Communication of uncertainty in the IPCC: A comparative international study

政府间气候变化专门委员会（IPCC）定期发布报告（评估），向决策者和公众通报与全球气候变化有关的问题。IPCC使用语言描述不确定性（如不太可能）来传达其预测和结论的潜在不精确性。先前的研究表明，公众对这些概率陈述的解读并没有作者的意图那么极端，而且对这些陈述的解读存在很大的个体差异。这些研究表明，在概率词中加入数值范围可以增加术语之间的区别和解释的一致性。气候变化是一个全球性问题，IPCC是一个全球性机构，其报告和结论被翻译成多种语言，具有国际影响。本项目是IPCC不确定性传播的多国合作研究。我们计划在许多国家管理翻译后的问卷调查，调查概率性声明解释的跨国差异，将这些差异与对全球气候变化的态度联系起来，并概述提高沟通有效性的方法。我们的结果和建议应有助于改进IPCC在其未来报告中传达不确定性的方式。

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) publishes periodical reports (assessments) informing policymakers and the public on issues related to global climate change. The IPCC uses verbal descriptions of uncertainty (such as unlikely) to convey the underlying imprecision of its forecasts and conclusions. Previous studies showed that the public interprets these probabilistic statements as less extreme than intended by the authors, and that there are large individual differences in the interpretation of these statements. These studies suggest that supplementing the probability words with numerical ranges would increase differentiation between terms and consistency of interpretation. Climate change is a global issue and the IPCC is a global body whose reports and conclusions are translated to many languages and have international impact. This project is a collaborative multi-national study of the of IPCC communication of uncertainty. We plan to administer translated questionnaires in many countries, to investigate cross-national differences in interpretation of probabilistic pronouncements, relate those to attitudes towards global climate change, and outline methods to improve the effectiveness of communication. Our results and recommendations should help improve the way the IPCC communicate uncertainty in its future reports.