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There’s a need for training and in filling in the gaps between the extremely casual tweeting, say, and the I.P.C.C. assessment report. There’s a whole range of levels of communication that could fit in between those two things…. The stuff in the middle, that’s where the people who know what they’re talking about should be acting, because we’re not there collectively now.Some of us are. But we’re not there collectively, and that kind of cedes that whole field to the people who don’t know anything and the people who are more fond of their own voice than they are of the facts and the people who want to disinform and misinform the public.So it’s that area in the middle, the hinterland between the paper and the tweet, where I think there’s a lot more scope for us to communicate and where, quite frankly, the field is wide open.

Though it has worked well enough to get us this far down evolution’s challenging road, our risk perception system, which blends thinking and feeling and mostly takes place subconsciously, often produces fears that fly in the face of the facts.  Many of us are more afraid of some risks — like mercury or pesticides or genetically modified food — than the evidence warrants. And many of us aren’t as concerned about some really dire dangers as we ought to be, like climate change, particulate pollution or acidification of the ocean  The problem is, being too afraid, or not afraid enough — a phenomenon I call “the perception gap” — produces dangers all by itself, For that reason, it’s worth exploring just why our fears don’t match the facts, as a first step toward protecting ourselves from the real dangers that arise when we get risk wrong.

We can avoid relying solely on the often-alarmist news media, or on friends who only reinforce how we already feel.