Steve Lewandowsky – Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

Life after COVID: most people don’t want a return to normal – they want a fairer, more sustainable future

Posted on January 6, 2022March 29, 2023 by janet.crompton

We are in a crisis now – and omicron has made it harder to imagine the pandemic ending. But it will not last forever. When the COVID outbreak is over, what do we want the world to look like?

In the early stages of the pandemic – from March to July 2020 – a rapid return to normal was on everyone’s lips, reflecting the hope that the virus might be quickly brought under control. Since then, alternative slogans such as “build back better” have also become prominent, promising a brighter, more equitable, more sustainable future based on significant or even radical change.

Returning to how things were, or moving on to something new – these are very different desires. But which is it that people want? In our recent research, we aimed to find out.

Along with Keri Facer of the University of Bristol, we conducted two studies, one in the summer of 2020 and another a year later. In these, we presented participants – a representative sample of 400 people from the UK and 600 from the US – with four possible futures, sketched in the table below. We designed these based on possible outcomes of the pandemic published in early 2020 in The Atlantic and The Conversation.

We were concerned with two aspects of the future: whether it would involve a “return to normal” or a progressive move to “build back better”, and whether it would concentrate power in the hands of government or return power to individuals.

Four possible futures

Back to normal – strong government
“Collective safety”

- We don’t want any big changes to how the world works.
- We are happy for the government to keep its powers to keep us safe and get back on economic track.

Back to normal – individual autonomy
“For freedom”

We don’t want any big changes to how the world works; our priority is business as usual and safety.
We want to take back from governments the powers they have claimed to limit our movements and monitor our data and behaviour.

Progressive – strong government
“Fairer future”

What we want is for governments to take strong action to deal with economic unfairness and the problem of climate change.
We are happy for the government to keep its powers if it protects economic fairness, health and the environment.

Progressive – individual autonomy
“Grassroots leadership”

What we want is for communities, not governments, to work together to build a fair and environmentally friendly world.
We want to take back from governments the powers they have claimed to limit our movements and monitor our data and behaviour.

In both studies and in both countries, we found that people strongly preferred a progressive future over a return to normal. They also tended to prefer individual autonomy over strong government. On balance, across both experiments and both countries, the “grassroots leadership” proposal appeared to be most popular.

People’s political leanings affected preferences – those on the political right preferred a return to normal more than those on the left – yet intriguingly, strong opposition to a progressive future was quite limited, even among people on the right. This is encouraging because it suggests that opposition to “building back better” may be limited.

Our findings are consistent with other recent research, which suggests that even conservative voters want the environment to be at the heart of post-COVID economic reconstruction in the UK.

The misperceptions of the majority

This is what people wanted to happen – but how did they think things actually would end up? In both countries, participants felt that a return to normal was more likely than moving towards a progressive future. They also felt it was more likely that government would retain its power than return it to the people.

In other words, people thought they were unlikely to get the future they wanted. People want a progressive future but fear that they’ll get a return to normal with power vested in the government.

We also asked people to tell us what they thought others wanted. It turned out our participants thought that others wanted a return to normal much more than they actually did. This was observed in both the US and UK in both 2020 and 2021, though to varying extents.

This striking divergence between what people actually want, what they expect to get and what they think others want is what’s known as “pluralistic ignorance”.

This describes any situation where people who are in the majority think they are in the minority. Pluralistic ignorance can have problematic consequences because in the long run people often shift their attitudes towards what they perceive to be the prevailing norm. If people misperceive the norm, they may change their attitudes towards a minority opinion, rather than the minority adapting to the majority. This can be a problem if that minority opinion is a negative one – such as being opposed to vaccination, for example.

In our case, a consequence of pluralistic ignorance may be that a return to normal will become more acceptable in future, not because most people ever desired this outcome, but because they felt it was inevitable and that most others wanted it.

Two people talking on a bench — We think we know what other people think – but often we’re wrong.
dekazigzag/Shutterstock

Ultimately, this would mean that the actual preferences of the majority never find the political expression that, in a democracy, they deserve.

To counter pluralistic ignorance, we should therefore try to ensure that people know the public’s opinion. This is not merely a necessary countermeasure to pluralistic ignorance and its adverse consequences – people’s motivation also generally increases when they feel their preferences and goals are shared by others. Therefore, simply informing people that there’s a social consensus for a progressive future could be what unleashes the motivation needed to achieve it.

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This blog is written by Caboteer Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, Chair of Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol and Ullrich Ecker, Professor of Cognitive Psychology and Australian Research Council Future Fellow, The University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Many conservatives have a difficult relationship with science – we wanted to find out why

Posted on August 25, 2021March 30, 2023 by janet.crompton

Many scientific findings continue to be disputed by politicians and parts of the public long after a scholarly consensus has been established. For example, nearly a third of Americans still do not accept that fossil fuel emissions cause climate change, even though the scientific community settled on a consensus that they do decades ago.

