Guide

Uncertainty & the IPCC

Uncertainty & the IPCC Download PDF

The well-respected and prom­inent journal Climatic Change released a spe­cial issue on com­mu­nic­ating uncer­tainty in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

This is a timely pub­lic­a­tion: the IPCC has come in for sig­ni­ficant cri­ti­cism for the way in which it has com­mu­nic­ated the com­plex uncer­tain­ties inherent in cli­mate sci­ence. Some of the papers in this spe­cial edi­tion are ori­ented very spe­cific­ally at the IPCC itself. Others dis­cuss the­or­et­ical notions of ‘uncer­tainty’, ‘con­sensus’, or ‘ignor­ance’ in a lot of tech­nical detail. But some are of wider interest for those involved in com­mu­nic­ating uncer­tainty in cli­mate sci­ence beyond the pro­cesses of the IPCC.

Baruch Fischhoff – a senior social sci­entist and risk researcher from the US – argues that without insti­tu­tional links between cli­mate sci­ent­ists, social sci­ent­ists and policy makers, the com­mu­nic­a­tion of cli­mate change is unlikely to improve. There is now a great deal of research on cli­mate change com­mu­nic­a­tion, and risk per­cep­tion research on other topics that is highly rel­evant. But it is only ever bolted on at the end of the com­mu­nic­a­tion pro­cess. Fischhoff sug­gests that it must be embedded much more deeply within the pro­duc­tion of cli­mate change know­ledge. There should be a con­tinuous chain of research and engage­ment from cli­mate sci­ence through to public con­sump­tion of that know­ledge, and social sci­ent­ists must be involved at every stage. Fischhoff also echoes a call he made with Nick Pidgeon in an earlier pub­lic­a­tion in Nature Climate Change for an assess­ment of the needs of policy-makers who use cli­mate sci­ence to be con­ducted (Fischhoff & Pidgeon, 2011). Otherwise, while com­mu­nic­a­tion may be improved, there is always the ques­tion of what exactly is being communicated.

Fischhoff’s central theme is that the sci­ence of com­mu­nic­a­tion needs to be applied to the com­mu­nic­a­tion of sci­ence in a more sys­tem­atic way. And another paper in the Special Issue – by John Sterman – explains some of the ways in which people’s ‘mental models’ (the ways in which people inter­pret and struc­ture inform­a­tion about the world) might hinder the com­mu­nic­a­tion of com­plex sci­entific inform­a­tion. This means that public engage­ment with cli­mate change will not be improved by simply providing  more inform­a­tion about cli­mate change: it requires dif­ferent modes of com­mu­nic­a­tion, including ‘exper­i­en­tial’ learning envir­on­ments such as inter­active sim­u­la­tions where people can ‘see’ for them­selves what hap­pens when (for example) levels of carbon dioxide increase in the atmo­sphere. Sterman argues that without this kind of inter­active learning about cli­mate sci­ence – let­ting ordinary people ‘exper­i­ment’ with dif­ferent aspects of the cli­mate system in sim­u­la­tions – under­standing of cli­mate change risks will never improve.

Brenda Ekwurzel and her col­leagues sug­gest that the immense col­lective effort put into pro­du­cing the IPCC assess­ment reports is typ­ic­ally not matched with public com­mu­nic­a­tion and out­reach efforts. This means that less author­it­ative sources fill the vacuum, and much of the good sci­entific work con­tained in the assess­ment reports is under­mined. The IPCC reports are major oppor­tun­ities for building under­standing and con­fid­ence in cli­mate sci­ence and debating the policy implic­a­tions – but instead, most media atten­tion has focused on the small number of errors that these reports have been found to (regret­tably, but per­haps inev­it­ably) contain.

Citing pre­vious research showing that people sys­tem­at­ic­ally mis­in­ter­pret the prob­ab­ility terms the IPCC use to describe their find­ings (Budescu et al, 2009), Ekwurzel and her col­leagues argue that if verbal prob­ab­ility labels are used in com­mu­nic­a­tion strategies, they should be accom­panied by actual num­bers too. Otherwise, the danger is that very strong state­ments such as ‘it is very likely that human activ­ities are causing cli­mate change’ will be inter­preted as ‘we are not sure if human activ­ities are causing cli­mate change’.  They also sug­gest that the uncer­tainty gen­er­ated by human actions (i.e. beha­vi­oural choices, policy responses etc) needs to be much more effect­ively dis­tin­guished from the types of uncer­tainty that relate to the sci­ence itself. This is an important point for com­mu­nic­ators to bear in mind – the single biggest source of uncer­tainty in attempts to model the future cli­mate are the choices that human soci­eties make.

A small number of the art­icles from this spe­cial issue are avail­able for free, including the Ekwurzel paper dis­cussed above, but most require a sub­scrip­tion to the journal. The altern­ative is to con­tact the lead author of the paper you’re inter­ested in, and request an earlier ver­sion of the paper that they might be willing to share with you. They will often have one that is barely any dif­ferent to the pub­lished ver­sion, but that does not mean infringing on the copy­right agree­ment they have with the journal.