Words of caution on communication.
A recent entry on The Huffington Post about the fate of the world's coral reefs (http://go.nature.com/fuqhFU) has stirred up a discussion in the blogosphere on the communication of uncertainty. The post reports on a new study by the World Resources Institute entitled Reefs at Risk Revisited (http://go.nature.com/DWxbtt), which finds that all of the world's coral reefs could be gone by 2050, in which case 500 million people's livelihoods worldwide would be threatened.
Over on The Benshi (http://go.nature.com/pey6vi), Randy Olson bemoans the reporting of such results with all of their qualifiers, caveats and uncertainties. Olson declares — à la late legal-eagle Johnny Cochran — that “if uncertainty is conveyed, credibility will fade.” He gives a stern warning to science communicators about the perils of entering the minefield of conveying uncertainty — a task that can, fears Olson, easily add to the junk pile of alarmism. Keith Kloor picks up on this over on Collide-a-Scape (http://go.nature.com/Tg6RxI), and points to the futility of spouting off without offering any solutions. How exactly is it possible to communicate a clear and concise message with just enough wiggle room to remain true to the various uncertainties of climate change, asks Kloor?
This all follows from a debate in the blogosphere on the importance of including qualifiers, spurred by a paper published in Nature on the link between human-induced climate change and a recent increase in extreme precipitation in the Northern Hemisphere. Writing on The New York Times Dot Earth blog (http://go.nature.com/u7FIK4), Andy Revkin says that in trying to convey the message clearly, both scientists and journals behaved as though the work had a “handle with care” sign attached. Unlike Olson, Revkin reckons that the more definite a statement, the less credible it's likely to be. Welcome to the minefield!
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Heffernan, O. On uncertainty. Nature Clim Change 1, 21 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1079
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1079
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On uncertainty
Nature Climate Change (2011)