Arguments
New Research for week #25, 2019
Posted on 25 June 2019 by SkS-Team
49 publications for this week.
The last paper in this week's list features Skeptical Science volunteer and highly cited researcher Stephan Lewandowsky along with Skeptical Science founder John Cook as first and second authors respectively, working with regular collaborator Gilles Gignac. Their paper identifies, confirms and examines what layperson intuition may see as peer pressure to conform to perceived dominant opinions in discussions of climate change at online venues. The paper helps to illustrate and exemplify how human psychology with its inherent flaws and virtues may be our most significant hurdle in dealing with the climate change we're causing. The problem might be said to lie between our ears, not up in the air. See also the aptly named I’ll See It When I Believe It: Motivated Numeracy in Perceptions of Climate Change Risk for more treatment of our dubious reasoning capability when we're confused by extraneous factors, the publication itself also being a nice example of extending and solidifying previous research.
Method for composition of Research News: This synopsis is principally composed via RSS feeds from a variety of academic publishers, employing fairly broad filters. The filter sieves 200-300 publications per week for further inspection. The resulting raw list includes interesting but off-topic papers; human inspection winnows output to perhaps 100-150 works involving global atmospheric climate to a greater or lesser extent. Due to the volume of publications and limited time scrutiny is chiefly via reading abstracts unless compelling curiosity or reason for concern about the claims of a paper leads further. Some results are "down in the weeds," being narrow discussions of arcane climate model behaviors, or highly regional studies with little "big picture" impact, or tenuous results that will likely benefit from more research; these are discarded. The final result is the few dozen publications per week cited here, involving extraordinary breadth and depth. Global anthropogenic climate change instigates and nourishes an astounding, grand collision of a multitude of scientific disciplines.
We'll perennially note: dry titles can't convey the content of an abstract let alone the full potential implications of a given paper. The publications cited in this list all fit the specification of plausibly being important components of a puzzle we're solving. We're working on providing easy access to abstracts but in the meantime we feel the articles we choose to highlight are worth a click to reach and read.
To the matter of clicking for abstracts, a question for readers: should clicking a paper title open a new window, or is it better to go "forth and back" from SkS to a given paper and vice versa? Please let us know preferences down below in comments— perhaps a consensus will emerge. Thanks!
Global Health Implications of Nutrient Changes in Rice under High Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (OA)
Climate sensitivity from both physical and carbon cycle feedbacks
Deepening of the winter mixed layer in the Canada Basin, Arctic Ocean over 2006?2017
Arctic Ocean freshwater dynamics: transient response to increasing river runoff and precipitation
Radiative Heating of an Ice?free Arctic Ocean
Automatically Finding Ship?tracks to Enable Large?scale Analysis of Aerosol?Cloud Interactions
Simultaneous Abiotic Production of Greenhouse Gases (CO2, CH4, and N2O) in Subtropical Soils
Contrasting temperature sensitivity of CO2 exchange in peatlands of the Hudson Bay Lowlands, Canada
Physical Drivers of Changes in Probabilistic Surge Hazard under Sea Level Rise
When will spaceborne cloud radar detect upward shifts in cloud heights?
New estimates of aerosol direct radiative effects and forcing from A?Train satellite observations
Evidence for increasing rainfall extremes remains elusive at large spatial scales: the case of Italy
Climate assessments for local action (OA)
Evidence for fire in the Pliocene Arctic in response to amplified temperature
Effects of atmospheric CO2 variability of the past 800 kyr on the biomes of southeast Africa
Elevation-dependent warming of maximum air temperature in Nepal during 1976–2015
Impacts of climate changes on the maximum and minimum temperature in Iran
Lateral attitude change on environmental issues: implications for the climate change debate
Genes on the edge: a framework to detect genetic diversity imperiled by climate change
Phytoplankton decline in the eastern North Pacific transition zone associated with atmospheric blocking
Enfranchising the future: Climate justice and the representation of future generations
Thermal stress induces persistently altered coral reef fish assemblages
Meridional Structure and Future Changes of Tropopause Height and Temperature
Anticipated changes to the snow season in Alaska: Elevation dependency, timing and extremes
I’ll See It When I Believe It: Motivated Numeracy in Perceptions of Climate Change Risk
Assessment of changing pattern of crop water stress in Bangladesh
Cognitive complexity increases climate change belief
Large greenhouse gas savings due to changes in the post-Soviet food systems
A Bayesian Networks approach for the assessment of climate change impacts on nutrients loading
Science by social media: Attitudes towards climate change are mediated by perceived social consensus
The previous issue of New Research may be found here.
Regarding : I’ll See It When I Believe It: Motivated Numeracy in Perceptions of Climate Change Risk.
This excellent study just confirms what I and probably others suspect intuitively. We know that many people centre their lives on a collection of fundamental ideological beliefs, and are reluctant to change their beliefs, probably because of the effort and perceived risks involved and the risk of alienating themselves from their tribe, given these shared bottom lines define the tribe. If data comes along that suggests a belief may be wrong, the smarter people are the smarter they are at fooling themselves about the data, which shouldn't actually be too surprising!
It's possible to train yourself out of this motivated reasoning, and be objective. Scientists are taught to do it. But it has a cost because it can mean criticising the views of friends and colleagues, and can alienate people from the group and the prevailing group think, so perhaps this is why its so prevalent particularly in the general public. It's just easier, but unfortunately the consequences of motivated reasoning can be serious..
All this appears to be a risk factor for both liberals and conservatives however conservatives look to me like they have particularly complex ideological belief systems, so this possibly explains the stronger motivated numeracy among the One Nation people compared to the Greens, although nobody is immune from the phenomenon. In my experience everyone has at least some cherished beliefs.
I always vote for clicking leading to a separate tab/window.
I applaud your continuing this column. I'd suggest for a start retaining Ari's subheadings. They make scanning the posts a good deal more productive, preventing the mind's snapping back and forth among a large number of fields of research.
Thanks for the suggestion, Synapsid.
As the current perpetrator of Research News I've been thinking hard about this, flipping and flopping.
In days gone by I was in the broadcasting business, sucked in from engineering and onward into management, unavoidably becoming involved with music programming schedules thereby. In music there was an instinct to divide music presentation into genres, which has its ups and downs. The "up" is that listeners with a particular interest could spend an hour per week hearing their favorite style. The downside was that those listeners never heard anything else because we made it so easy for them to avoid anything new, thereby helping them miss much.
In a way the situation in broadcasting and choices there are redolent of the modern condition of the internet, where the decapitation of the editorial class has ended up inadvertently compartmentalizing thoughts and beliefs into what seems to be growing mutual intolerance and ignorance. Bumping into things can be a feature and not a bug.
As with music such as AA, jazz etc. there are scientific players working with different instruments, covering different beats but exploring realms sharing commonality. Meanwhile our fault as a species qualified for management of the planet seems significantly to lie in failing to see the big picture.
The long way of saying: the current disorder is an engineering choice. :-)
But I'm still thinking about it; engineering is never finished. As it stands, articles are being presented in their default order as found in journal feeds so they are categorized at least by what is accepted by particular publishers and their respective journal families. It should be possible to make it work acceptably for specialists and generalists; I'll bend my mind to that.
Thanks again for your thoughts.
Thanks to this service, I discovered a new study that has profound significance in the palaeo category, having full access but not one iota of publicity when searched. Can someone give it a good review?
"Evidence for fire in the Pliocene Arctic in response to amplified temperature"