Editors: Stephan Lewandowsky, Timothy Ballard and Richard D. Pancost
For decades, the scientific community has called for actions to be taken to mitigate the adverse consequences of climate change. To date, those calls have found little substantial traction, and politicians and the general public are currently engaged in a debate about the causes and effects of climate change that bears little resemblance to the scientific reality. Uncertainty plays a pivotal role in public debate, and arguments against mitigation are frequently couched in terms of uncertainty. These rhetorical uses of uncertainty contrast sharply with the scientific finding that greater uncertainty about the extent of warming is nearly inevitably associated with an increased future risk. Likewise, greater uncertainty about the extent of warming translates into greater risk of mitigation failure; that is, a greater risk that a given temperature threshold will be exceeded even if mitigation were to commence immediately. This volume seeks to find ways to bridge this disparity between scientists and the general public in the conceptualization of uncertainty. By combining contributions from climate science, cognitive science, psychology, and allied disciplines in the social sciences and physical sciences, this volume shows that uncertainty often embodies considerable knowledge and hence can provide an impetus, rather than a hindrance, for political action.
Cover image: Courtesy of Anne H. Young
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About the Guest Editors
Stephan Lewandowsky’s research examines people's memory, decision making, and knowledge structures, with a particular emphasis on how people update information in memory. He currently focuses on the potential conflict between human cognition and the physics of the global climate, which has led him into doing research in climate science and climate modeling as well as in cognition. In addition to publishing in the peer-reviewed literature, he has contributed numerous opinion pieces to the global media on issues such as climate change "skepticism" and misinformation. He is currently the Digital Content Editor for the Psychonomic Society and he blogs routinely on cognitive research at www.psychonomic.org.
Timothy Ballard is a research fellow at the University of Queensland. His research combines elements of cognitive psychology, organizational behavior, and behavioral economics. He aims to understand how people make decisions involving uncertainty. Timothy is particularly interested in understanding decisions that involve trade-offs between competing objectives, and those with consequences that are not immediately apparent. A major focus of Timothy's work is the effect of uncertainty on decisions about climate change. His research aims to understand the psychological mechanisms that underlie people's risk perceptions, with the goal of enhancing climate change communication.
Richard Pancost is a Professor of Biogeochemistry at the University of Bristol and conducts research on how organisms mediate our planet’s chemical environment and how their molecular signatures can be used to reconstruct Earth’s past climate. He uses these findings to constrain uncertainty in the Earth system but also to identify the unknown unknowns – the deep uncertainty in predicting biotic responses to rapid global warming and the sustainability of ecosystems on which we depend. In 2013, he became Director of the Cabot Institute which engages interdisciplinary approaches to address the major environmental and sustainability challenges of the 21st century, with a particular focus on risk and resiliency in an uncertain world.
