Lawrence Hall of Science, in brief

I visited the LHS last week.  There seems to be a lot of climate education information on their website, but on display in the museum itself, the only climate change education seems to be the one "global temperature change" dataset (of many others) on their "Science on a Sphere" display, whose issues I covered in the previous post. A lot more could be done here, to explain the science as well as ACC's recommended basics on policy solutions; and its effectiveness could be assessed in-house, through their educational assessment office.
(A very little more below.)

NOAA's Science on a Sphere: Climate visualization & other suggestions for viewing at science museums

How to use a specialized display to optimally highlight signal, not noise?

NOAA's "Science on a Sphere" - at Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science, Seattle's Science Museum, and many others - is a planet-shaped screen for displaying planetary "spatial" data for earth and other planets, as well as, presumably, displaying anything that a flat screen can show. Here's the FAQ.

NOAA's PPI goals&objectives fall short of the ACC policy&outreach recommendations

Yesterday's post shows the NRC  America's Climate Choices assessment(s)' recommendation for climate outreach and climate mitigation policy.  (In short: we can't solve it without aligning private incentives with public policy goals, via putting a price on carbon; and the public needs education outreach to be informed about  climate change and the relative effectiveness of policies to address it.)

How do NOAA's goals&objectives align with these recommendations?  According to  NOAA's Office of Program Planning and Integration website, not as well as it could.

What "America's Climate Choices" reports (NRC, 2011) said about climate policy and outreach

The message doesn't seem to be getting through as well as it should.

"We ... need information on the implications of different options -- especially to assess whether policies are effective." 
"Although we face a daunting challenge, if we start an honest conversation now and look at some options,...it's something we can do."

"[We need to] adopt an economy-wide carbon pricing system  ... [since an] incentive that aligns private sector incentives with public policy goals is essential to getting this job done.  It just doesn't work any other way."

In 2010-2011 the National Research Council - the research/report-writing arm of our National Academy of Sciences - put out a series of reports called America's Climate Choices*  - and from what I can tell, the report's information and recommendations, for outreach on effective solutions, is being ignored.

This post just gives excerpts and quotes from & about the report, on climate mitigation policy & outreach assessments and recommendations.

Kudos to TV news - incl. PBS's Woodruff and NOAA's Karl Thomas (RT)

The lead story of last night's PBS NewsHour covered recent extreme weather events in the context of global climate change. (Capital Climate)

Every Network Gets Extreme Weather Story Right, ‘Now’s The Time We Start Limiting Manmade Greenhouse Gases’ — ABC (Romm)

Sandwalk/Larry Moran on science communication that matters

Read Larry Moran's blogpost Communicating Science to Society - in short, we need less news and more explainers. Excerpt:

NOAA's website climate.gov needs improvement

The day after this post was published, NOAA's 2011 "State of the Climate" report came out; see Judy Woodruff of PBS interviewing NOAA's Thomas Karl. 
Updated Sept  2 with NOAA response, appended to post.

Talking with an intelligent libertarian-contrarian recently,  I asked what institution he found credible; he said NOAA.

So I thought to myself "voila, my work here is done" - just point him to their website, offer some salient quotes, and at least we'll move on to the next barrier to acceptance.  But no -