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.
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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
bones;
world crude production has been stuck near 74 million barrels per day for 7 years, despite a tripling of prices. Don’t expect sympathy if you do something stupid like buy a real gas guzzler
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Yeah…sounds awful. Until you think through the price in more relevant terms. At $100 per barrel, crude oil is about 15 cents a cup. So 7 years ago maybe it was 5 cents a cup. The fact is that three times almost nothing is just a smidge more than almost nothing. Most of the cost of fuel is refining and taxes, the feedstock is so cheap that the cost of a cup of crude oil wouldn’t cover the tip on a cup of coffee.
In other words, calling us oldthinkers who unbellyfeel climscare “deniers” by the minitrue has failed to make us think we are committing a doubleplusungood thoughtcrime. The proles antithink it too, so the minitrue need to develop more plusgood newspeak the duckspeakers at the prolefeed can use.
Watermelons
Perhaps these anthropologists should add a linguist to their team. He or she could tell them that the meaning of text resides in and between sentences. If you hear or read text in a foreign language (which is English to me) it takes time to extract meaning although you know most words. Yesterday I’ve read the climate paragraph of Obama’s speech, translated in Dutch. It took me one second to realize that his sentences conveyed pathetic nonsense from the beginning to the end. This has to do with the second layer of language, determining whether or not you will buy a used car from your spokesman.
Climate Cabal. Cabalists conspire to concoct climate crises. They want to poison the language? Bring it on.
We are creatures of metaphor. Language is metaphor. We grasp at words that encapsulate big ideas that simplify our existence, but if they taste like…after you say them chances are they will not enjoy long tenure in the lexicon. “Meme” is a beautiful word. “Culturegen”? Well, the scientistists on this list are among the most literate on the planet…
Denier? It is used in the sense of “infidel”, or those who would sabotage salvation for economic gain. Whether they can make that leverage stick remains to be seen. The longer atmospheric temperature fails to rise, the more ocean enthalpy appears to have peaked, the more righteous denial will become.
Journalists..
There you go might as well bang your head against the wall.
A great example is the change of the meaning of “sea level” to mean “ocean volume” by the U. of Colo. a year or two ago, so that a declining rate of sea level rise due to sinking ocean basins could be restored to its previous trajectory.
An equally bad one is the misuse of “extreme event” by NOAA and/or the NCDC, as described in this recent thread: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/21/2012-ranks-54th-in-extreme-weather-events/
One definition of “extreme” is “far from average.” But the connotation of the word—i.e., its suggestive overtone—is “far from average in a bad way.” Strictly speaking, a mild winter and a mild summer may be called extreme, in that they are unusual. But in ordinary discourse, those terms would not be used—rather “mild” or “cozy” or comfortable.” NOAA or the NCDC, by counting mild seasons as “extreme” has given the public an exaggerated impression of how extreme 2012 was. Even if this wasn’t its intent when it set up its guidelines for computing extremeness, the unintended misleading consequence should now be apparent, and a separate table should be set up solely for “negative” extreme events. That should be the one the media is alerted to in official press releases.
Hmm, now that I check my (Cassell’s) dictionary, I find that the denotations are in line with the connotation I described above, making the NOAA/NCDC behavior more reprehensible. Here they are:
1. of the highest degree, most intense. 2. Beyond what is reasonable, immoderate. [That would rule out the characterization of “moderate” summer and winter temps as being “extreme”.] 3. Outermost, farthest. [Ditto.]
But the next definition allows NOAA/NCDC to play a deceptive word game—it’s technically defensible, but it’s deceptive to employ it: 4. At the utmost limit, at either end.
Pat Frank says:
January 22, 2013 at 7:13 pm
“. . . when we’ll almost certainly be . . . ”
. . . doing something with something we never thought about before. I won’t even try to guess. The Stone Age did not end for a lack of stone. The Bronze Age did not, etc. I was raised in a town with a factory specializing in the making of glass milk bottles. We haven’t run out of sand. I’m just supplying a little more ammunition for when you next respond to a troll.
bones, oil is a manipulated market. OPEC pumps at a rate that most benefits their income. Russia, Norway, and Mexico play along.
