expert credibility in climate change pdf

National Academies, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedĭata Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.įunding: This research was funded by the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF), as well as by Lawrence Linden, Robert Litterman and Henry Paulson. Received: OctoAccepted: JanuPublished: March 26, 2015Ĭopyright: © 2015 Myers et al. PLoS ONE 10(3):Īcademic Editor: Kimmo Eriksson, Mälardalen University, SWEDEN Implications for theory and practice are discussed.Ĭitation: Myers TA, Maibach E, Peters E, Leiserowitz A (2015) Simple Messages Help Set the Record Straight about Scientific Agreement on Human-Caused Climate Change: The Results of Two Experiments. The interaction of messages with political ideology was also tested, and demonstrated that messages were approximately equally effective among liberals and conservatives. Participants who estimated the level of agreement prior to being shown the corrective statement gave higher estimates of the scientific consensus than respondents who were not asked to estimate in advance, indicating that incorporating an “estimation and reveal” technique into public communication about scientific consensus may be effective. The second experiment tested the effect of eliciting respondents’ estimates of scientific agreement prior to presenting them with a statement about the level of scientific agreement. We found that numeric statements resulted in higher estimates of the scientific agreement. The first experiment tested hypotheses about providing numeric versus non-numeric assertions concerning the level of scientific agreement. In this paper, we report results from two experiments, conducted with national samples of American adults, that tested messages designed to convey the high level of agreement in the climate science community about human-caused climate change. Yet, among the American public, there is widespread misunderstanding of this scientific consensus. Human-caused climate change is happening nearly all climate scientists are convinced of this basic fact according to surveys of experts and reviews of the peer-reviewed literature.

Expert credibility in climate change pdf