Your sweeping generalizations about religion and religious scientists don’t agree with my personal experience, but I can’t speak to yours.

You’re thought is pointing to this mechanistic idea of having some ‘competent’ scientists inform the non-scientists and think that career politician or the sixty percent anti-scientific public to just go “oh, of course, therefore, I’ll vote the scientific way!” Ah, no, back to the first paragraph. Yes, we need to get people to know and be scientists if we’re ever to have a rational democracy(as oppossed to a disfunctional irrational democracy).

That’s hard as it is; but, it’s also easier said than done. The twentieth century alone had more scientists, mathematicians, and engineers in all history; today, we have even more; but, they tend to mix up their science with their anti-science religion(mostly christianity; see 1corinth1, or even Genesis about the tree of life; or Dueteronomy 4 and I do believe 7 where a faction tells the others that they should stop studying the heavens). Arab religion is generally not anti-science; but, like Taoism that doesn’t understand that one must do experiment/observation and mathemtics to do science, Arab religion doens’t understand that one shouldn’t have all kinds of bogus restrictions on what you can or cannot look at . . . or else they’ll cut your hand off or worse.

Most religious people today that get a science degree don’t think twice about the dark ages, they don’t know they’re own religion. If they did, well, they usually chose to ignore and anybody pointing it out(I’ve experienced this with a former indian mathematician friend of mine); people are socially bound up; they’re not going to tell their, sister, mother, daughter, or wife that their religion is bunk!

The religious who end up in science just turn the principles of science and their religion around to make things ‘o.k.’ There’s nothing one can do; you just point out like in america, that religious discussion is not part of a scientific discussion and end it at that. Note: Kepler, Galileo, and Newton all bent their religion around to make it ‘o.k.’ to do science. Honestly, I think Kepler most; Galileo and Newton hardly ever mentioned ‘god.’ If they did, it sounded like they just put the mention of god in their books to shut up the social nazies mouths!(I don’t recall the mention of god in his Two new sciences; Newton only mentions god one time at the end of his Principia).

As for your prescription on how to impart knowledge about climate change to someone… Well, your first point is a glittering generality that I would like to but just can’t agree with. Your others, however, are pretty much in line with existing guidelines (that I’ll be discussing in part 3!): stick to the science and stay out of politics, tailor your message and vocabulary to your intended audience, and as much as possible, *engage* the listener in a dialogue rather than talking at them from on high.

Lastly, your comment about more formal education is another seemingly reasonable one, but research shows otherwise: More educated individuals tend to have more highly polarized opinions. The causes of this are, as I understand it, not fully understood, but are under study. I’ll probably mention this in a later post as well.

1) Choose pretty much anyone except politicians (whose livelihoods depend strongly on ignoring everything except their constituents’ views),
2) Talk to them in a sweet, human, and non-threatening way, and mostly about the underlying subject rather than the political conclusions (so that they would be more likely to actually listen to a word I’m saying),
3) Be interesting and engage the audience, and
4) Explain not using “overwhelming scientific evidence”, but plain English and easy-to-understand facts, focusing not on rigor but on simple, common-sense things they can easily verify for themselves.

If we use classrooms as our example of giving people knowledge instead of inaptly-named Congressional “hearings”, I think we do see an effect. People with a formal education in a subject are definitely less likely to hold extreme, far-from-mainstream views on that subject than people without.