Global Warming

The effects of communicating uncertainty on public trust in facts and numbers

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ◽

10.1073/pnas.1913678117 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 117 (14) ◽

pp. 7672-7683 ◽

Cited By ~ 20

Author(s):

Anne Marthe van der Bles ◽

Sander van der Linden ◽

Alexandra L. J. Freeman ◽

David J. Spiegelhalter

Keyword(s):

Global Warming ◽

Epistemic Uncertainty ◽

Public Trust ◽

National Sample ◽

Systematic Research ◽

Small Decrease ◽

Human Knowledge ◽

Common Assumption ◽

The World ◽

Scientific Facts

Uncertainty is inherent to our knowledge about the state of the world yet often not communicated alongside scientific facts and numbers. In the “posttruth” era where facts are increasingly contested, a common assumption is that communicating uncertainty will reduce public trust. However, a lack of systematic research makes it difficult to evaluate such claims. We conducted five experiments—including one preregistered replication with a national sample and one field experiment on theBBC Newswebsite (totaln= 5,780)—to examine whether communicating epistemic uncertainty about facts across different topics (e.g., global warming, immigration), formats (verbal vs. numeric), and magnitudes (high vs. low) influences public trust. Results show that whereas people do perceive greater uncertainty when it is communicated, we observed only a small decrease in trust in numbers and trustworthiness of the source, and mostly for verbal uncertainty communication. These results could help reassure all communicators of facts and science that they can be more open and transparent about the limits of human knowledge.

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The Global Warming of Climate Science: Climategate and the Construction of Scientific Facts

International Studies in the Philosophy of Science ◽

10.1080/02698595.2010.522411 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 24 (3) ◽

pp. 287-307 ◽

Cited By ~ 17

Author(s):

Marianne Ryghaug ◽

Tomas Moe Skjølsvold

Keyword(s):

Global Warming ◽

Climate Science ◽

Scientific Facts

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Modelling ecosystem adaptation and dangerous rates of global warming

Emerging Topics in Life Sciences ◽

10.1042/etls20180113 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 3 (2) ◽

pp. 221-231 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Rebecca Millington ◽

Peter M. Cox ◽

Jonathan R. Moore ◽

Gabriel Yvon-Durocher

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Global Warming ◽

Diffusion Rate ◽

Individual Species ◽

Genetic Evolution ◽

Rates Of Change ◽

Rapid Climate Change ◽

Warming Climate ◽

Intraspecies Competition ◽

High Trait

Abstract We are in a period of relatively rapid climate change. This poses challenges for individual species and threatens the ecosystem services that humanity relies upon. Temperature is a key stressor. In a warming climate, individual organisms may be able to shift their thermal optima through phenotypic plasticity. However, such plasticity is unlikely to be sufficient over the coming centuries. Resilience to warming will also depend on how fast the distribution of traits that define a species can adapt through other methods, in particular through redistribution of the abundance of variants within the population and through genetic evolution. In this paper, we use a simple theoretical ‘trait diffusion’ model to explore how the resilience of a given species to climate change depends on the initial trait diversity (biodiversity), the trait diffusion rate (mutation rate), and the lifetime of the organism. We estimate theoretical dangerous rates of continuous global warming that would exceed the ability of a species to adapt through trait diffusion, and therefore lead to a collapse in the overall productivity of the species. As the rate of adaptation through intraspecies competition and genetic evolution decreases with species lifetime, we find critical rates of change that also depend fundamentally on lifetime. Dangerous rates of warming vary from 1°C per lifetime (at low trait diffusion rate) to 8°C per lifetime (at high trait diffusion rate). We conclude that rapid climate change is liable to favour short-lived organisms (e.g. microbes) rather than longer-lived organisms (e.g. trees).

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