The graphic here shows that oil production has been increasing steadily, apart from OPEC’s managed slowdown in the 1980’s, and is not “stuck” anywhere.
When fracked oil enters the market, OPEC will lose its quasi monopoly and the pumping rate could become subject to open competition (one hopes).
Inexpensive natural gas will free up some oil, but what we’re really waiting for is an economical method to convert natural gas into methanol. Lots of folks are working on it. A break-through there combined with abundant low-cost natural gas could mean a very cheap energy future, as methanol replaces gasoline.
I started reading the full article, but didn’t get very far. When I saw that the first reference in the intro was to Naomi Oreske’s invention of the 97 percent figure, I figured I knew where this was all headed. So this 3-percenter decided to have a beer and go to bed.
Maybe I’ll read it in the morning.
Hmmm. Nice tool. Will have to play a bit more with that.
Interesting correlation between “bullshit” and “global warming”.
Now, did the global warming cause the bullshit? Or did the bullshit cause the global warming.
Hmmm. Another tough ‘un.
Chicken:egg. Egg:chicken. Hmmm.
A search for “sun spots” is really interesting on http://books.google.com/ngrams
RoHa says:
January 22, 2013 at 9:04 pm
“Climate crazies?”
Crazy is the New Normal.
Chris @NJ_Snow_Fan says:
January 22, 2013 at 5:31 pm
“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.”
That would have the added advantage of knowing exactly where which comrade is at any given time.
Some of the public may have difficulty understanding some scientific words and climatic terms, but they still have a good grasp of the meaning of such words as “fraud, deception, manipulation, payola, corruption, stupidity, hiding, criminality, irrelevance and wild speculation”. These are all terms that they will come across frequently as they investigate the theory of Global Warming, Climate Change, Climate disprution, and Extreme Weather. The same words will be useful for future developments of the Theory too.
Alarmists want to simplify an otherwise highly complex concoction of relationships beginning with the Sun, the orbits of the planets, all the way down to cosmic rays, water vapour, ocean currents and geochemistry and turn it into something the uneducated public can understand and follow like the Kardashians – Carbon.
They did the same with CFC’s. Turn any number of bad guys and natural forces into one single meme, even if untrue. CO2 is even too scientific and therefore difficult for most to comprehend, hence “carbon”.
Ask anyone 20 years ago what the word “carbon” means and you’d be met with a myriad of responses. The first thing that springs to anyone’s mind these days when “carbon” is mentioned, is a myriad number of things that all point to mankind being destructive. Hence, “climate change” and “carbon” are now interlinked to form one inescapable meaning.
Any reasonable person knows that weather kills, not climate.
At $140 million for the cost of the Presidential inauguration expenses, that would be $20 for each of the 7 million TV viewers.
2013 TV Inauguration ratings down substantially from 2009
http://www.dailypaul.com/271589/2013-tv-inauguration-ratings-down-substantially-from-2009
The Democrats will now Own the Man-Made Global Warming/Climate Change Scam.
It all started with Agenda 21 doublespeak “Sustainable Development”, “Smart Growth”, etc. First you dumb down the population through public school indoctrination and teach them to be prolific in the usage of ad hominem attacks against anyone who challenges their imbecilic mind set.
Agenda 21 For Dummies
Hi Climate Ace
You assert that “they” (meaning ‘we’ i.e. climate skeptics or the majority of WUWT readers) …
Yet in the paragraph immediately before that you do a lot of “completely and utterly wrong … predicting” and probably quite a bit of “projecting”.
You do not even suggest that you are “guessing” about us. You prefix your assumptions with “Naturally”, so in your ‘construct’ our views are part of our ‘nature’. Consequently, like dumb animals, we are “compelled to doubt and diss”. We are, according to you, not motivated by anything so noble as ‘saving the planet’. It is fear that drives us: fear of ‘profound threats’ to our “wealth”; our “power”; our “religious views” and our “way of interpreting the world”.
I am neither wealthy or powerful, and I am an atheist. But (in a move that many regulars here may think is dumb) I do feel compelled to respond.
