英语科普：否定气候变化对科学界的影响.docx

Climate change denial in public discourse1 may encourage climate scientists to over-emphasise scientific uncertainty2 and is also affecting how they themselves speak -- and perhaps even think -- about their own research, a new study from the University of Bristol, UK argues. Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, from Bristols School of Experimental Psychology3 and the Cabot Institute, and colleagues from Harvard University and three institutions in Australia show how the language used by people who oppose the scientific consensus4 on climate change has seeped5 into scientists discussion of the alleged6 recent hiatus or pause in global warming, and has thereby7 unwittingly reinforced a misleading message.The idea that global warming has stopped has been promoted in contrarian blogs and media articles for many years, and ultimately the idea of a pause or hiatus has become ensconced in the scientific literature, including in the latest assessment8 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).Multiple lines of evidence indicate that global warming continues unabated, which implies that talk of a pause or hiatus is misleading. Recent warming has been slower than the long term trend, but this fluctuation9 differs little from past fluctuations10 in warming rate, including past periods of more rapid than average warming. Crucially, on previous occasions when decadal warming was particularly rapid, the scientific community did not give short-term climate variability the attention it has now received, when decadal warming was slower. During earlier rapid warming there was no additional research effort directed at explaining catastrophic warming. By contrast, the recent modest decrease in the rate of warming has elicited11 numerous articles and special issues of leading journals.This asymmetry12 in response to fluctuations in the decadal warming trend likely reflects what the studys authors call the seepage13 of contrarian claims into scientific work.Professor Lewan