Communicating uncertainty: lessons learned and suggestions for climate change assessment

Agreeing to disagree: uncertainty management in assessing climate change, impacts and responses by the IPCC

“…The fact that the TAR defined the meaning of words used to describe probabilities did not appear to influence how people then interpreted those words (Patt and Schrag 2003;Patt and Dessai 2005;Patt et al 2004). More precisely, these authors found that among a sample of COP 9 participants, the numerical interpretation of "unlikely, perhaps very unlikely" climate change did not depend on whether they had read the IPCC TAR.…”

Embodied uncertainty: living with complexity and natural hazards

“…Such individual and collective interpretations of risks lead to decisions about why and how we live in landscapes of uncertainty (Thompson and Warburton 1985;Macnaghten 2003;Robbins and Moore 2013). Uncertainty tends to be categorised as epistemic -derived from incomplete knowledge, or aleatory -a product of intrinsic natural variability (sometimes called 'natural stochastic uncertainty', or 'variability uncertainty') (Walker et al 2003;Patt and Dessai 2005; van Asselt and Vos 2006). In the climate change literature, aleatory uncertainty is part of a category of 'unknowable knowledge', which includes the 'human reflexive uncertainty' in response to climatic change and the uncertain outcomes of such actions.…”

Social science perspectives on natural hazards risk and uncertainty

“…The role of the scientist in governance is therefore also a growing research field in its own right. Patt and Dessai (2005) and Grothmann and Patt (2005), operating in the climate adaptation context, have looked at the role of experts and the effect of uncertainty in expert assessments on citizens' choices in response to perceived risks. It is essential but not necessarily sufficient to follow good practice in risk communication, and deliver training in technical or cognitive skills to those receiving the complex messages of environmental risk assessment.…”