Interview with Professor Chris Rapley

Professor Chris Rapley CBE is Professor of Climate Science at University College London. Until December 2010, he was the Director of the Science Museum. This followed a decade as Director of the British Antarctic Survey and four years as Executive Director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme.  He is a leading figure in the public debate around climate change.

You have just left your position as Director of the Science Museum to take up the role of Professor of Climate Science at UCL. What experiences and lessons about climate science will you take with you?
I learnt a lot about the social aspects of climate science. Before I joined the Museum, like many of my colleagues, I suffered from the ‘information deficit’ model of human behaviour. Science had uncovered an inconvenient truth and so it seemed that all we had to do was to lay out the evidence and the world would understand and respond appropriately. But of course it’s not as simple as that. Over the past year, the climate debate has become shrill, polarised and politicised, which is not helpful. At the same time, it has attracted the attention of people from other disciplines– the marketers, the behavioural psychologists, the cognitive psychologists and the anthropologists. They’ve come along and said ‘We could have told you that people don’t make up their mind on the evidence, particularly when it’s as technically obscure and complex as climate science. They decide on the basis of their ideological outlook, their esteem system, their world view, etc’. In the US, there is a very strong case that people who are neo-liberalists and free marketers are much less likely to believe in man-made climate change. Whereas, if you are liberal and cynical about politics and business, you are likely to believe in man-made climate change without really having considered the evidence. You just use evidence to give you a warm feeling about your existing prejudice and ideology.

The Museum has also left me much more thoughtful about my own position on things. I used to take it for granted that I was genuinely impartial and analytical about science. When I arrived, some of the senior staff talked a lot about belief. I said ‘Hey, this isn’t about belief, it’s about weighing up evidence coming to reasoned conclusions’. And they smiled at me and said ‘Chris, when people walk through the door of the Science Museum, they believe. They’re not in a position to conclude. And you probably believe as well’. Although I was affronted, to an extent greater than I had realised, it’s true. I’ve had years of experience in some specific areas of climate science. But when I read the conclusions of a scientist in an area in which I am not expert, I do my best to make my own judgements and if it sounds really implausible, then I might talk to somebody in that field to give me some advice. But in the end, there is much I must take on trust, assuming that the scientific process of revealing what is not true has run its course. Is that concluding or believing? I have come to accept the element of belief, albeit a sophisticated form of belief, which is not what I had previously recognised.

The Science Museum’s 2009 exhibition Prove It! provided evidence for man-made climate change and asked visitors to send a message of support to the UK negotiating team at Copenhagen. The poll had surprising results, with large numbers voting that they did not give their support. What have you learnt from these results?
People don’t want to be told what to think. They want a framework from which they can begin to make sense of things; they want to be helped in thinking for themselves. But they are very quick to notice if you seem to be advocating one position. It’s hard to think back a year and a half to the mindset that existed when we set up the exhibition. There was a heady enthusiasm; the Obama administration had just come in, and people were optimistic about Copenhagen and believed a course of effective action was finally going to be worked out. Our message in the exhibition was along the lines ‘it’s real, let’s get real about it’ when we should have been saying ’look at this really interesting issue, here’s what the science community has found, here’s a framework in which you can think about it and make up your own mind’. It was a bit of a shock for us to get some criticisms from friends of the Museum, but I’m glad we did it because it was a valuable lesson.

How have these lessons changed the approach of Atmosphere, the Science Museum’s latest climate change gallery?

We decided this time to focus on the story of climate science, which is a fascinating and legitimate story regardless of whether humans are changing the climate. This way we hoped to increase engagement and deepen understanding – that was our objective. We wanted to engage with people who would normally turn the page if they saw a climate change story in the paper. We wanted them to become confident and interested in finding out more for themselves. In his Reith Lecture last year, I heard Martin Rees say during the Q&A session ‘If your geography is so poor that you don’t know the difference between South Korea and Syria then you are disempowered; you are cut off from making any sense of a whole stream of on going discussion in the media’. And, similarly, if your knowledge of climate science is either hazy or non-existent, then how can you possibly make up your mind in a reasoned way about the subject?

