This summer, Pope Francis plans to release an encyclical letter in which he will address environmental issues, and very likely climate change.

Though public understanding of the need for climate-friendly policies is critical, many Americans remain ill-informed about the facts and risks of global warming. For good reason. Too often, scientists’ explanations of climate change are unnecessarily burdened by confusing caveats and boring or complicated jargon.

Attacks on institutions that keep records of global temperatures, such as NASA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the UK Met Office, and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, continue to appear in the press.

The climate debate seems to be as polarised as ever. While joint political pledges offer some hope that climate change no longer has to be a partisan issue, a look at the comments below most articles on global warming says otherwise.

As California endures its worst drought since records began, illegal marijuana plantations are being blamed for further depleting precious water resources.

It can be tempting to think that people who disagree with you are mad, bad or simply stupid. However, not only are such judgements usually wrong, but telling people that they are stupid is unlikely to convince them of the merit of your own view.

Western liberal democracies believe that in difficult political decisions science serves as a referee and arbiter of truth. Scientific knowledge can indeed inform and narrow the scope of policy choices, for example in the teaching of evolution in public schools.

From the 1950s until the 1990s, nuclear weapons were viewed as the greatest threat to human life on the planet. Jonathan Schell, whose book The Fate of the Earth (1998) perhaps best crystallised the danger and fear of such weapons for a popular audience, referred to life after a nuclear holocaust as a “republic of insects and grass”.

If we want to use scientific thinking to solve problems, we need people to appreciate evidence and heed expert advice. But the Australian suspicion of authority extends to experts, and this public cynicism can be manipulated to shift the tone and direction of debates. We have seen this happen in arguments about climate change.

John Oliver discusses the tension between the public and private worlds of predicting the weather.