Climate change report undercut by cloudy language
Most people don’t comprehend fully the recent U.N. climate change report because its language is not as clear as it could be in describing what to expect, say researchers. They suggest the International Panel on Climate Change should use percentages to express its conclusions rather than wording such as “likely” or “about as likely as not” or “virtually certain.” The IPCC provides numerical equivalents in an appendix. “Virtually certain” means a more than 99 percent likelihood of occurring, for instance.
When researchers interviewed 10,000 people in 24 countries about the meaning of the phrases, only 27 percent interpreted the language in the way used by IPCC. The figure rose to 40 percent when people were given the numerical probabilities. “Most people tended to underestimate what was meant by high probabilities of extreme events occurring and overestimate low probabilities,” says a summary at SciDevNet. An author of the study says people let their opinions color their perceptions.
The study appeared in Nature Climate Change and is available here.