Publics and UK parliamentarians underestimate the urgency of peaking global greenhouse gas emissions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports treat politicians as recipients of information, but not as foci of research efforts. Moreover, academic research on politicians' knowledge concentrates on belief in climate change's anthropogenic cause. Little is known of how aware national parliamentarians are of key findings and policy recommendations from assessment reports. Here, we address this through a survey of 100 Members of Parliament in the United Kingdom on their knowledge of the well-publicised statement from the 6th assessment report of when global greenhouse emissions need to peak for a global temperature increase limit of 1.5 °C to be possible. Parliamentarians overwhelmingly overestimate the time period humanity has left to bend the temperature curve although partisan differences apply. Public surveys in Britain as well as Canada, Chile and Germany show similarly low knowledge, yet being younger, worried about climate change, and having lower levels of conspiracy belief mentality increase accuracy significantly.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".