| 英文摘要: | Here we demonstrate that speakers at the press conference for the publication of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (Working Group 1; ref. 1) attempted to make the documented level of certainty of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) more meaningful to the public. Speakers attempted to communicate this through reference to short-term temperature increases. However, when journalists enquired about the similarly short ‘pause’2 in global temperature increase, the speakers dismissed the relevance of such timescales, thus becoming incoherent as to ‘what counts’ as scientific evidence for AGW. We call this the ‘IPCC’s certainty trap’. This incoherence led to confusion within the press conference and subsequent condemnation in the media3. The speakers were well intentioned in their attempts to communicate the public implications of the report, but these attempts threatened to erode their scientific credibility. In this instance, the certainty trap was the result of the speakers’ failure to acknowledge the tensions between scientific and public meanings. Avoiding the certainty trap in the future will require a nuanced accommodation of uncertainties and a recognition that rightful demands for scientific credibility need to be balanced with public and political dialogue about the things we value and the actions we take to protect those things4, 5, 6. In this paper, we assess the relationship between two fundamentals of science communication: uncertainty and meaning. Uncertainties are everyday matters of concern for scientists. Most can be called ‘local’ uncertainties7 as they reflect an uncertainty manifest within a single phenomenon. Climate science is replete with such local uncertainties8. Here, we focus on temporally local uncertainties that were the subject of a number of questions and answers in the press conference under consideration. Examples of temporally local uncertainties in climate science include the variable effects of volcanoes, solar cycles, climate sensitivity, El Niño, and the impact of the financial crisis on emissions. Some of these phenomena are both spatially huge and temporally local in the sense that they are expected to have short-term effects and require resolution within broader theoretical frameworks7, 8. Yet these problematic, temporally local, uncertainties are inevitably encountered by climate scientists seeking to produce broader certainties; namely the concrete, theoretical explanation and detection of AGW. A second crucial issue, for those concerned with science communication, is that of meaning. Meaning arises from personal experiences embedded in the local contexts within which people create and value their lives4, 9. Acknowledging the importance of local contexts highlights how different spheres of meaning become relevant in making science public. For example, a comparison of professional and popular science writing10 has shown that the characteristics of scientific claims shift as knowledge is translated from scholarly journals into more widely read publications. Journal articles largely restrict themselves to answering questions of scientific meaning: ‘what happened?’ and ‘what was the reason for the event?’ Wider audiences, however, are concerned with questions of public meaning related to their own local contexts: ‘what value should be placed on the event?’ and ‘what action should now be taken?’ Negotiating the boundary between ‘scientific meaning’ and ‘public meaning’ is a particular concern for the IPCC for two reasons. First, the IPCC is committed both to providing policy-neutral advice11 and facilitating greater understanding of its work amongst non-specialist audiences12, and there are calls for such objectives to be achieved not only through an increased supply of scientific knowledge but also through such knowledge being made more publicly meaningful4, 5. Second, representatives of the IPCC are requested to give press conferences, events that sit at the boundary between science and the media13 wherein officials can make meaning beyond the text and demonstrate authority and still exert a degree of control14. Here we examine this boundary, building on previous literature on the communication of climate science uncertainties15, 16 with a qualitative analysis of an original and important data source: the press conference transcript. We argue here that a relationship exists between certainty and meaning in climate science, that a framework for understanding this relationship can be formed, and that this framework can be explored using the IPCC as a test case. We do not claim that understanding meaning, certainty, or the relationship between them is straightforward. Following others5, 17, 18 we do, however, believe that it is reasonable to treat the two concepts as independent of one another, although further empirical research into the question will be valuable. Investigating the relationship between certainty and meaning is also useful in helping to understand interactions during the press conference under consideration and the activities of the IPCC more broadly. The degree of certainty regarding AGW has increased since the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 (refs 1, 19). Indeed, various calls for action on AGW have been premised on this increasing certainty20. Simultaneously, however, there is a widely held belief, following criticisms4, that increased certainty has yet to manifest into public meanings powerful enough to prompt significant personal, political and policy responses (see Fig. 1). That is not to say that no public meanings about climate change have developed during the lifetime of the IPCC (refs 21, 22), rather that the certainty of climate change knowledge continues to have greater scientific than public meaning.
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