Research into why people reject scientific facts has identified people’s political worldviews as the principal predictor variable. People with a libertarian or conservative worldview are more likely to reject climate change and evolution and are less likely to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

What explains this propensity for rejection of science by some of the political right? Are there intrinsic attributes of the scientific enterprise that are uniquely challenging to people with conservative or libertarian worldviews? Or is the association merely the result of conflicting imperatives between scientific findings and their economic implications? In the case of climate change, for example, any mitigation necessarily entails interference with current economic practice.

We recently conducted two large-scale surveys that explored the first possibility – that some intrinsic attributes of science are in tension with aspects of conservative thinking. We focused on two aspects of science: the often tacit norms and principles that guide the scientific enterprise, and the history of how scientific progress has led us to understand that human beings are not the centre of the universe.

Sociologist Robert Merton famously proposed norms for the conduct of science in 1942. The norm of “communism” (different from the political philosophy of communism) holds that the results of scientific research should be the common property of the scientific community. “Universalism” postulates that knowledge should transcend racial, class, national or political barriers. “Disinteredness” mandates that scientists should conduct research for the benefit of the scientific enterprise rather than for personal gain.

These norms sit uneasily with strands of standard contemporary conservative thought. Conservatism is typically associated with nationalism and patriotism, at the expense of embracing cooperative internationalism. And the notion of disinterestedness may not mesh well with conservative emphasis on property rights.

Science has enabled us to explain the world around us but that may create further tensions – especially with religious conservatism. The idea that humans are exceptional is at the core of traditional Judeo-Christian thought, which sees the human as an imago Dei, an image of God, that is clearly separate from other beings and nature itself.

Against this human exceptionalism, the over-arching outcome of centuries of research since the scientific revolution has been a diminution of the status of human beings. We now recognise our planet to be a rather small and insignificant object in a universe full of an untold number of galaxies, rather than the centre of all creation.

Testing the issues

We tested how those two over-arching attributes of science – its intrinsic norms and its historical effect on how humans see themselves – might relate to conservative thought and acceptance of scientific facts in two large-scale studies. Each involved a representative sample of around 1,000 US residents.

We focused on three scientific issues; climate change, vaccinations, and the heritability of intelligence. The first two were chosen because of their known tendency to be rejected by people on the political right, allowing us to observe the potential moderating role of other predictors.

The latter was chosen because the belief that external forces such as education can improve people and their circumstances is a focus of liberalism. Conservatism, on the other hand, is skeptical of that possibility and leans more towards the idea that improvement comes from the individual – implying a lesser role for the malleability of intelligence.

The fact that individual differences in intelligence are related to genetic differences, with current estimates of heritability hovering around 50%, is therefore potentially challenging to liberals but might be endorsed by conservatives.

The two studies differed slightly in how we measured political views and people’s endorsement of the norms of science, but the overall findings were quite clear. Conservatives were less likely to accept the norms of science, suggesting that the worldviews of some people on the political right may be in intrinsic conflict with the scientific enterprise.

Those people who accepted the norms of science were also more likely to endorse vaccinations and support the need to fight climate change. This suggests that people who embrace the scientific enterprise as a whole are also more likely to accept specific scientific findings.

We found limited support for the possibility that belief in human exceptionalism would predispose people to be more sceptical in their acceptance of scientific propositions. Exceptionalism had little direct effect on scientific attitudes. Therefore, our study provided no evidence for the conjecture that the long history of science in displacing humans from the centre of the world contributes to conversatives’ uneasiness with science.

Finally, we found no strong evidence that people on the political left are more likely to reject the genetic contribution to individual variation in intelligence. This negative result adds to the evidence that science denial is harder to find on the left, even concerning issues where basic aspects of liberal thought – in this case the belief that people can be improved – are in potential conflict with the evidence.

The two studies help explain why conservatives are more likely to reject scientific findings than liberals. This rejection is not only dictated by political interests clashing with a specific body of scientific knowledge (such as human-caused climate change), but it appears to represent a deeper tension between conservatism and the spirit in which science is commonly conducted.

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This blog has been written by Cabot Institute for the Environment member Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, Chair of Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol and Klaus Oberauer, Professor of Cognitive Psychology, University of Zurich. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

We have the vaccine for climate disinformation – let’s use it

Posted on February 4, 2020March 31, 2023 by janet.crompton

Exposing people to likely disinformation campaigns about bushfire causes will help inoculate them. JASON O’BRIEN/AAP

Australia’s recent bushfire crisis will be remembered for many things – not least, the tragic loss of life, property and landscape. But one other factor made it remarkable: the deluge of disinformation spread by climate deniers.