The essential aspect (I’ll avoid the word ‘nature’ for the avoidance of ambiguity) of a good scientist, or someone with a scientific outlook, is to question and doubt. The essence of people with “religious views” is certainty. Although, the more formal term is “faith”. Faith, to the “faithful” is a good thing. They can’t get enough of it.
The faithful put their faith in the “truth” of their religion. To them, this “truth” is unquestionable. It is undeniable. Anyone who does do so is a “denier” (the old term “blasphemer” has gone out of fashion).
To influence people’s perceptions about the future the high priests must control their beliefs about the past. A man ‘walked on water’/’split the moon’ because the Bible/Koran says so. The Medieval Warm Period didn’t happen because the shaft of the hockey stick says so. Thermogeddon is nigh because the blade of the hockey stick says so.
Every religion has its articles of faith. For Global Warming they are:
there is a greenhouse effect;
CO2 is a greenhouse gas;
atmospheric CO2 levels are rising;
man is mostly responsible;
the globe has warmed;
the warming is unprecedented;
man is mostly responsible;
the warming will continue;
there are no significant benefits;
it will be catastrophic;
curbing CO2 emissions is more effective than any other counter-measure.
They are a house of cards. Take any one of these pillars away and the alarmists’ agenda collapses. However, some pillars are more solid than others (some are based on sound empirical observation and reproducible experiment, others not so much).
To protect their temple, the alarmists do what the priesthoods of other religions often do -misrepresent the beliefs of the unbelievers. It does not matter to them that I accept the first five of those pillars and that I have varying degrees of doubt about the remainder. To them everything is conflated in the term “denier”.
They have used the weakness of their house (reliance on multiple pillars) to their advantage. An accurate description of my belief would be that I am skeptical about catastrophic man-made global warming. It cannot be reduced to a single word or slick acronym. CAGW-skeptic doesn’t roll off the tongue. And I doubt that most CAGW believers even know what it stands for.
Particular religious beliefs are not in our ‘nature’. They are inculcated. Language is part of that process.
How confused can they get? Which word(s) in “The world is doomed and it’s man’s fault!” do they think people misunderstand? Certainly people do not fail to understand the “Give us all your money; shut off your use of stable electrical grid power, junk your vehicles and combustion engines and be prepared to be cold in the winter and hot in the summer”. Don’t forget you’ve got to walk everywhere too.
A) What is published far and wide by the befuddled main media are bad translations from a paper abstract coupled with extremist desire to frame ‘it for the cause’!
B) People are not allowed to see the actual published peer collusion research articles without paying a fee. Expensive if one wants to review the related and quoted research papers at the same time.
C) Even with buying the danged research article, data is withheld along with relevant meta-data from the poor misguided and certainly misinformed misled populations at large.
Though it does sound like a fun computer experiment searching for changes over time for the ‘meanings’ given to “climate change”. Which properly should be termed “climate alarmism, the new global quack religion; coolaid available on request”. WUWT should place high in the search lists as WUWT readers are quick to notice the sleazy word changes used by alarmists.
1 The general public do not understand simple scientific terms.
2 People who don’t understand simple scientific terms are stupid.
3 The general public are stupid.
So we’ll make things simpler for them ?
From Aristotle to Newton to Einstein et al the public have not only understood the scientific discoveries but have embraced them.
The paper above is palpably meaningless and of course the one word most of us stupid people understand is propaganda?
I think it’s a bit rich for someone doing an examination of the words used to help scientists to better “communicate” when they themselves mean “convince”. And in any event Lord Rutherford spelled this out clearly in the literature in the early 20th century when he said:
“If you can’t explain your theory to a barmaid, it probably isn’t very good physics.”
Gasoline can be synthesized from coal + natural gas. Diesel can be synthesized from coal + ammonia.
The problems the same they think using better BS will help them sell ‘the cause ‘
They still not worked out its the selling of BS in the first place which is the problem .
Has for
“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,”
Well the irony is here is often the exact opposite is the problem , people are more than smart enough to understand what is being claimed and they can see the hypocrisy of those saying it , the lies they use to support and and the reality that the facts don’t even support the claims in the first place .