It's a (much-bemoaned) fact of life among advocates for action on climate change that a few well-publicized voices questioning this whole dubious proposition (e.g. "Are human beings really destroying our climate, which has been doing just fine for millions of years? C'mon now.") can constitute serious debate and uncertainty in the minds of the public. People read the prevailing view alongside the views of a few outliers (ahem, Exxon, ahem) and decide that the whole thing is still undecided and the best thing is to sit tight and not make any rash efforts to save the world.

As explored in today's New York Times, this is a problem even among scientists who agree on the commonly-accepted basic position that "accumulating greenhouse gases will warm the world, erode ice sheets, raise seas and have big impacts on biology and human affairs." Within that broad consensus, there is lots of healthy scientific push and pull--"two papers forward, one paper back"--in the words of author Andrew Revkin. Scientists accustomed to this sort of give-and-take may be able to step back and see this intellectual tussle as the "evolution of objective scientific understanding," but polls show the public remains "divided and confused" about the issue, probably because they just see a lot of contradictory opinions.

Lots of scientists are looking for ways to get around the urge to dumb down findings by playing up the aspects seem most powerful and important but will later be disputed loudly by other scientists. Instead, they're trying to provide more nuanced information on an ongoing basis, working with reporters to get the emphasis right and giving the lay-person intelligible information on developments as they occur.

Increasingly, scientists are taking their message straight to the public. Realclimate.org, Climatepolicy.org and Climateethics.org are among Web sites where issues are explored in an ongoing way, rather than in response to news releases and scientific papers. Other new Web ventures, like ClimateCentral.org at Princeton and the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media, focus on improving media coverage.

Robert J. Brulle , a sociologist at Drexel University, said it was hard to be optimistic about such efforts. "In this public sphere," he said, "it is assumed that the better argument, backed up with solid scientific evidence, will prevail." He said many studies had shown that people tended to sift sources of information to reinforce existing views.

It remains an uphill battle, but at least the messaging piece is now being picked up by more than the activist/advocacy community. That's a step in the right direction.