From the University of Missouri:
Public Acceptance of Climate Change Affected by Word Usage, Says MU Anthropologist
Better science communication could lead to a more informed American public.
Public acceptance of climate change’s reality may have been influenced by the rate at which words moved from scientific journals into the mainstream, according to anthropologist Michael O’Brien, dean of the College of Arts and Science at the University of Missouri. A recent study of word usage in popular literature by O’Brien and his colleagues documented how the usage of certain words related to climate change has risen and fallen over the past two centuries. Understanding how word usage affects public acceptance of science could lead to better science communication and a more informed public.
“Scientists can learn from this study that the general public shouldn’t be expected to understand technical terms or be convinced by journal papers written in technical jargon,” O’Brien said. “Journalists must explain scientific terms in ways people can understand and thereby ease the movement of those terms into general speech. That can be a slow process. Several words related to climate change diffused into the popular vocabulary over a 30-50 year timeline.”
O’Brien’s study found that, by 2008, several important terms in the discussion of climate change had entered popular literature from technical obscurity in the early 1900s. These terms included:
- Biodiversity – the degree of variation in life forms within a given area
- Holocene – the current era of the Earth’s history, which started at the end of the last ice age
- Paleoclimate –the prehistoric climate, often deduced from ice cores, tree rings and pollen trapped in sediments
- Phenology – the study of how climate and other environmental factors influence the timing of events in organisms’ life cycles
Not every term was adopted at the same rate or achieved the same degree of popularity. Biodiversity, for example, came into popular use quickly in only a few years in the late 80s and early 90s. Other terms, like Holocene or phenology, have taken decades and are still relatively uncommon.
“The adoption of words into the popular vocabulary is like the evolution of species,” O’Brien said. “A complex process governs why certain terms are successful and adopted into everyday speech, while others fail. For example, the term ‘meme’ has entered the vernacular, as opposed to the term ‘culturgen,’ although both refer to a discrete unit of culture, such as a saying transferred from person to person.”
To observe the movement of words into popular literature, O’Brien and his colleagues searched the database of 7 million books created by Google. They used the “Ngram” feature of the database to track the number of appearances of climate change keywords in literature since 1800. The usage rate of those climate change terms was compared to the usage of “the,” which is the most common word in the English language. Statistical analysis of usage rates was calculated in part by co-author William Brock, a new member of MU’s Department of Economics and member of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study, “Word Diffusion and Climate Science” was published in the journal PLOS ONE and can be viewed here (in full): http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0047966. Co-authors also included R. Alexander Bentley of the University of Bristol Phillip Garnett of Durham University.
-30-
EDITOR’S NOTE: A portion of O’Brien’s experiment can be repeated using any computer with internet access.
- 1. Go to http://books.google.com/ngrams
- 2. Enter terms such as “climate change,” “global warming,” or “anthropogenic” and note how they have changed in usage over the past century.
Story Contact(s):
Timothy Wall, walltj@missouri.edu
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Democrat?
🙂
Polly want a cracker!
For some unexpected results, compare: wood, coal, nuclear, gas, renewable, solar, biomass
He should have added sustainable to that list.
Look what happened at Rio+20 sustainable meant different things to clowns in the UN Circus, it was actually meant to of course to obfuscate the real objectives. To some sustainable meant taking and replacing sensibly to others a de-industrialization and a return to Agrarian society
If they want to continue using the “den…” word, I suggest we fight back using the words CAGW “sympathiser.” It also has connotations.
You keep using that word “informed”. I do not think it means what you think it means.
“Climate change” represents a rejection of rational thought. That is not exaggerating. It’s intended to imply that the effect is happening even though the posited mechanism– global warming– is not. It is magical thinking.
All the Government has to do is tell the truth that if we don’t’ t start using alternative energy sources, convert to more efficient vehicles, home and businesses heat/ cooling devices the economy will come to a stand still and collapse when oil shortages start in 10 years time. They also should be straight with the public that the Global Warming Plot is the governments way to tax the hard working Americans more to pay for their BS out of control spending. F mars and all the $$$ they are spending on projects like that. We have poor families on earth that need more help the trying to figure out if life was ever on mars. Anywhere in the universe where water is present or was present life is there or was.
“Understanding how word usage affects public acceptance of science could lead to better science communication and a more informed public.”
That’s a double edged sword.
It can also lead to ever more effective use of emotive terminology by propagandists.
Or AndyG55 if you really wanted to get ugly you could say “collaborator.”
One more thing if everyone changed over to an electric car the us highway system would collapse because they would not get any tax money from fuel sales to pay for repairs and maintain the highways and roads. They will tax people on electric cars by miles driven in the future in America.
I can live with either..
Use “collaborator” for the Karoly, Lewindowsky types etc
And use “sympathisers” for the following lemmings.
“Understanding how word usage affects public acceptance of science could lead to better science communication and a more informed public.”
Global Warming SCAM speak for: How to better hoodwink the general public into accepting continued funding of more worthless GW studies, projects, and modeling.
Useful Idiot is probably the most appropriate term for most Warmists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
MARKETING: Selling Horse Droppings as an exciting new health food!!!
What they are talking about is how to better “market” their dogma.
I think “Climate Hoax” is totally adequate at getting the point across to the public.
How can we be called a denier when this is the situation.
http://s7.postimage.org/wft08cre3/Reckoning_Day_arriving_shortly_IPPC_Obs_Dec12.png
Its the other way around.
How about Climate Hooey?
I’m waiting for that article headlined: “Why can we not communicate with Deniers?”
That would nicely sum up the self-absorption and lack of self-awareness of the ‘sympathisers’.
