An innovative approach to predicting global warming without using climate model simulationsOA

<正>Global warming projections rely heavily on climate model simulations. Due to too many tuning knobs in climate models, such as the representation of clouds and convection, global warming projections have a large range of inter-model spreads.     

试论报纸在大众科学传播中的作用--《广州日报》10年科学报道的统计分析研究

本文选取《广州日报》对其从1992年到2001年的10年间的科学传播情况进行了统计分析。结果显示，10年间其科学报道总量呈上升趋势，科学报道深度也在逐年加深；其中，医学／卫生类的科学报道所占比例高于其他各类的报道，科学报道内容中科学知识的含量远高于科学方法和科学精神的含量。     

Making sense of global warming: Norwegians appropriating knowledge of anthropogenic climate change

This paper studies how people reason about and make sense of human-made global warming, based on ten focus group interviews with Norwegian citizens. It shows that the domestication of climate science knowledge was shaped through five sense-making devices: news media coverage of changes in nature, particularly the weather, the coverage of presumed experts' disagreement about global warming, critical attitudes towards media, observations of political inaction, and considerations with respect to everyday life. These sense-making devices allowed for ambiguous outcomes, and the paper argues four main outcomes with respect to the domestication processes: the acceptors, the tempered acceptors, the uncertain and the sceptics.     

Principle-based adept predictions of global warming from climate mean statesOA

Distinguishing anthropogenic warming from natural variability and reducing uncertainty in global-warming projections continue to present challenges. Here, we introduce a novel principle-based framework for predicting global warming from climate mean states that is based solely on carbon-dioxide-increasing scenarios without running climate models and relying on statistical trend analysis. By applying this framework to the climate mean state of 1980–2000, we accurately capture the subsequent global warming（0.403 K predicted versus 0.414 K observed） and polar warming amplification patterns. Our predictions from climate mean states of individual models not only exhibit a high map-correlation skill that is comparable to that of individual Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 models for the observed warming, but also capture the temporal pace of their warming under the 1% annual CO₂-increasing scenario. This work provides the first principle-based confirmation that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are the primary cause of the observed global warming from 1980–2000 to 2000–2020, independently of climate models and statistical analysis.     

科学认识、国际政治利益与环境保护角力下的《京都议定书》

自有科学研究结果显示温室气体排放会导致全球暖化以来,气候变迁议题便广泛地受到国际社会与科学界的重视。本文以《京都议定书》为案例,探讨科学知识与政治利益之间的关系,并对其未来发展进行展望。     

Public culture and public understanding of genetics: a focus group study

As the role of genetic science in everyday life has grown, policymakers have become concerned about Americans' understandings of this science. Much effort has been devoted to formal schooling, but less attention has been paid to the role of public culture in shaping public understanding of genetics. Research into public cultural messages about genetics has claimed that the public is likely to adopt problematic accounts, but few studies have explored the public's articulation of these messages. This study is based on 25 focus groups convened to explore the lay public's understanding of genetics. The study found that the public processed a greater variety of messages than assumed by previous researchers, including documentaries, non-science-fiction films, and popular television in addition to previous researchers' focus on science fiction and news media. The study also found that the public does not process the messages through the linear, transmission model assumed by previous research. The public processes messages about genetics complexly and critically. On the basis of these findings, the study suggests that researchers should include a greater variety of texts about genetics in their research and attend more fully to audience processing in addition to content analyses of these texts.     

新形势下西藏高校新闻媒体的思想政治教育功能

作为高校思想政治教育和新闻宣传工作的重要阵地,高校新闻媒体有其重要的育人功能和明确的舆论导向作用。在当前新形势下,西藏高校新闻媒体的主体地位尤为显著,特别是在加强民族团结教育,坚持正确的舆论导向,维护社会稳定大局,繁荣各民族先进文化等方面都担负着重要和特殊的历史使命。     

Public science for a global empire: The British quest for the South Magnetic Pole

It is well known to historians of science that, early in the nineteenth century, terrestrial magnetism became both a popular science and a significant research enterprise in Europe. For Britain, as a maritime power, it offered benefits for navigation. Theoretical physicists claimed that, with enough observations of magnetic variation, intensity, and dip taken throughout the world over time, they could deduce regular mathematical laws to explain the phenomena. Because of the lack of data from the region, particular attention focused on field research in deep southern latitudes. Finding the precise location of the South Magnetic Pole became a prime goal for some enthusiasts. With burgeoning colonies in Africa and the Antipodes, Britain assumed a leading role in this effort. British scientists looked to their government for funding and called on the Admiralty to dispatch expeditions. It is less well known that both popular and scientific interest in terrestrial magnetism continued throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. The H.M.S. Erebus and H.M.S. Terror (1839-1843), H.M.S. Challenger (1872-1876), and R.Y. Discovery (1901-1904) sailed to the Antarctic as part of Britain's extended "Magnetic Crusade," which culminated with Royal Society geologist T. W. Edgeworth David of the Nimrod expedition reaching the South Magnetic Pole in 1909.     

