Hollywood, Climate Change, and the Public
IN HIS EDITORIAL “CLIMATE CHANGE AND climate science” (11 June, p. 1565), Donald Kennedy argues that although there is broad scientific consensus over the anthropogenic origin and growing seriousness of current climate change, public attention has instead focused on areas of scientific disagreement and on extreme but unlikely future scenarios.
Against this background, there has been considerable debate about the potential impact on public opinion of the disaster film The Day After Tomorrow, in which global warming triggers a sudden shutdown of the Northern Atlantic Conveyor, bringing about a new ice age in a matter of days. Although some (1) argue that the film is likely to succeed in its makers’ aim (2) of raising consciousness about climate change, others (3, 4) suggest that by portraying dramatic but exceptionally unlikely events (5, 6), it will instead reduce public understanding.
To shed light on this controversy, we collected data on 200 adults’ levels of concern and knowledge about climate change, either on their way into (N= 95) or after seeing (N= 105) the film.
Simple questionnaire surveys were conducted at four cinemas in southeastern England (Epsom, Putney, Sutton, and Wimbledon) in June and July 2004. Besides background socioeconomic data (age, sex, educational level, income, parental status, and environ- mental charity membership), questions focused on concern (measured as how much out of a hypothetical £1000 people wanted to give to climate mitigation versus four other good causes), on how many emission- reducing actions people already took or planned to take, and on knowledge of predicted temperature changes and their likely consequences (7, 8). We assessed concern before asking questions that revealed that the survey focused on climate change.
Here we examine the impact of the film by testing for differences in scores between arriving and departing filmgoers.
Watching The Day After Tomorrow did indeed raise levels of concern: Those ques- tioned after seeing the film allocated almost 50% more of their hypothetical £1000 to climate mitigation than those interviewed on arrival [means ± SE of £180.13 ± £15.20 versus £122.25 ± £13.20; t184= −2.67, P<
0.01 (9)]. Moreover, this exit-entry difference remained significant after controlling for the positive effect of parenthood (10). There was no difference in how many kinds of emission- reducing actions (such as using public trans- port or low-energy bulbs) that our exit and entry sample already undertook (1.71 ± 0.10 versus 1.80 ± 0.10; t190= 1.15, NS), but the
film also had no detectable effect on the number they planned to undertake in future (2.56 ± 0.11 versus 2.64 ± 0.11; t191= 0.71, NS). There was no change, after seeing the film, in people’s score for knowledge of likely 21st-century temperature change (2.60 ± 0.07 versus 2.62 ± 0.06; t171= 0.26, NS), despite twice as many exiting filmgoers suggesting it will become colder. However, when asked which specific effects of climate change are predicted (7, 8) for the UK by 2100, those who had seen The Day After Tomorrow had less realistic expectations than those interviewed beforehand (11).
Overall, the data thus suggest that seeing an entertaining if exaggerated illus- tration of the possible effects of climate change succeeds, in just 125 minutes, in raising public concern—but at the price of reducing public understanding. It would be interesting to see if these divergent effects hold in other countries, and which, if either, persists over time. More generally, our findings confirm that intense dramati- zations have real potential to shift public opinion. However, the question remains whether such portrayals can be made more accurate (and thereby less confusing) without losing their popular appeal.
ANDREWBALMFORD,1,2ANDREAMANICA,1* LESLEYAIREY,1LINDABIRKIN,1AMYOLIVER,1
JUDITHSCHLEICHER1 1Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EJ, UK. 2Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, University of Cape Town, Private Bag, Rondebosch 7701, Cape Town, South Africa.
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E- mail: am315@cam.ac.uk
References and Notes 1.Nature429, 1 (2004).
2.The Day After TomorrowWeb site, www.thedayafter- tomorrow.com, accessed 12 July 2004.
3. P. J. Michaels,USA Today, 25 May 2004, p. A21.
4. F. Pearce, “Scientists stirred to ridicule ice age claims,”
NewScientist.com, 12 July 2004 (available at www.
newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994888).
5. W. S. Broecker,Science304, 388 (2004).
6. A. J. Weaver, C. Hillaire-Marcel,Science304, 400 (2004).
7. J. T. Houghton et al., Eds.,Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2001).
8. UK Climate Impacts Programme, www.ukcip.org.uk, accessed 12 July 2004.
9. All ttests used arc-sine square-root-transformed scores, expressed as percentages of the maximum possible.
10. A minimal Generalized Linear Model (GLM) with quasi-binomial error structure gave F2,197= 7.19,P= 0.001, with P< 0.05 for both terms; no significant interactions.