As climate change worsens – and with it, the bushfire risk – it’s well worth considering how to protect the public against disinformation campaigns in future fire seasons.

So how do we persuade people not to be fooled? One promising answer lies in a branch of psychology called “inoculation theory”. The logic is analogous to the way a medical vaccine works: you can prevent a virus spreading by giving lots of people a small dose.

In the case of bushfire disinformation, this means exposing, ahead of time, the myths most likely to be perpetrated by sceptics.

Bushfire bunkum

Disinformation can take many forms, including cherry-picking or distorting data, questioning of the scientific consensus by presenting fake experts, and outright fabrication.

On the issue of bushfires in Australia, there is little scientific doubt that human-caused climate change is increasing their magnitude and frequency. But spurious claims on social media and elsewhere of late sought to muddy the waters:

bots and trolls disseminated false arson claims which downplayed the impact of climate change on the bushfires
NewsCorp reported more than 180 arsonists had been arrested “in the past few months”. The figure was a gross exaggeration and distorted the real numbers
The misleading arson claim went viral after Donald Trump Jr, the president’s son, tweeted it. A UK government minister, Heather Wheeler, also repeated the false claim in the House of Commons
NSW Nationals leader John Barilaro, among others, wrongly suggested a lack of hazard reduction burning – the fault of the Greens – had caused the fires
Conservative commentators claimed the 2019-20 bushfires were no worse than those of the past.

Where will it go next?

Climate science clearly indicates Australia faces more dangerous fire weather conditions in the future. Despite this, organised climate denial will inevitably continue.

Research has repeatedly shown that if the public knows, ahead of time, what disinformation they are likely to encounter and why it is wrong, they are less likely to accept it as true.

This inoculation involves two elements: an explicit warning of an impending
attempt to misinform, and a refutation of the anticipated disinformation.

For example, research has shown that if people were told how the tobacco industry used fake experts to mislead the public about the health risks of smoking, they were less likely to be misled by similar strategies used to deny climate change.

It is therefore important to anticipate the next stage of disinformation about the causes of bushfire disasters. One likely strategy will be to confuse the public by exploiting the role of natural climate variability.

This tactic has been used before. When natural variability slowed global warming in the early 2000s, some falsely claimed that global warming “had stopped”.

Of course, the warming never stopped – an unexceptional natural fluctuation merely slowed the process, which subsequently resumed.

Natural climate variability may bring the occasional mild fire season in future. So let’s arm ourselves with the facts to combat the inevitable attempts to mislead.

Here are the facts

The link between human-caused climate change and extreme weather conditions is well established. But natural variability, such as El Niño and La Niña events in the Pacific Ocean may at times overshadow global warming for a few years.

The below video illustrates this. We used historical data from Adelaide to project the expected incidence of extreme heatwaves for the rest of the century, assuming a continued warming trend of 0.3℃ per decade.

The top panel shows the distribution of all 365 daily maximum temperatures for a year, with the annual average represented by the vertical red line. As the years tick over, this distribution is moving up slowly; the red line increasingly diverges from the average temperature observed before the climate started changing (the vertical black line).

The bottom panel shows the expected incidence of extreme heatwaves for each year until 2100. Each vertical line represents an intense heatwave (five consecutive days in excess of 35℃ or three days in excess of 40℃). Each heatwave amplifies the fire danger in that year.

The analysis in the video clarifies several important aspects of climate change:

the number and frequency of extreme heatwaves will increase as the climate continues to warm
for the next few decades at least, years with heatwaves may be followed by one or more years without one
the respite will only be brief because the inexorable global warming trend makes extreme fire conditions more and more inevitable.

Looking ahead

When it comes to monster bushfire seasons, the link to climate change is undeniable. This season’s inferno is a sign of worse to come – even if it doesn’t happen every year.

Educating the public on climate science, and the tactics used by disinformers, increases the chance that “alternative facts” do not gain traction.

Hopefully, this will banish disinformation to the background of public debate, paving the way for meaningful policy solutions.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, Chair of Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol and John Hunter, University Associate, Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Why is populism popular? A psychologist explains

Posted on June 23, 2016April 13, 2023 by janet.crompton

This was once a referendum about whether or not the UK should remain in the EU. But not anymore. The referendum has effectively turned into a plebiscite about diversity and tolerance vs divisiveness and hatred: the Leave campaign in particular has largely ditched its long-demolished economic arguments and remoulded itself into an appeal to increasingly shrill and ugly emotion.

How could it have come to that? How could a campaign find so much popular traction by explicitly disavowing rational and informed deliberation?

