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A new study has revealed that the language used by the global climate change watchdog, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is overly conservative – and therefore the threats are much greater than the Panel's reports suggest.
Published in the journal BioScience, the team of scientists from the University of Adelaide, Flinders University, the University of Bristol (UK), and the Spanish National Research Council has analysed the language used in the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (from 2014).
Message - Society - Climate - Emergency—is - Overstatement
"We found that the main message from the reports—that our society is in climate emergency—is lost by overstatement of uncertainty and gets confused among the gigabytes of information," says lead author Dr. Salvador Herrando-Pérez, from the University of Adelaide's Environment Institute and Australian Centre for Ancient DNA.
"The IPCC supports the overwhelming scientific consensus about human impact on climate change, so we would expect the reports' vocabulary to be dominated by greater certainty on the state of climate science—but this is not the case."
IPCC - Level - Certainty - Findings - Categories
The IPCC assigns a level of certainty to climate findings using five categories of confidence and ten categories of probability. The team found the categories of intermediate certainty predominated, with those of highest certainty barely reaching 8% of the climate findings evaluated.
"The accumulation of uncertainty across all elements of the climate-change complexity means that the IPCC tends to...
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