You are right, of course. We are going to have to learn how to make people listen to us. You've been telling me this, and I've been thinking about it in other ways too. Chris and I talk about this a lot. My state is doing a lot of good work on climate change and I don't meet a lot of deniers. But I sometimes think that officials don't have quite enough strangled panic in their voices when they talk about taking action. And there are some fundamental concepts that they don't address at all. Chris and I talk about bringing those into the open, and then we talk about message delivery and then I realize that I will have to do that in person. My person and charm and appearance will matter, might even become useful tools.
I do not like this. This is not how I want it to be. It isn't even that I think I will be bad at it. I like public speaking. I know how to translate information. I'm conventionally pretty. I can modulate my voice and demeanor. So I have the potential. It is just that I am stupidly purist. I don't want to use it. You know what I want? I want the value of my ideas to shine forth from an unadorned presentation, so self-evidently right that they do the converting on first exposure. That would be great!*
Of course that isn't how it works, despite my explicitly stated preference. If I believe in a crisis and that I have stuff to offer, then I have a duty to use what's available to me to advocate. Frick. Fortunately, I can put that all off by researching it first, learning how. Diffusion of Innovations is on its way to me. Naturally, I read this guy's dissertation on how technical information gets into policy making. I'm looking at stuff on climate change communication. You were right on that too. It always comes back to storytelling. Fine. Whatever. I can tell stories. There's more, of course. I bet marketers and evangelicals have put a lot of thought into how to convey messages. I should see if I can find any of that, except that it sounds so skeezy and will probably lower my impression of people.
All of that sounds like a good and useful approach to take, and certainly should be exhaustively researched before I do anything boring like cultivate a professional appearance, calibrated to give off the perfect vibe of knowledgable and adult and powerful and just mildly sexy and approachable. One cannot track all the research back to original studies and evaluate their methods in a suit. That's just ridiculous.
*It would also be... a lot like a blog. A policy/thought-driven blog! Where you write things down and only occasionally put up vanity pictures. People find and link you mostly on the merits and a little on the authority of tastemakers. Keep the content coming and people who like content start to gather. Perfect! All information transfer should be like this!