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What began as something spontaneous and unique has today become a parody of itself. What was exceptional and emergent in the realm of ideas has been bottled, packaged, and sold back to us over and over again. The whole TED vibe has come to resemble a sales pitch.
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In most TED venues, the stage on which the speakers perform (its hard to resist that verb in relation to TED talks) looks more like a TV set than a lecture hall. The videos are also very well produced, with lots of quirky PowerPoint and a big role for the audience, who you hear in the background and see in cutaways. It's all designed to enrich the viewing experience, and it has made TED into an online video sensation.
A fundamental problem with climate science in the public realm, as conventionally practiced by the IPCC, is the essential ink blot nature of its presentation. By "ink blot" I mean that there is literally nothing that could occur in the real world that would allow those who are skeptical of scientific claims to revise their views due to unfolding experience. That is to say, anything that occurs with respect to the climate on planet earth is "consistent with" projections made by the climate science community. Some scientists go further and argue that climate science cannot be shown to be incorrect based on experience because its projections are probabilistic. The result is that people tend to see in climate science other things than those that can be resolved empirically -- which fosters politicization and tribal behavior.
The ink blot nature of climate science would be a non-issue if it were a field like philosophy or cosmology in which people were debating non-empirical claims for academic interests. But climate science -- or at least a very visible part of that field -- has set forth on an evangelistic path in trying to convince the unconvinced of their views among politicians and the general public.
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the ink blot nature of climate science leaves climate scientists in a position of arguing from authority or demanding that people need "trust us." The typical mode of engagement with skeptics by many visible climate scientists is to argue how right they are (and wrong/evil the skeptics are) -- but what skeptics need instead is to hear what it would mean for climate scientists to be wrong. If one cannot be wrong, then experience cannot be used to adjudicate claims.
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the climate science community argues that uncertainties/variability are so large as to make such claims not inconsistent with their views
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Twitter is
being used increasingly as a means of continuing and extending
dialogue, commentary and networking amongst academic
conference participants and is rapidly becoming the default
technology used to support what is known as the ‘backchannel’.
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