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Clarity of meaning in IPCC press conference

Nature Climate Change volume 5, pages 961–962 (2015)Cite this article

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To the Editor —

In a recent Letter1, Hollin and Pearce suggest that the panel at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report Working Group 1 (ref. 2) press conference fell into a “certainty trap” by presenting an “incoherent” message. We argue that this conclusion is incorrect because the authors misunderstand key points of the panel's message and misrepresent some of the press conference statements.

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Figure 1: The combined land and ocean surface temperature anomaly from 1850–2012, averaged annually (top) and decadally (bottom).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental Science and Policy, George Mason University, Fairfax, 22030, Virginia, USA

    Peter Jacobs

  2. Climate Nexus, 3150 18th Street, Suite 544, PMB 309, San Francisco, 94110, California, USA

    Hunter Cutting

  3. School of Experimental Psychology and Cabot Institute, University of Bristol, 12A Priory Road, Bristol, BS8 1TU, UK

    Stephan Lewandowsky

  4. Mount Beauty, Victoria, 3699, Australia

    Miriam O'Brien

  5. Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, Royal Observatory, Blackford Hill, Edinburgh, EH9 3HJ, UK

    Ken Rice

  6. Amsterdam University College AUC, PO Box 94160, Amsterdam, 1090 GD, The Netherlands

    Bart Verheggen

Authors
  1. Peter Jacobs
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  2. Hunter Cutting
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  3. Stephan Lewandowsky
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  4. Miriam O'Brien
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  5. Ken Rice
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  6. Bart Verheggen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ken Rice.

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Jacobs, P., Cutting, H., Lewandowsky, S. et al. Clarity of meaning in IPCC press conference. Nature Clim Change 5, 961–962 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2845

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