There are many subjects about which, as an educated person, I know embarrassingly little. Equally, what we found with visitors to the Museum is that they are uncomfortable and embarrassed to admit how little they knew about climate science – fragments of this and that in a kind of haze, but unable to join up the dots. If we can help people join the dots and be empowered to make up their own minds about the issue, then it’s a success. There are already early signs that we’ve got it about right. Visitor numbers have been more than twice what we had planned for.

What’s was your greatest success in making science engaging while at the Science Museum?
I think it was the fully revamped contemporary Wellcome Wing, particularly the gallery Who Am I?, which takes the individual as its subject. During the Museum’s centenary celebrations, we ran a public vote that asked which object in the Museum had most affected people’s lives and the modern world. Right from the moment the poll opened, the x-ray machine went into the lead and never looked back. The top three were the x-ray machine, penicillin and the double helix. These results show that, for many people who are trying to link an object and make sense of it, it’s the medical side that has great traction, because people relate to it through personal experience. The Who Am I? gallery has a natural tug that brings people in. It’s called Who am I – it’s the most common word at a cocktail party. People are fascinated with themselves, and rightly so, because understanding ourselves helps us survive, so there’s a deep instinct to do so. The gallery included a great initiative in which some disadvantaged young people were given a curatorial role, which seems to have really made an impact on some of their lives, providing then with focus and, I understand, even helping them commit to a career. And I’ve just seen that the Who am I? online game, Thingdom, has won a design award.

So, in terms of engaging with the public, it’s about that personal connection?
Yes, the key is starting where people are, in their own minds and bodies, and engaging on their terms. It’s also about connections between people. One of the great things at the Science Museum is that you get a lot of intergenerational discussion between adults and children, whether it’s within families or school groups. In our exhibit The Secret Life of the Home, you hear people getting really excited, saying ‘Oh look, there’s a mangle, do you know what that is? When I was young...’. When there’s that sort of human connection with an object, it’s no longer the museum telling the story – the process becomes truly democratised. It’s part of your life. But it’s a part that you are sharing with another generation that hasn’t necessarily experienced it. It’s very powerful.

That’s one of the problems I think with headphones and audio tours. As soon as you put on headphones you are listening to another authoritative voice and you’ve stopped that personal discussion.

You’ve voiced concerns about both climate change and population growth – how do you go about engaging the public in these complex and highly contentious topics?
One of the challenges, I think, is language. If we use terms such as ‘warmist’ and ‘denier’ then we’ve done two things. We’ve tribalised each other, making each other enemies and we’ve also laid down the rules of engagement. We’re on separate sides of a divide and the purpose of the exercise it to prove each other wrong. It’s very natural for us to fall into these ways, particularly in the UK, because we are taught, right from the school debating societies, that this is the way to engage on such subjects. Your job is to win. That’s fine as a sort of blood sport. But it’s not a very good way of solving problems. A much better way is to hold a dialogue where you’re open minded not closed minded, where you recognise we can probably agree on 60% and then begin to make sense of the rest together. So getting the language and the mode of engagement right is key.

Why engage the public at all in issues around science? Why not just make the right decisions and get on with it?
We live in a democracy so, firstly, we all have a right to be participants in science. I suppose I’m starting to sound a bit like the Big Society now, but actually the flaw in the Big Society is precisely this - how can you give people power to make decisions if you don’t give them the means to make the right decisions? People not only need to understand the issues, but also to understand the process of making a good decision. Another reason we have to engage the public is because they own it all. As Director of the Science Museum, the collections belong to the nation and the public paid for my salary. As a scientist, they pay for my research projects and I’ve always felt very passionately that, when you accept the Queen’s shilling, it’s a duty to explain to people what you’ve spent it on. And I’ve found that people really are interested – much more than is often assumed - in how science is done and what it’s uncovering. I remember giving a lecture to a fairly conservative evening discussion group on the British civil space programme. At the end of it I said that the programme is costing every tax-payer one and a half gin and tonics a year. They had a little chat and said ’do you know what, you can make that two gin and tonics’. People get science, they like it and they want to know about it. That’s why public engagement is worth it.