Some commentators have responded to those questions with bewilderment and resignation, as if right-wing populism and hatred are unavoidable socio-political events, much like volcanic eruptions or earthquakes.

Far from it. Populism and hatred do not erupt, they are stoked. The “Tea Party” in the US was not a spontaneous eruption of “grassroots” opposition to Barack Obama but the result of long-standing efforts by libertarian “think tanks” and political operatives.

Likewise, the present demagoguery in the UK against the EU arises at least in part from media ignorance or hostility towards migrants, and a similar well-funded but nebulous network of organisations (often linked to human-caused climate change denial).

Populism is not an inevitable natural disaster but the result of political choices made by identifiable individuals who ultimately can be held accountable for those choices.

Why populism is popular

The public’s willingness to endorse right-wing populism can be explained and predicted by a range of different variables.

Has there been a financial crisis recently, for example? One particularly detailed recent analysis by a team of German economists shows that over a period of nearly 150 years, every financial crisis was followed by a ten-year surge in support for far-right populist parties. It is now eight years since the height of the last global financial crisis.

As the market goes bust, right-wing populism booms. Frank May / EPA

On average, far-right votes increased by 30% after a financial crisis, but not after “normal” recessions (that is, economic contractions that were not accompanied by a full-blown crisis). This may appear paradoxical, but it fits with other research which has shown that support for populism is not directly predicted by a person’s economic position nor life satisfaction. Instead, what matters is how people interpret their economic position: feelings of relative personal deprivation and a general view of society being in decline were found to be the major predictors of populism.

It’s not the economy, stupid, it’s how people feel.

There is now reasonably consistent evidence that populism thrives on people’s feeling of a lack of political power, a belief that the world is unfair and that they do not get what they deserve – and that the world is changing too quickly for them to retain control. Whenever people attribute the origins of their perceived vulnerability to factors outside themselves, populism is not far away.

So what about immigration?

The actual numbers of immigrants are not the sole determinant of people’s attitudes. What matters perhaps even more is how they are being interpreted. For example, in 1978, when net migration to the UK was around zero, up to 70% of the British public felt that they were in danger of “being swamped” by other cultures. Conversely, in the early 2010s, the white Britons who were least concerned about immigration were those who lived in highly diverse areas in “Cosmopolitan London”.

It’s not just immigration, it’s how people feel about their new neighbours.

London hosts lots of migrants – and few residents seem to mind. robertsharp, CC BY

Where do we go from here?

On the supply side, politicians and journalists alike must be held accountable for their choices and their words through the media, the rule of law and, ultimately, elections. London voters recently sent a clear signal about their decency when they rejected the fear-mongering of one candidate by resoundingly electing his Muslim opponent.

On the demand side, several recommendations to counter populism have been put forward, although the debate on this is still in its early stages. Two insights are promising.

First, the need to offer a vision for a better society with which people can identify. The Remain campaign has thus far focused on highlighting the risks of an EU exit. Those risks loom large but highlighting them, by itself, does not create a better world.

It would be advisable instead to focus on the many ways in which the EU has contributed to such a better world – how many UK voters remember that the EU won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 for transforming Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace? How many realise that the EU is one of the few institutions able to stand up to multinational tax avoidance which appears poised to extract billions from Apple? The list goes on and deserves to be heard.

Second, we know with some degree of confidence that fear of the “other”, and hostility towards immigrants, can be overcome by interaction if certain key conditions are met. This work, mainly at the local level, is essential to heal the wounds of this divisive debate, whatever the outcome on June 23.

Lest one be pessimistic about the possibility of success, we need to remind ourselves how quickly and thoroughly we have tackled homophobia in Western societies: whereas gay people were feared, marginalised and excluded not so long ago, the UK parliament is now the “queerest legislature in the world” and has 32 MPs who call themselves gay, lesbian or bisexual.

And in Germany yesterday, 40,000 citizens took to the streets to hold hands in a gesture against racism. There is a Europe out there that should inspire rather than frighten.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member, Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, Chair of Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Read other blogs in the Brexit series:

– Brexit, trust and the future of global environmental governance

– The EU, Brexit and nature conservation law

– Brexit: A climactic decision?

– Why is populism popular? A psychologist explains

– Sharing routine statistics must continue post-Brexit when tackling health and climate change

We just had the hottest year on record – where does that leave climate denial?

Posted on January 25, 2016April 12, 2023 by janet.crompton

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

At a news conference announcing that 2015 broke all previous heat records by a wide margin, one journalist started a question with “If this trend continues…” The response by the Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Gavin Schmidt, summed up the physics of climate change succinctly: “It’s not a question of if…”

Even if global emissions begin to decline, as now appears possible after the agreement signed in Paris last December, there is no reasonable scientific doubt that the upward trends in global temperature, sea levels, and extreme weather events will continue for quite some time.

