I also told them to stay up to date with current issues and be proactive in offering comment in their field of expertise. (Eg, if they're a human rights activist, and it's a hot issue somewhere, call TV stations and newspapers letting them know you're available for a local angle).
One of the things I also stressed (among others) was to be able to back up their claims. If they were going to make bold predictions, it should be based on proven fact. Otherwise they'd end up looking stupid, and anything they say might would be ignored from then on (rightly or wrongly).
I saw this story today and was reminded of that:
Turns out the official 2007 report based the "melting Himalayas" claim on a story in the New Scientist in 1999. Which itself was based on a speculative interview with a little-known Indian scientist, who later confirmed it was speculation rather than anything factual. The report said the glaciers melting had "probability of greater than 90 per cent". Which was the report's own conclusion, again not something based on fact.
A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.
The effect of this? To call into question the validity of the rest of the report... and other reports the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued. Rightly or wrongly, they have been discredited as a source on this issue.
That was the sort of thing I was warning the activists about. It's all very well to say something like "100 homeless die each year on Hobart's streets" if you want to get a headline, but be prepared for a backlash and public discrediting soon after.
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