Climate literacy is necessary but not sufficient

Mark McCaffrey is not happy with the recent trend of downplaying the importance of climate literacy:

There’s a dangerous meme drifting through the climate community: that when it comes to “solving” climate change, literacy does not matter. True, years of promoting filling the information deficit with more facts hasn’t worked, but the current “literacy bashing,” repeated in climate blogs and conversations, is unfortunate, oversimplified and, to be blunt, nonsense. Literacy, particularly about 21st century challenges such as climate and energy, does matter.

and concludes that:

To be clear, information is not enough to develop policies, political will or technological solutions. But without current, accurate information, none of the above is possible. The fact that few people are literate about science in general and climate/energy in particular and, that in the absence of literacy, opinions, ideologies and psychological biases run riot, isn’t a surprise.

To re-purpose a phrase from Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann: Climate literacy is necessary but not sufficient in order to develop smart sensible policies to deal with the problem.