STATEMENT:

 In the aftermath of the CRU scandal, most scientists avoided attention.

PASSAGE:

The response of most climate scientists was to cross their fingers and hope for the best, and they kept a low profile. Many no doubt hoped that subsequent independent inquiries into the IPCC and CRU would draw a line under their problems.

STATEMENT:

Journalists have defended the CRU and the IPCC against their critics.

PASSAGE:

However, although these were likely to help, they were unlikely to undo the harm caused by months of hostile news reports and attacks by critics.

STATEMENT:

Ralph Cicerone regarded the damage caused by the CRU as extending beyond the field of climate science.

PASSAGE:

The damage that has been done should not be underestimated. As Ralph Cicerone, the President of the US National Academy of Sciences, wrote in an editorial in the journal Science: ‘Public opinion has moved toward the view that scientists often try to suppress alternative hypotheses and ideas and that scientists will withhold data and try to manipulate some aspects of peer review to prevent dissent.’ He concluded that ‘the perceived misbehavior of even a few scientists can diminish the credibility of science as a whole.’

STATEMENT:

  Since 2010, confidence in climate science has risen slightly in the US.

PASSAGE:

An opinion poll taken at the beginning of 2010 found that the proportion of people in the US who trust scientists as a source of information about global warming had dropped from 83 percent, in 2008, to 74 percent. Another survey carried out by the British Broadcasting Corporation in February 2010 found that just 26 percent of British people now believe that climate change is confirmed as being largely human-made, down from 41 percent in November 2009.

STATEMENT:

Climate scientists should take professional advice on regaining public confidence.

PASSAGE:

In fact, climate science needs professional help to rebuild its reputation. It could do worse than follow the advice given by Leslie Gaines-Ross, a ‘reputation strategist’ at Public Relations (PR) company Webef Shandwick, in her recent book Corporate Reputation: 12 Steps to Safeguarding and Recovering Reputation. Gaines-Ross’s strategy is based on her analysis of how various organisations responded to crises, such as desktop-printer firm Xerox, whose business plummeted during the 1990s, and the USA’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) after the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003.

STATEMENT:

It could be said that language begins with gesture.

PASSAGE:

Take gesture, arguably the starting point for language. Until recently, it was considered uniquely human - but not any more. Mike Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and others have compiled a list of gestures observed in monkeys, gibbons, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orang-utans, which reveals that gesticulation plays a large role in their communication.

STATEMENT:

Ape gestures always consist of head or limb movements.

PASSAGE:

Ape gestures can involve touch, vocalising or eye movement, and individuals wait until they have another ape’s attention before making visual or auditory gestures. If their gestures go unacknowledged, they will often repeat them or touch the recipient.

STATEMENT:

Apes ensure that other apes are aware of their gesturing.

PASSAGE:

Ape gestures can involve touch, vocalising or eye movement, and individuals wait until they have another ape’s attention before making visual or auditory gestures. If their gestures go unacknowledged, they will often repeat them or touch the recipient.

STATEMENT:

Primate and human gestures share some key features.

PASSAGE:

In an experiment carried out in 2006 by Erica Cartmill and Richard Byrne from the University of St Andrews in the UK, they got a person to sit on a chair with some highly desirable food such as banana to one side of them and some bland food such as celery to the other. The orang-utans, who could see the person and the food from their enclosures, gestured at their human partners to encourage them to push the desirable food their way. If the person feigned incomprehension and offered the bland food, the animals would change their gestures - just as humans would in a similar situation. If the human seemed to understand while being somewhat confused, giving only half the preferred food, the apes would repeat and exaggerate their gestures - again in exactly the same way a human would. Such findings highlight the fact that the gestures of non­human primates are not merely innate reflexes but are learned, flexible and under voluntary control - all characteristics that are considered prerequisites for human-like communication.

STATEMENT:

Cartoons present an amusing picture of animal communication.

PASSAGE:

Of course, language is more than mere sound - it also has meaning. While the traditional, cartoonish version of animal communication renders it unclear, unpredictable and involuntary, it has become clear that various species are able to give meaning to particular sounds by connecting them with specific ideas. Dolphins use 'signature whistles’, so called because it appears that they name themselves. Each develops a unique moniker within the first year of life and uses it whenever it meets another dolphin.

STATEMENT:

People often feel that they have been wrongly assessed.

PASSAGE:

Success in many vocations largely depends on skill in sizing up people. It is important not only to such professionals as the clinical psychologist, the psychiatrist or the social worker, but also to the doctor or lawyer in dealing with their clients, the businessman trying to outwit his rivals, the salesman with potential customers, the teacher with his pupils, not to speak of the pupils judging their teacher. Social life, indeed, would be impossible if we did not. to some extent, understand, and react to the motives and qualities of those we meet; and clearly we are sufficiently accurate for most practical purposes, although we also recognize that misinterpretations easily arise – particularly on the pare of others who judge us!