Technology policy and global warming: Why new policy models are needed (or why putting new wine in old bottles won’t work)

In recent years, the threat of global climate change has come to be seen as one of the most serious confronting humanity. To meet this challenge will require the development of new technologies and the substantial improvement of existing ones, as well as ensuring their prompt and widespread deployment. Some have argued that the urgency of the situation requires a “Manhattan Project” or an “Apollo Program”. This paper examines why such a policy model is inappropriate, arguing that the nature of the policy context for confronting climate change necessitates a different kind of technology policy than that for building an atomic bomb or for achieving a manned lunar landing. Instead, it seeks to draw lessons from three sectors that seem to be more pertinent and where government technological development and deployment programs have been pursued with some success in the United States - namely, agriculture, biomedical research and information technology. It compares and contrasts these with the policies pursued with regard to the first two of these sectors in the United Kingdom. The paper concludes by drawing out the implications for the design of policies supporting technological development and innovation to address the problem of global climate change.     

Invoking politics and ethics in the design of information technology: undesigning the design

It is a truism that the design and deployment of information and communication technologies is vital to everyday life, the conduct of work and to social order. But how are individual, organisational and societal choices made? What might it mean to invoke a politics and an ethics of information technology design and use? This editorial paper situates these questions within the trajectory of preoccupations and approaches to the design and deployment of information technology since computerisation began in the 1940s. Focusing upon the dominant concerns over the last three decades, the paper delineates an interest in design and use in relation to socio-technical theories, situated practices and actor-network theory. It is argued that each of these approaches is concerned with a particular form of politics that does not explicitly engage with ethics. In order to introduce ethics into contemporary debates about information technology, and to frame the papers in the special issue, it is argued that Levinas’ ethics is particularly valuable in problematising the relationship between politics and ethics. Levinas provides a critique of modernity’s emphasis on politics and the egocentric self. It is from a Levinasian concern with the Other and the primacy of the ethical that a general rethinking of the relationship between politics, ethics and justice in relation to information and communication technologies can be invoked.     

Sin in cyber-eden: understanding the metaphysics and morals of virtual worlds

This article uses a notorious incident within the computer program EVE Online to exemplify and facilitate discussion of the metaphysics of virtual worlds and the morality of user behavior. The first section examines various frameworks used to understand virtual worlds, and emphasizes those which recognize virtual worlds as legal contracts, as representational worlds, and as media for communication. The second section draws on these frameworks to analyze issues of virtual theft and virtual betrayal arising in the EVE incident. The article concludes by arguing that, in the absence of countervailing contractual obligations, users of virtual worlds have the same de facto duties to each other as they do in mediated and real environments. This paper grew out of my senior thesis in philosophy at Pomona College, entitled Game Theory: The Metaphysics and Morals of Massively Multiplayer Environments. I am indebted to Peter Kung and Paul Hurley for their critical insights and constant encouragement, as well as the Fulbright program, which afforded me the time and resources to develop this project.     

Patrick Geddes and the politics of evolution

Ever since they began to be widely discussed during the early nineteenth century, evolutionary ideas have played a controversial role in debates about politics and social reform. Understanding the political commitments of those who have sought to integrate politics and evolution is a complex challenge, though; not least because memories of mid-twentieth-century eugenic policies have frequently shaped how we talk about biosocial science. However, as the case of the Scottish biologist-turned-town-planner Patrick Geddes highlights, while we need to be aware of the broad appeal that biosocial science has historically held, we also need to recognise that current political categories can be misleading when thinking about those of who have put evolution and politics together.     

Progress,innovation and regulatory science in drug development: the politics of international standard-setting

This paper examines international standard-setting in the toxicology of pharmaceuticals during the 1990s, which has involved both the pharmaceutical industry and regulatory agencies in an organization known as the International Conference on Harmonisation of Technical Requirements for Registration of Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH). The analysis shows that the relationships between innovation, regulatory science and 'progress' may be more complex and controversial than is often assumed. An assessment of the ICH's claims about the implications of 'technical' harmonization of drug-testing standards for the maintenance of drug safety, via toxicological testing, and the delivery of therapeutic progress, via innovation, is presented. By demonstrating that there is not a technoscientific validity for these claims, it is argued that, within the ICH, a discourse of technological innovation and scientific progress has been used by regulatory agencies and prominent parts of the transnational pharmaceutical industry to legitimize the lowering and loosening of toxicological standards for drug testing. The mobilization and acceptance of this discourse are shown to be pivotal to the ICH's transformation of reductions in safety standards, which are apparently against the interests of patients and public health, into supposed therapeutic benefits derived from promises of greater access to more innovative drug products. The evidence suggests that it is highly implausible that these reductions in the standards of regulatory toxicology are consistent with therapeutic progress for patients, and highlights a worrying aspect embedded in the 'technical trajectories' of regulatory science.     

Lay experts and the politics of breast implants

This paper discusses the controversy around breast implants in the United States and Europe. It focuses on the emergence of consumer and support groups for women and offers an analysis of the role they have played in recent policy developments in UK and Europe. The politics of breast implants is seen as a politics of knowledge in which scientific expertise has consistently been deployed in ways that minimize the credibility and legitimacy of women's accounts of their bodies and illness experiences. These women have been doubly disadvantaged in a policy debate that turns on scientific controversy and uncertainty. This implies a gendered dynamic to the changing relations of knowledge and expertise. The paper contributes to an understanding of the relations between regulators, manufacturers, users, and clinicians in the global medical device industry and to wider debates around the public understanding of science.