issue. In the United States, more than a third of people believe that “most scientists are unsure whether global warming is occurring or not.”
In part this distorted perception is due to the way that the media presents the issue as contested and adheres to a debate format that pits a climate scientist against a contrarian drawn from a spinning Rolodex of professional deniers. But this uncertainty also originates in the professional caution with which climate scientists present their findings.
There is even widespread uncertainty over the very meaning of the word uncertainty . The precise language of science uses the word to mean the extent to which the weight of available evidence supports a conclusion. Scientists argue that full certainty is unattainable, indeed damaging, and that the maintenance of doubt is the very foundation of the scientific method.
However, the lay public uses the word in a quite different way: to mean the extent to which the expert is confident in his or her stated opinion. When scientists say uncertain , the public hears unsure , and considers them less reliable or trustworthy. Thus we might be more inclined to trust an expert who is certain that something is unlikely than one who is uncertain that something is very likely.
Social trust is determined by confidence and is conveyed by body language, eye contact, and a clear and unfaltering delivery. Scientists can still generate trust in their work if they can communicate their uncertainty with social confidence. All too often, though, professional scientists project a lack of confidence, especially when set up against a professional contrarian who spends much of his life in television studios. Here, for example, is a leading climate scientist feeling the pressure in a live TV debate against a leading climate denier.
“There could be catastrophe in the air. We hear all kinds of explanations about the uncertainties, but the uncertainties—and indeed one of the quotes in the [denier’s] book is ‘uncertainty is uncertainty.’ Well, uncertainty can play both ways.”
Rather than talking confidently about the certainties of what is known, he is talking unconfidently about the uncertainties of what is not known. He is trying to say that the uncertainties are themselves dangerous, but for the listener, it seems as if he has just said “I don’t know” five times in a row.
This is not to say that climate change is uncertain at all: As with any complex issue, it can be read in terms of layers of confidence. Some aspects are well known, well understood, and almost certain. Some parts are conjectural, little understood, and highly uncertain. As former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would have it, there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.
Defining climate change as a whole as certain or uncertain is therefore a choice. Advocates of action focus on the known knowns and emphasize the scale of agreement around that. Opponents of action, such as the skeptical climatologist Judith Curry, emphasize the “whole host of unknown unknowns that we don’t even know how to quantify.”
This interpretation of climate change as exceptionally uncertain is as much a matter of confirmation bias and convenient storytelling as the sibling arguments that it is a distant future issue or that action requires unacceptable losses. Even the most skeptical of skeptics cannot, with an open mind, explore this issue and not conclude that the core science is extremely firm.
In 2008 Professor Richard Mueller did exactly that and decided that climate science was in need of a more combative and rational challenge from a critical outsider.
Mueller, I should say, likes the word rational . Sitting together at a bustling sidewalk cafe opposite his laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches theoretical physics, he tells me that the Senate was quite rational to reject the Kyoto Protocol. The skeptical public, he says, has
In part this distorted perception is due to the way that the media presents the issue as contested and adheres to a debate format that pits a climate scientist against a contrarian drawn from a spinning Rolodex of professional deniers. But this uncertainty also originates in the professional caution with which climate scientists present their findings.
There is even widespread uncertainty over the very meaning of the word uncertainty . The precise language of science uses the word to mean the extent to which the weight of available evidence supports a conclusion. Scientists argue that full certainty is unattainable, indeed damaging, and that the maintenance of doubt is the very foundation of the scientific method.
However, the lay public uses the word in a quite different way: to mean the extent to which the expert is confident in his or her stated opinion. When scientists say uncertain , the public hears unsure , and considers them less reliable or trustworthy. Thus we might be more inclined to trust an expert who is certain that something is unlikely than one who is uncertain that something is very likely.
Social trust is determined by confidence and is conveyed by body language, eye contact, and a clear and unfaltering delivery. Scientists can still generate trust in their work if they can communicate their uncertainty with social confidence. All too often, though, professional scientists project a lack of confidence, especially when set up against a professional contrarian who spends much of his life in television studios. Here, for example, is a leading climate scientist feeling the pressure in a live TV debate against a leading climate denier.
“There could be catastrophe in the air. We hear all kinds of explanations about the uncertainties, but the uncertainties—and indeed one of the quotes in the [denier’s] book is ‘uncertainty is uncertainty.’ Well, uncertainty can play both ways.”
Rather than talking confidently about the certainties of what is known, he is talking unconfidently about the uncertainties of what is not known. He is trying to say that the uncertainties are themselves dangerous, but for the listener, it seems as if he has just said “I don’t know” five times in a row.
This is not to say that climate change is uncertain at all: As with any complex issue, it can be read in terms of layers of confidence. Some aspects are well known, well understood, and almost certain. Some parts are conjectural, little understood, and highly uncertain. As former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would have it, there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.
Defining climate change as a whole as certain or uncertain is therefore a choice. Advocates of action focus on the known knowns and emphasize the scale of agreement around that. Opponents of action, such as the skeptical climatologist Judith Curry, emphasize the “whole host of unknown unknowns that we don’t even know how to quantify.”
This interpretation of climate change as exceptionally uncertain is as much a matter of confirmation bias and convenient storytelling as the sibling arguments that it is a distant future issue or that action requires unacceptable losses. Even the most skeptical of skeptics cannot, with an open mind, explore this issue and not conclude that the core science is extremely firm.
In 2008 Professor Richard Mueller did exactly that and decided that climate science was in need of a more combative and rational challenge from a critical outsider.
Mueller, I should say, likes the word rational . Sitting together at a bustling sidewalk cafe opposite his laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches theoretical physics, he tells me that the Senate was quite rational to reject the Kyoto Protocol. The skeptical public, he says, has
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