TY - JOUR
T1 - Statistical Language Backs Conservatism in Climate-Change Assessments
AU - Herrando-Pérez, Salvador
AU - Bradshaw, Corey J.A.
AU - Lewandowsky, Stephan
AU - Vieites, David Rodriguez
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - The scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change is empirically settled, but communicating it to nonscientific audiences remains challenging. To be explicit about the state of knowledge on climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has adopted a vocabulary that ranks climate findings through certainty-calibrated qualifiers of confidence and likelihood. In this article, we quantified the occurrence of knowns and unknowns about "The Physical Science Basis" of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report by counting the frequency of calibrated qualifiers. We found that the tone of the IPCC's probabilistic language is remarkably conservative (mean confidence is medium, and mean likelihood is 66%-100% or 0-33%), and emanates from the IPCC recommendations themselves, complexity of climate research, and exposure to politically motivated debates. Leveraging communication of uncertainty with overwhelming scientific consensus about anthropogenic climate change should be one element of a wider reform, whereby the creation of an IPCC outreach working group could enhance the transmission of climate science to the panel's audiences.
AB - The scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change is empirically settled, but communicating it to nonscientific audiences remains challenging. To be explicit about the state of knowledge on climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has adopted a vocabulary that ranks climate findings through certainty-calibrated qualifiers of confidence and likelihood. In this article, we quantified the occurrence of knowns and unknowns about "The Physical Science Basis" of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report by counting the frequency of calibrated qualifiers. We found that the tone of the IPCC's probabilistic language is remarkably conservative (mean confidence is medium, and mean likelihood is 66%-100% or 0-33%), and emanates from the IPCC recommendations themselves, complexity of climate research, and exposure to politically motivated debates. Leveraging communication of uncertainty with overwhelming scientific consensus about anthropogenic climate change should be one element of a wider reform, whereby the creation of an IPCC outreach working group could enhance the transmission of climate science to the panel's audiences.
KW - climate change
KW - communication
KW - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
KW - terminology
KW - uncertainty
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85064402564&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1093/biosci/biz004
DO - 10.1093/biosci/biz004
M3 - Article
VL - 69
SP - 209
EP - 219
JO - BIOSCIENCE
JF - BIOSCIENCE
SN - 0006-3568
IS - 3
ER -