People are more likely to believe that humans cause global warming if they are told that 97% of publishing climate scientists agree that it does, a new study has found. Despite overwhelming evidence showing that human activity is causing the planet to overheat, public concern is on the wane, said the study, titled The pivotal role of perceived scientiﬁc consensus in acceptance of science and published in the journal Nature Climate Change on Monday. “One reason for this decline is the ‘manufacture of doubt’ by political and vested interests, which often challenge the existence of the scientiﬁc consensus. The role of perceived consensus in shaping public opinion is therefore of considerable interest,” the study’s authors said. Overall, participants in the study greatly underestimated the level of scientific agreement on the issue, the study said.
CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause. My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth.
This paper addresses the representation of scientific uncertainty about global warming and climate change in the U.S. popular press. An examination of popular press articles about global warming from 1986 to 1995 reveals that scientific uncertainty was a salient theme. The paper describes several forms of uncertainty construction and means through which it was managed.
More than half of biomedical findings cannot be reproduced – we urgently need a way to ensure that discoveries are properly checked REPRODUCIBILITY is the cornerstone of science. What we hold as definitive scientific fact has been tested over and over again. Even when a fact has been tested in this way, it may still be superseded by new knowledge. Newtonian mechanics became a special case of Einstein's general relativity; molecular biology's mantra "one gene, one protein" became a special case of DNA transcription and translation.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-75978" title="3168287411_8c071e7195_z" src="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2011/09/3168287411_8c071e7195_z.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="428" /> We live in a world filled with difficult decisions. In fact, we’ve managed to turn even trivial choices – say, picking a toothpaste – into a tortured mental task, as the typical supermarket has more than 200 different dental cleaning options.
Are complex decisions better left to the unconscious? Further failed replications of the deliberation-without-attention effectJudgment and Decision Making , vol. 4, no. 6, October 2009, pp. 509-517 The deliberation-without-attention effect occurs when better decisions are made when people experience a period of distraction before a decision than when they make decisions immediately or when they spend time reflecting on the alternatives. This effect has been explained (e.g., Dijksterhuis, 2004) by the claim that people engage in unconscious deliberation when distracted and that unconscious thought is better suited for complex decisions than conscious thought. Experiments 1, 2A, and 2B in this study included a dominant alternative and failed to find evidence for this effect. Experiment 3 removed the dominant alternative and manipulated mode of thought within-subjects to eliminate alternative explanations for the failed replication.
We ended up studying something that we call "heuristics and biases". Those were shortcuts, and each shortcut was identified by the biases with which it came. The biases had two functions in that story. They were interesting in themselves, but they were also the primary evidence for the existence of the heuristics. If you want to characterize how something is done, then one of the most powerful ways of characterizing the way the mind does anything is by looking at the errors that the mind produces while it's doing it because the errors tell you what it is doing.
David Spiegelhalter's Personal Home Page Research Since October 2007 I have been Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk.
Tomorrow's weather will be unsettled with bright intervals and showers interspersed with more prolonged periods of rain. The weekend will continue unsettled with a 65% chance of showers and further rain on Saturday. We listen uncomplaining to this drivel from one day to the next. We are British.
Simon Jenkins' tirade against weather forecasters ( The Met Office thinks August will be wet. Buy futures in sun cream now , 31 July) shows a misunderstanding of what science can deliver. Jenkins contrasts "scientists who lecture ministers on the exactitude of their calling" with "public predictions so smothered in caveats and qualifiers as to be drained of significance". He seems to expect precise predictions of the future despite deriding such claims in the light of "the probabilistic nature of life".
THE British players in the unfolding swine-flu drama are providing a riveting case study of different responses to risk. While the government tries to look cool, controlled and consistent, tabloid newspapers hunt sensation and citizens exhibit every emotion from nervous anxiety to stoical acceptance. In the meantime, mainland Europe revels in portraying the UK as a land gripped by pestilence. Perhaps we all need a crash course in considering the unintended consequences of overreacting to events.