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Language about climate change differs between proponents and skeptics
https://uwaterloo.ca/news/news/language-about-climate-change-differs-between-proponents-and[font face=Serif][font size=5]Language about climate change differs between proponents and skeptics[/font]
Monday, September 28, 2015
[font size=3]Proponents of climate change tend to use more conservative, tentative language to report on the science behind it, while skeptics use more emotional and assertive language when reinterpreting scientific studies, says research from the University of Waterloo.
Tentative language would include words such as "possible," "probable" or "might." The terms "alarmist" and "wrong" are examples of emotional language.
Using a series of computational text analysis tools to measure the use of hedging or emotional words, Srdan Medimorec and Gordon Pennycook, both PhD candidates in the Department of Psychology at Waterloo, examined two recent reports of opposing groups. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) holds that climate change is unequivocal and that humans influence climate, while the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) is skeptical of the human impact on climate change.
Although the IPCC clearly warns of the threat of climate change, the text analysis showed that their report used more cautious, less explicit language to present their claims. This finding coincides with work indicating that the IPCC has tended to provide overly conservative estimates of the impact of climate change in previous publications. By contrast, the NIPCC report reinterprets the scientific findings with more certain, aggressive language to advance the case that human-made climate change is a myth.
...[/font][/font]
Monday, September 28, 2015
[font size=3]Proponents of climate change tend to use more conservative, tentative language to report on the science behind it, while skeptics use more emotional and assertive language when reinterpreting scientific studies, says research from the University of Waterloo.
Tentative language would include words such as "possible," "probable" or "might." The terms "alarmist" and "wrong" are examples of emotional language.
Using a series of computational text analysis tools to measure the use of hedging or emotional words, Srdan Medimorec and Gordon Pennycook, both PhD candidates in the Department of Psychology at Waterloo, examined two recent reports of opposing groups. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) holds that climate change is unequivocal and that humans influence climate, while the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) is skeptical of the human impact on climate change.
Although the IPCC clearly warns of the threat of climate change, the text analysis showed that their report used more cautious, less explicit language to present their claims. This finding coincides with work indicating that the IPCC has tended to provide overly conservative estimates of the impact of climate change in previous publications. By contrast, the NIPCC report reinterprets the scientific findings with more certain, aggressive language to advance the case that human-made climate change is a myth.
...[/font][/font]