Politically and ideologically motivated denial will nonetheless continue for a little while longer, until it ceases to be politically opportune.

So how does one deny that climate change is upon us and that 2015 was by far the hottest year on record? What misinformation will be disseminated to confuse the public?

The real deal: 2015 was the hottest year on record.
Met Office, CC BY-NC-SA

Research has identified several telltale signs that differentiate denial from scepticism, whether it is denial of the link between smoking and lung cancer or between CO₂ emissions and climate change.
One technique of denial involves “cherry-picking”, best described as wilfully ignoring a mountain of inconvenient evidence in favour of a small molehill that serves a desired purpose. Cherry-picking is already in full swing in response to the record-breaking temperatures of 2015.

Political operatives such as James Taylor of the Heartland Institute – which once compared acceptance of the science of climate change to the Unabomber in an ill-fated billboard campaign – have already denied 2015 set a record by pointing to satellite data, which ostensibly shows no warming for the last umpteen years and which purportedly relegates 2015 to third place.

Satellite data (green) has much more uncertainty than thermometer records (red).
Kevin Cowtan / RSS / Met Office HadCRUT4, Author provided

So what about the satellite data?

If you cannot remember when you last checked the satellites to decide whether to go for a picnic, that’s probably because the satellites don’t actually measure temperature. Instead, they measure the microwave emissions of oxygen molecules in very broad bands of the atmosphere, for example ranging from the surface to about 18km above the earth. Those microwave soundings are converted into estimates of temperature using highly-complex models. Different teams of researchers use different models and they come up with fairly different answers, although they all agree that there has been ongoing warming since records began in 1979.

There is nothing wrong with using models, such as those required to interpret satellite data, for their intended purpose – namely to detect a trend in temperatures at high altitudes, far away from the surface where we grow our crops and make decisions about picnics.

But to use high-altitude data with its large uncertainties to determine whether 2015 is the hottest year on record is like trying to determine whether it’s safe to cross the road by firmly shutting your eyes and ears and then standing on your head to detect passing vehicles from their seismic vibrations. Yes, a big truck might be detectable that way, but most of us would rather just have a look and see whether it’s safe to cross the road.

And if you just look at the surface-based climate data with your own eyes, then you will see that NASA, the US NOAA, the UK Met Office, the Berkeley Earth group, the Japan Meteorological Agency, and many other researchers around the world, all independently arrived at one consistent and certain end result – namely that 2015 was by far the hottest year globally since records began more than a century ago.

Enter denial strategy two: that if every scientific agency around the world agrees on global warming, they must be engaging in a conspiracy! Far from being an incidental ornament, conspiratorial thinking is central to denial. When a scientific fact has been as thoroughly examined as global warming being caused by greenhouse gases or the link between HIV and AIDS, then no contrary position can claim much intellectual or scholarly respectability because it is so overwhelmingly at odds with the evidence.

That’s why politicians such as Republican Congressman Lamar Smith need to accuse the NOAA of having “altered the [climate] data to get the results they needed to advance this administration’s extreme climate change agenda”. If the evidence is against you, then it has to be manipulated by mysterious forces in pursuit of a nefarious agenda.

This is like saying that you shouldn’t cross the road by just looking because the several dozen optometrists who have independently attested to your 20/20 vision have manipulated the results because … World Government! Taxation! … and therefore you’d better stand on your head blindfolded with tinfoil.

So do the people who disseminate misinformation about climate actually believe what they are saying?

The question can be answered by considering the stock market. Investors decide on which stock to buy based on their best estimates of a company’s future potential. In other words, investors place an educated bet on a company’s future based on their constant reading of odds that are determined by myriad factors.

Investors put their money where their beliefs are.

Likewise, climate scientists put their money where their knowledge is: physicist Mark Boslough recently offered a $25,000 bet on future temperature increases. It has not been taken up. Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt similarly offered a bet to an Australian “skeptic” on climate change. It was not taken up.

People who deny climate science do not put their money where their mouth is. And when they very occasionally do, they lose.

This is not altogether surprising: in a recent peer-reviewed paper, with James Risbey as first author, we showed that wagering on global surface warming would have won a bet every year since 1970. We therefore suggested that denial may be “… largely posturing on the part of the contrarians. Bets against greenhouse warming are largely hopeless now and that is widely understood.”

So the cherry-picking and conspiracy-theorising will continue while it is politically opportune, but the people behind it won’t put their money where their mouth is. They probably know better.
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This blog was written by Cabot Institute member, Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, Chair of Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Global warming ‘pause’ was a myth all along, says new study

Posted on November 30, 2015April 12, 2023 by janet.crompton

The idea that global warming has “stopped” is a contrarian talking point that dates back to at least 2006. This framing was first created on blogs, then picked up by segments of the media – and it ultimately found entry into the scientific literature itself. There are now numerous peer-reviewed articles that address a presumed recent “pause” or “hiatus” in global warming, including the latest IPCC report.