The problem is not the words used to discuss the extreme AGW paradigm, the problem is observations and analysis in peer reviewed journals does not support the extreme AGW paradigm. The planet will warm less than 1C from a doubling of atmospheric CO2. There is no extreme AGW crisis to address.
The words uses to discuss facts does not change the facts (i.e. There is truth and there is analysis and research to find the truth.). Words can confuse the discussion and delay the realization of what is or is not correct. Words do not change what is or is not truth.
The fact that observations show global warming has stalled for 16 years and the ocean is now cooling provides support for the assertion that there is no extreme AGW crisis to address. The extreme AGW paradigm pushers are only now starting to acknowledge that the planet has not warmed in 16 years.
The second unaddressed issue, is what to do if there was an extreme AGW problem, which there is not.
Even if there was an extreme AGW problem the solution would not be to implement a scam. The “green” energy schemes that have been proposed and that are being funded are scams. A scam is economically and engineering not viable.
The opportunity for executing the scam exists as the extreme warming paradigm pushers have removed logic and responsibility from the discussion and there are always unscrupulous, honor-less people how will take advantage of a weakness.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975,00.html
The Clean Energy Scam
But the basic problem with most biofuels is amazingly simple, given that researchers have ignored it until now: using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon…. …Backed by billions in investment capital, this alarming phenomenon is replicating itself around the world. Indonesia has bulldozed and burned so much wilderness to grow palm oil trees for biodiesel that its ranking among the world’s top carbon emitters has surged from 21st to third according to a report by Wetlands International. Malaysia is converting forests into palm oil farms so rapidly that it’s running out of uncultivated land. But most of the damage created by biofuels will be less direct and less obvious. In Brazil, for instance, only a tiny portion of the Amazon is being torn down to grow the sugarcane that fuels most Brazilian cars. More deforestation results from a chain reaction so vast it’s subtle: U.S. farmers are selling one-fifth of their corn to ethanol production, so U.S. soybean farmers are switching to corn, so Brazilian soybean farmers are expanding into cattle pastures, so Brazilian cattlemen are displaced to the Amazon. It’s the remorseless economics of commodities markets. “The price of soybeans goes up,” laments Sandro Menezes, a biologist with Conservation International in Brazil, “and the forest comes down.”
Deforestation accounts for 20% of all current carbon emissions. So unless the world can eliminate emissions from all other sources–cars, power plants, factories, even flatulent cows–it needs to reduce deforestation or risk an environmental catastrophe. That means limiting the expansion of agriculture, a daunting task as the world’s population keeps expanding. And saving forests is probably an impossibility so long as vast expanses of cropland are used to grow modest amounts of fuel. The biofuels boom, in short, is one that could haunt the planet for generations–and it’s only getting started.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2008-04-14/biofuel-production-a-crime-against-humanity/2403402
Biofuel production ‘a crime against humanity’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7969102/The-Clean-Development-Mechanism-delivers-the-greatest-green-scam-of-all.html
It is now six months since I reported on what even environmentalists are calling “the biggest environmental scandal in history”. Indeed this is a scam so glaringly bizarre that even the UN and the EU have belatedly announced that they are thinking of taking steps to stop it. The essence of the scam is that a handful of Chinese and Indian firms are deliberately producing large quantities of an incredibly powerful “greenhouse gas” which we in the West – including UK taxpayers – then pay them billions of dollars to destroy.
The extreme AGW issue is a mania, the madness of crowds.
http://blogs-images.forbes.com/warrenmeyer/files/2012/02/15yr-temps.gif
http://www.forbes.com/sites/warrenmeyer/2012/02/09/understanding-the-global-warming-debate/
“The problem for global warming supporters is they actually need for past warming from CO2 to be higher than 0.7C. If the IPCC is correct that based on their high-feedback models we should expect to see 3C of warming per doubling of CO2, looking backwards this means we should already have seen about 1.5C of CO2-driven warming based on past CO2 increases. But no matter how uncertain our measurements, it’s clear we have seen nothing like this kind of temperature rise. Past warming has in fact been more consistent with low or even negative feedback assumptions.”
In science, theory and terms around theory become more precise as knowledge is gained. With regard to AGW, that is not the case. Is has become “climate change” then “climate disruption” actually losing precision in the process. That is how we know that the theory is not very good in the first place.
That said, I don’t think “Hoax” is correct.
The powers that be are all “awareness raisers” who used to be called “propogandists”.
From the EPA’s Klimate Kids guide for elementary school teachers glossary:
” Carbon dioxide: A colorless, odorless greenhouse gas. It is produced naturally when dead animals (think puppies or polar bears) or plants decay..”
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/kids/
Suzuki “the dirty blood is pumped to the lungs to have the carbon removed”
Climate writers style sheet: “Avoid using “positive feedback” rather “exagerates dangerous effects”.
I think “Fraud” certainly applies to much of it.
It doesn’t help that an anthropologist just simply assumes that the science is correct. Why do these loons think that finding other ways to communicate would convince the general public. The majority of the public a dozen years ago used to accept global warming before all this recent agonizing over proper communications. They have fallen away in droves. The clear problem to even a laymen anthropologist is: A) the behaviour and dirty tricks that came to light with climategate and more recent revelations of dishonesty and fiddling. B) the changing of goal posts and the spouting of nonsense about cold and snow is due to global warming C) the failure of all the forecasts of doom that were already to be upon us and D) the weather itself – 16 years of no statistically significant warming; no acceleration in sea level rise, a bitter cold Canada, Europe and Asia at present, etc.
I wonder what the data would show for “nuts”?