Assessment of How Climate Scientists Communicate Risk Shows Imperfections, Improvements

The hardest part, experts find, is communicating “unquantifiable” uncertainty

Scientists have long struggled to find the best way to present crucial facts about future sea level rise, but are getting better at communicating more clearly, according to an international group of climate scientists, including Princeton’s Michael Oppenheimer.

The consequences of improving communications are enormous, the scientists said, as civic leaders actively incorporate climate scientists’ risk assessments into major planning efforts to counter some of the effects of rising seas.

Writing in Nature Climate Change, the scientists review the language and graphics used in climate “assessment” reports between 1990 and 2021 by members of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“The IPCC’s assessments of past sea level rise have been superb, but its projections of future sea level rise sometimes have been criticized for lack of a full representation of uncertainty about the future,” said Oppenheimer, director of Princeton’s Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment, Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs and the High Meadows Environmental Institute and an author of the study.

Statistically speaking, future sea level change is characterized by two different types of uncertainty, said Robert Kopp, a lead author of the study and a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences.

“There’s quantifiable uncertainty, which can be measured and presented with a degree of confidence, and then there’s ambiguity, a form of deep uncertainty that cannot be well represented quantitatively,” said Kopp. “For some of those processes we understand the physics quite well – for example, how the ocean takes up heat and expands in response to that – and so can quantify and convey those risks. But other processes, particularly some of those acting on ice sheets, involve factors we don’t understand that well and that are difficult to put into quantitative terms, but might nonetheless be able to cause rapid sea-level rise.”

The analysis shows aspects of sea level rise where the level of risk could be quantified have been presented accurately, informing public bodies effectively.

But when conveying sea level uncertainties that have been and remain difficult to quantify, the language in the reports often has fallen short, either oversimplifying projections or conveying the information in a confusing manner, according to the analysis. Such language could lead policymakers to neglect the risks associated with possible high-end sea-level outcomes.

Ambiguity arises in situations in which analysts can interpret a common set of facts in highly divergent ways – or can’t interpret them at all, Kopp said.

“Sea level projections extending only a few decades into the future and under lower emissions scenarios exhibit less ambiguity than do projections in the longer term and under higher emissions scenarios,” he said.

The study contrasts the language used to convey ambiguities in the risk of late-century sea level rise in the IPCC reports in 1990, 1995, 2001, 2007, 2013 and 2021, along with the UN’s Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate issued in 2019.

In the First Assessment Report, released in 1990, the authors characterized a rapid disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet because of global warming as “unlikely in the next century.”

In contrast, in the Sixth Assessment Report, published in 2021, scientists warn that higher rates of sea level rise before 2100 could be “caused by earlier-than-projected disintegration of marine ice shelves, the abrupt, widespread onset of marine ice sheet instability and marine ice cliff instability around Antarctica.”

The IPCC report goes on to explain that the processes are characterized by “deep uncertainty.” It concludes: “In a low-likelihood, high-impact storyline, under high emissions such processes could in combination contribute more than one additional meter of sea level rise by 2100.”

Communicating complex risk scenarios to the public in an effective manner is an ongoing process. If the approach taken in the most recent climate report in 2021 is successful, it will be accurately reflected in future regional assessments and will ultimately be judged by policymakers, along with climate and social scientists.

It matters that scientists get it right, the study concludes.

“Sea level rise and the associated increasing risk of coastal flooding are high-priority concerns for national policy makers as well as at all levels of governance along the coast. Representing and communicating uncertainty comprehensively is critically important to shaping effective policy to defend lives and property,” said Oppenheimer.

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The paper “Communicating future sea-level rise uncertainty and ambiguity to assessment users,” first appeared in Nature Climate Change on June 2, 2023. Robert Kopp led the study with Jessica O’Reilly, an anthropologist at Indiana University Bloomington who studies the IPCC, and Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton University climate scientist who has served with the IPCC since the First Assessment Report. The other authors in the study, all of whom were involved with the Sixth Assessment Report, include those from Brown University and the University of Buffalo in the U.S., as well as others in China, France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore. This research was funded by agencies that include the National Science Foundation and NASA.

This release was prepared by Kitta MacPherson of Rutgers University and adapted by C-PREE staff at Princeton University.