STATEMENT:

 Unscientific systems of personality assessment have been of some use.

PASSAGE:

Just because the process is so familiar and taken for granted, It has aroused little scientific curiosity until recently. Dramatists, writers and artists throughout the centuries have excelled in the portrayal of character, but have seldom stopped to ask how they, or we, get to know people, or how accurate is our knowledge. However, the popularity of such unscientific systems as Lavater’s physiognomy in the eighteenth century, Gall’s phrenology in the nineteenth, and of handwriting interpretations by graphologists, or palm-readings by Gypsies, show that people are aware of weaknesses in their judgments and desirous of better methods of diagnosis. It is natural that they should turn to psychology for help, in the belief that psychologists are specialists in ‘human nature’.

STATEMENT:

People make false assumptions about the expertise of psychologists.

PASSAGE:

It is natural that they should turn to psychology for help, in the belief that psychologists are specialists in ‘human nature’. This belief is hardly justified: for the primary aim of psychology had been to establish the general laws and principles underlying behaviour and thinking, rather than to apply these to concrete problems of the individual person.

STATEMENT:

 It is likely that some psychologists are no better than anyone else at assessing personality.

PASSAGE:

A great many professional psychologists still regard it as their main function to study the nature of learning, perception and motivation in the abstracted or average human being, or in lower organisms, and consider it premature to put so young a science to practical uses. They would disclaim the possession of any superior skill in judging their fellow-men. Indeed, being more aware of the difficulties than is the non-psychologist, they may be more reluctant to commit themselves to definite predictions or decisions about other people. Nevertheless, to an increasing extent psychologists are moving into educational, occupational, clinical and other applied fields, where they are called upon to use their expertise for such purposes as fitting the education or job to the child or adult,and the person to the job,Thus a considerable proportion of their activities consists of personality assessment.

STATEMENT:

Research since 1940 has been based on acceptance of previous theories.

PASSAGE:

The growth of psychology has probably helped responsible members of society to become more aware of the difficulties of assessment. But it is not much use telling employers, educationists and judges how inaccurately they diagnose the personalities with which they have to deal unless psychologists are sure that they can provide something better. Even when university psychologists themselves appoint a new member of staff, they almost always resort to the traditional techniques of assessing the candidates through interviews, past records, and testimonials, and probably make at least as many bad appointments as other employers do. However, a large amount of experimental development of better methods has been carried out since 1940 by groups of psychologists in the Armed Services and in the Civil Service, and by such organizations as the (British) National Institute of Industrial Psychology and the American Institute of Research.

STATEMENT:

Environmentalists take a pessimistic view of the world for a number of reasons.

PASSAGE:

For many environmentalists, the world seems to be getting worse. They have developed a hit-list of our main fears: that natural resources are running out; that the population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat; that species are becoming extinct in vast numbers, and that the planet's air and water are becoming ever more polluted.

STATEMENT:

Data on the Earth’s natural resources has only been collected since 1972.

PASSAGE:

But a quick look at the facts shows a different picture. First, energy and other natural resources have become more abundant, not less so, since the book The Limits to Growth' was published in 1972 by a group of scientists.

STATEMENT:

The number of starving people in the world has increased in recent years.

PASSAGE:

Second, more food is now produced per head of the world's population than at any time in history. Fewer people are starving.

STATEMENT:

Extinct species are being replaced by new species.

PASSAGE:

Third, although species are .indeed becoming extinct, only about 0.7% of them are expected to disappear in the next 50 years, not 25-50%, as has so often been predicted.

STATEMENT:

Some pollution problems have been correctly linked to industrialisation.

PASSAGE:

environmental pollution either appear to have been exaggerated, or are transient - associated with the early phases of industrialisation and therefore best cured not by restricting economic growth, but by accelerating it. One form of pollution - the release of greenhouse gases that causes global warming - does appear to be a phenomenon that is going to extend well into our future, but its total impact is unlikely to pose a devastating problem. A bigger problem may well turn out to be an inappropriate response to it.

STATEMENT:

It would be best to attempt to slow down economic growth.

PASSAGE:

environmental pollution either appear to have been exaggerated, or are transient - associated with the early phases of industrialisation and therefore best cured not by restricting economic growth, but by accelerating it. One form of pollution - the release of greenhouse gases that causes global warming - does appear to be a phenomenon that is going to extend well into our future, but its total impact is unlikely to pose a devastating problem. A bigger problem may well turn out to be an inappropriate response to it.