Confronting climate change in the age of denial

This Editorial is part of the Confronting Climate Change in the Age of Denial Collection.What is it about stories that captures the human imagination?Writing coaches will tell you that readers care more about what happens next than they do about beautiful prose.Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga says that stories help us make sense of the world.In the 1970s, Gazzaniga identified a brain region in the left hemisphere, which he dubbed "the interpreter," that tries to fit everything into a story, even filling in missing gaps, in a deep-seated need to create order from chaos [1].Trouble is, our reliance on story to interpret the world also makes us vulnerable to conspiracy theories and false narratives that happen to dovetail with our values and worldview.Scientists and science educators have long wrestled with the challenges of communicating evidence that contradicts people's personal, religious, or political beliefs, particularly regarding evolution, vaccine safety, and climate change.A perfect case study of people's tendency to create their own narratives in the face of incomplete information is the recent viral response to a photo of a starving polar bear.The photographers intended to show what the future of climate change might look like: polar bears depend on sea ice to hunt seals, walruses, and other prey.As more sea ice melts, bears will lose their hunting platforms and likely starve to death, placing the species' survival at risk.But people interpreted the image through their own personal lens.Some recognized the effort to illuminate the costs of climate change while others seized on the photo to deny climate change by pointing to healthy bears as evidence that the species is doing fine.The photographers recently said they were shocked by the response and realized they'd "lost control of the narrative" [2].Against this backdrop, we asked an Arctic mammal expert and two social scientists to weigh in on the challenges and pitfalls of communicating scientific evidence around climate change.Their contributions appear in the collection publishing this week, "Confronting climate change in the age of denial" [3].Sue Moore and Randall Reeves draw on decades of research on marine mammals to set the record straight on the likely impacts of climate change on wildlife populations in the Arctic."Marine mammals are ecosystem sentinels, capable of reflecting ocean variability through changes in their ecology and body condition," Moore, a biological oceanographer, and Reeves, a marine mammal biologist, write in "Tracking arctic marine mammal resilience in an era of rapid ecosystem alteration" [4].They explore the life history traits of endemic and migratory Arctic species to gauge their capacity to adapt to ecosystem changes caused by rapid warming and identify potential winners (bowhead and gray whales) and losers (polar bears and walruses).The authors propose a framework to facilitate rapid assessments of population status and guide management and conservation efforts.The framework enhances traditional approaches, they argue, by including ecological indicators-including geographic range and behavior-and physiological