So did global warming really pause, stop, or enter a hiatus? At least six academic studies have been published in 2015 that argue against the existence of a pause or hiatus, including three that were authored by me and colleagues James Risbey of CSIRO in Hobart, Tasmania, and Naomi Oreskes of Harvard University.

Our most recent paper has just been published in Nature’s open-access journal Scientific Reports and provides further evidence against the pause.

Pause not backed up by data

First, we analysed the research literature on global temperature variation over the recent period. This turns out to be crucial because research on the pause has addressed – and often conflated – several distinct questions: some asked whether there is a pause or hiatus in warming, others asked whether it slowed compared to the long-term trend and yet others have examined whether warming has lagged behind expectations derived from climate models.

These are all distinct questions and involve different data and different statistical hypotheses. Unnecessary confusion has resulted because they were frequently conflated under the blanket labels of pause or hiatus.

New NOAA data released earlier this year confirmed there had been no pause. The author’s latest study used NASA’s GISTEMP data and obtained the same conclusions.
NOAA

To reduce the confusion, we were exclusively concerned with the first question: is there, or has there recently been, a pause or hiatus in warming? It is this question – and only this question – that we answer with a clear and unambiguous “no”.

No one can agree when the pause started

We considered 40 recent peer-reviewed articles on the so-called pause and inferred what the authors considered to be its onset year. There was a spread of about a decade (1993-2003) between the various papers. Thus, rather than being consensually defined, the pause appears to be a diffuse phenomenon whose presumed onset is anywhere during a ten-year window.

Given that the average presumed duration of the pause in the same set of articles is only 13.5 years, this is of concern: it is difficult to see how scientists could be talking about the same phenomenon when they talked about short trends that commenced up to a decade apart.

This concern was amplified in our third point: the pauses in the literature are by no means consistently extreme or unusual, when compared to all possible trends. If we take the past three decades, during which temperatures increased by 0.6℃, we would have been in a pause between 30% and 40% of the time using the definition in the literature.

In other words, academic research on the pause is typically not talking about an actual pause but, at best, about a fluctuation in warming rate that is towards the lower end of the various temperature trends over recent decades.

How the pause became a meme

If there has been no pause, why then did the recent period attract so much research attention?
One reason is a matter of semantics. Many academic studies addressed not the absence of warming but a presumed discrepancy between climate models and observations. Those articles were scientifically valuable (we even wrote one ourselves), but we do not believe that those articles should have been framed in the language of a pause: the relationship between models (what was expected to happen) and observations (what actually happened) is a completely different issue from the question about whether or not global warming has paused.

A second reason is that the incessant challenge of climate science by highly vocal contrarians and Merchants of Doubt may have amplified scientists’ natural tendency to be reticent over reporting the most dramatic risks they are concerned about.

We explored the possible underlying mechanisms for this in an article earlier this year, which suggested climate denial had seeped into the scientific community. Scientists have unwittingly been influenced by a linguistic frame that originated outside the scientific community and by accepting the word pause they have subtly reframed their own research.

Research directed towards the pause has clearly yielded interesting insights into medium-term climate variability. My colleagues and I do not fault that research at all. Except that the research was not about a (non-existent) pause – it was about a routine fluctuation in warming rate. With 2015 being virtually certain to be another hottest year on record, this routine fluctuation has likely already come to an end.

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This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

This blog is by Cabot Institute member Prof Stephan Lewandowsky, University of Bristol.

Prof Steve Lewandowsky

Read the official press release.

The great climate communication clash

Posted on June 11, 2015April 13, 2023 by janet.crompton

Cultural cognition vs. consensus messaging:

Challenges of climate communication in a polarized world

If anyone attending the Cabot Institute debate between science communication researchers Dan Kahan and Stephan Lewandowsky last Wednesday was hoping for a relaxing, passive glance into the word of climate communication then they were in for a shock.Attending the event, which was moderated by Climate Outreach director Dr Adam Corner, was like being thrown into a politically-fuelled hurricane of communication and miscommunication. The mildly terrifying, albeit engaging, debating style of Dan Kahan meant there was never a dull moment as the two world-leading cognitive scientists locked horns over their opinions on how science should communicate climate change to the public.

The evening was kicked off by Kahan, whose invasive debating style saw him thundering into the audience to deliver his messages, a style which certainly drew attention if not support. The greatest focus of his message seemed to be in addressing the motivations of climate sceptics. Kahan claimed that the climate change consensus delivered by the scientific community is polarising opinion; those who are sceptics are not misinformed, their scepticism is fuelled by how they identify themselves. To put simply, the side of the climate change war they fight is supported more by culture than learning.

