difficult to report because it was primarily an intellectual issue affecting the future.
He recalled attending a seminar for media executives organised by the CIES at Cambridge to introduce them to the "bigger picture". As an experiment, those attending were presented with alternative stories and asked to make a decision on them in a couple of seconds, "the average attention span of a news editor".
The stories involved burning rain forests in Indonesia and Brazil last autumn, to be rated in order of importance. Indonesia scored much higher because it was "a powerful human story of people living in smog" as well as a metaphor for the Asian tiger economies "going up in smoke", Mr Harrabin said.
By contrast, the burning Amazon rain forests in Brazil did not rate very highly because they were seen as "old hat" even though 24,000 sq km of forest were destroyed, compared to 17,000 sq km in Indonesia. The Brazilian rain forest was "not the fly moving on the wall. It is the wall."
THE MEDIA, said the man from the BBC, are always on the look-out for victims of one sort or another. "If you face news editors with two stories, one about a win-win situation and another about a situation that will create a load of losers who are going to scream the house down, I think they'll go for option two."
Mr John Gummer, the former British environment secretary, said politicians were constantly under pressure to make decisions on the basis of newspaper headlines, rather than content. They did not have time to trawl through weighty scientific documents, so even science was understood in terms of headlines.
Described by Friends of the Earth as "the best Environment Secretary we've ever had", Mr Gummer said there was a need to bring global environmental change down to earth. People were very concerned about air pollution, and this should be used as a springboard to develop their understanding of the wider issues.