If this is the case, then increasing the budget powering the scientific consensus won’t help. Indeed, as Kahan expressed, the expensive climate change communication campaign in the U.S. hasn’t made any difference to the opinions of the public. His message? Stop trying to change who we are and do something proactive with the budget instead.

Next Lewandowsky stepped up to the floor. His argument is pro-consensus, defining the consensus as a few simple facts; that climate change is happening, is caused by humans and is problematic. His theory is that people respond to education and change their opinions based on the information available to them. This, he claims, is based on testing trials performed in Australia where participants found themselves more concerned about climate change after being exposed to the general consensus. In Lewandowsky’s words “consensus is the gateway to belief’.

Underpinning his argument is the relationship between the layman and the expert. Lewandosky claims that in times of uncertainty, people defer to the expert; “If 97% of engineers delivered a consensus that the bridge was unsafe to cross, would you cross the bridge?”. 97% of climate scientists believe global warming is an issue, so we submit to the opinion of the expert. The idea works in theory but, according to Kahan we aren’t submitting to the expert, in fact, public opinion is unchanged.

So where does the answer lie? Despite lengthy discussions on the climate consensus, no communication consensus was reached. After the discussion was opened up to the audience, the complexities of the task at hand became apparent: while the ‘yes’ versus ‘no’ controversy is clearly polarised, audience members suggested there are degrees of ‘yes’. Is climate change part man made and part natural? Should we be spending more money on adaption rather than mitigation as Kahan suggested? To what extent is politics contributing to the miscommunication; how can we disentangle the issue of left-wing environmentalism as an opponent of capitalism? The list goes on.

My opinion of the outcome was that the path forwards was a hybrid of the opinions present. Yes, we shouldn’t focus on ‘converting’ the minority of sceptics. The consensus should focus on revaluating the options and behaviour of the supporters. How can we make reducing climate change an economic option for free market capitalism, rather than just trying to close it down. Maybe, as Kahan suggests, instead of aggressive PR campaigns that polarise opinion, we should be working on strengthening the knowledge of the ‘believers’. Indeed making the outcome of the consensus more attractive to those who are in support of climate change, to me, seems like a more progressive step forward.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Keri McNamara, a PhD student in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol.

Are you a poor logician? Logically, you might never know

Posted on November 7, 2014April 14, 2023 by janet.crompton

By Stephan Lewandowsky, University of Bristol and Richard Pancost, University of Bristol

This is the second article in a series, How we make decisions, which explores our decision-making processes. How well do we consider all factors involved in a decision, and what helps and what holds us back?

It is an unfortunate paradox: if you’re bad at something, you probably also lack the skills to assess your own performance. And if you don’t know much about a topic, you’re unlikely to be aware of the scope of your own ignorance.

Type in any keyword into a scientific search engine and a staggering number of published articles appears. “Climate change” yields 238,000 hits; “tobacco lung cancer” returns 14,500; and even the largely unloved “Arion ater” has earned a respectable 245 publications.

Experts are keenly aware of the vastness of the knowledge landscape in their fields. Ask any scholar and they will likely acknowledge how little they know relative to what is knowable – a realisation that may date back to Confucius.

Here is the catch: to know how much more there is to know requires knowledge to begin with. If you start without knowledge, you also do not know what you are missing out on.

This paradox gives rise to a famous result in experimental psychology known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Named after Justin Kruger and David Dunning, it refers to a study they published in 1999. They showed that the more poorly people actually performed, the more they over-estimated their own performance.

People whose logical ability was in the bottom 12% (so that 88 out of 100 people performed better than they did) judged their own performance to be among the top third of the distribution. Conversely, the outstanding logicians who outperformed 86% of their peers judged themselves to be merely in the top quarter (roughly) of the distribution, thereby underestimating their performance.

John Cleese argues that this effect is responsible for not only Hollywood but the actions of some mainstream media.

Ignorance is associated with exaggerated confidence in one’s abilities, whereas experts are unduly tentative about their performance. This basic finding has been replicated numerous times in many different circumstances. There is very little doubt about its status as a fundamental aspect of human behaviour.

Confidence and credibility

Here is the next catch: in the eyes of others, what matters most to judge a person’s credibility is their confidence. Research into the credibility of expert witnesses has identified the expert’s projected confidence as the most important determinant in judged credibility. Nearly half of people’s judgements of credibility can be explained on the basis of how confident the expert appears — more than on the basis of any other variable.

Does this mean that the poorest-performing — and hence most over-confident — expert is believed more than the top performer whose displayed confidence may be a little more tentative? This rather discomforting possibility cannot be ruled out on the basis of existing data.

But even short of this extreme possibility, the data on confidence and expert credibility give rise to another concern. In contested arenas, such as climate change, the Dunning-Kruger effect and its flow-on consequences can distort public perceptions of the true scientific state of affairs.

To illustrate, there is an overwhelming scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions from our economic activities are altering the Earth’s climate. This consensus is expressed in more than 95% of the scientific literature and it is shared by a similar fraction — 97-98% – of publishing experts in the area. In the present context, it is relevant that research has found that the “relative climate expertise and scientific prominence” of the few dissenting researchers “are substantially below that of the convinced researchers”.

Guess who, then, would be expected to appear particularly confident when they are invited to expound their views on TV, owing to the media’s failure to recognise (false) balance as (actual) bias? Yes, it’s the contrarian blogger who is paired with a climate expert in “debating” climate science and who thinks that hot brick buildings contribute to global warming.

‘I’m not an expert, but…’

How should actual experts — those who publish in the peer-reviewed literature in their area of expertise — deal with the problems that arise from Dunning-Kruger, the media’s failure to recognise “balance” as bias, and the fact that the public uses projected confidence as a cue for credibility?

Speaker of the US House of Representatives John Boehner admitted earlier this year he wasn’t qualified to comment on climate change.

We suggest two steps based on research findings.
The first focuses on the fact of a pervasive scientific consensus on climate change. As one of us has shown, the public’s perception of that consensus is pivotal in determining their acceptance of the scientific facts.

When people recognise that scientists agree on the climate problem, they too accept the existence of the problem. It is for this reason that Ed Maibach and colleagues, from the Centre for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, have recently called on climate scientists to set the record straight and inform the public that there is a scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is happening.

One might object that “setting the record straight” constitutes advocacy. We do not agree; sharing knowledge is not advocacy and, by extension, neither is sharing the strong consensus behind that knowledge. In the case of climate change, it simply informs the public of a fact that is widely misrepresented in the media.

The public has a right to know that there is a scientific consensus on climate change. How the public uses that knowledge is up to them. The line to advocacy would be crossed only if scientists articulated specific policy recommendations on the basis of that consensus.

The second step to introducing accurate scientific knowledge into public debates and decision-making pertains precisely to the boundary between scientific advice and advocacy. This is a nuanced issue, but some empirical evidence in a natural-resource management context suggests that the public wants scientists to do more than just analyse data and leave policy decisions to others.

Instead, the public wants scientists to work closely with managers and others to integrate scientific results into management decisions. This opinion appears to be equally shared by all stakeholders, from scientists to managers and interest groups.

Advocacy or understanding?

In a recent article, we wrote that “the only unequivocal tool for minimising climate change uncertainty is to decrease our greenhouse gas emissions”. Does this constitute advocacy, as portrayed by some commenters?

It is not. Our statement is analogous to arguing that “the only unequivocal tool for minimising your risk of lung cancer is to quit smoking”. Both statements are true. Both identify a link between a scientific consensus and a personal or political action.

Neither statement, however, advocates any specific response. After all, a smoker may gladly accept the risk of lung cancer if the enjoyment of tobacco outweighs the spectre of premature death — but the smoker must make an informed decision based on the scientific consensus on tobacco.

Likewise, the global public may decide to continue with business as usual, gladly accepting the risk to their children and grandchildren – but they should do so in full knowledge of the risks that arise from the existing scientific consensus on climate change.

Some scientists do advocate for specific policies, especially if their careers have evolved beyond simply conducting science and if they have taken new or additional roles in policy or leadership.
Most of us, however, carefully limit our statements to scientific evidence. In those cases, it is vital that we challenge spurious accusations of advocacy, because such claims serve to marginalise the voices of experts.

Portraying the simple sharing of scientific knowledge with the public as an act of advocacy has the pernicious effect of silencing scientists or removing their expert opinion from public debate. The consequence is that scientific evidence is lost to the public and is lost to the democratic process.
But in one specific way we are advocates. We advocate that our leaders recognise and understand the evidence.

We believe that sober policy decisions on climate change cannot be made when politicians claim that they are not scientists while also erroneously claiming that there is no scientific consensus.
We advocate that our leaders are morally obligated to make and justify their decisions in light of the best available scientific, social and economic understanding.

Click on the links below for other articles in the series, How we make decisions:

Stephan Lewandowsky receives funding from the Royal Society, from the World University Network (WUN), and from the ‘Great Western 4’ (GW4) consortium of English universities.
Richard Pancost receives funding from RCUK, the EU and the Leverhulme Trust.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Tag: Steve Lewandowsky