11. Mean scores (out of 6): 3.06 ± 0.13 versus 3.48 ± 0.13;
t179= 2.57,P= 0.01; with the effect remaining significant in a GLM controlling for sex and the positive effects of income and charity membership:F4,195= 8.43,P< 0.001, with P< 0.05 for all four terms; no significant interactions.
12. Readers interested in replicating this survey should contact the corresponding author for a copy.
Impact of watching The Day After Tomorrowon people’s concern and knowledge about climate change.Concern is measured as how much out of a hypothetical £1000 people wanted to give to climate mitigation versus four other good causes (social or medical charities, overseas aid, or animal welfare).
Knowledge is scored as how many out of six possible effects (increased winter flooding, house subsidence, late frosts, earlier flowering, lawn-mowing in winter, and the Thames freezing solid) respondents correctly identified (8) have or have not been predicted for the UK by 2100. The histograms show means ± SE. The photo shows a scene from The Day After Tomorrow, in which a tidal wave hits New York City.
Letters to the Editor
Letters (~300 words) discuss material published in Sciencein the previous 6 months or issues of general interest. They can be submitted through the Web (www.submit2science.org) or by regular mail (1200 New York Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20005, USA). Letters are not acknowledged upon receipt, nor are authors generally consulted before publication.
Whether published in full or in part, letters are subject to editing for clarity and space.
L ETTERS
www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 305 17 SEPTEMBER 2004 1713
CREDITS:(PHOTO) COURTESY OF 20TH CENTURY FOX/BUREAU L.A.COLLECTIONS/CORBIS
Image not available for online use.
250 200 150 100 50 0
4 3 2 1 0 Entry
Money for climate mitigation (£) Knowledge of UK effects
Exit Entry Exit
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Questions and Answers.
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Others may need a little more help and encouragement at an early age. Helping develop that interest and provide the learning tools necessary is something we at AAAS care passionately about. It’s a big part of the very reason we exist.
Our educational programs provide after-school activities such as the Kinetic City web-based science adventure game, based on the Peabody Award winning Kinetic City radio show; ScienceNetlinks, with over 400 science lessons available on the Internet; and Project 2061, which provides teaching benchmarks to foster an improved understanding of science and technology in K-12 classrooms.
AAAS has been helping to answer the questions of science and scientists since 1848, and today is the world’s largest multidisciplinary, nonprofit membership association for science related professionals. We work hard at advancing science and serving society – by supporting improved science education, sound science policy, and international cooperation.
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17 SEPTEMBER 2004 VOL 305 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org
Evidence for Taming of Cats
THE RECENTBREVIA CONCERNING EVIDENCE OF early taming of cats (“Early taming of the cat in Cyprus,” J.-D. Vigne et al., 9 Apr., p. 259) contains some statements that I feel should be scientifically tempered. Vigne et al.state “The joint burial could also imply a strong associa- tion between two individuals, a human and a cat… The Cyprus burial thus likely represents early evidence for the taming of cats.”
The Cyprus find is at best evidence of a relationship between an admired human being and a possibly commensal species of wild animal, Felis sylvestris. Students of feline systematics have long identified the African wild cat (F. silvestris) as the sister group to the domestic cat (1–3). However, in the absence of any artifacts of domestication at the Cyprus site (collar, clothing, cage, evidence of castra- tion of male, jewelry on the cat, and so forth), the felid in question must be considered a wild commensal species.
I think it is fair to say that the first status or stage of this process was that of a commensal variety of the wild cat. It is further reasonable to assume that the wild cat was welcomed in the vicinity of early humans, as it helped control a less acceptable commensal animal, the rodent. The transition from the African wild cat to a truly domesticated feline would have involved living and breeding as a tame member of a human dwelling. As a paleontol- ogist and a veterinarian, I suggest we seek more hard evidence before using the term
“tame” or “domesticated.”
TOMROTHWELL Division of Paleontology, American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th Street, New York, NY 10024, USA.
References
1. J. Clutton-Brock, A Natural History of Domestic Mammals(Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA, ed. 2, 1999), pp. 133–140.
2. M. F. Essop, N. Mda, J. Flamand, E. H. Harley,S. Afr. J.
Sci.27, 71 (1997).
3. R. I. Pocock,Proc. Zool. Soc. London1907, 143 (1907).
Response
WE THANKROTHWELL FOR HIS REMARKS. IT IS important to remember that, as in paleon- tology, archaeological results can never be considered as certainties, but only as prob- abilities. However, we continue to suggest that “[t]he Cyprus burial… likely repre- sents early evidence for the taming of cats”
and not merely a manifestation of a commensal status of a wild species.
The cat is one of the seven species of large mammals, among the several tens of wild species once present in Western Asia, that were introduced voluntarily onto the island of Cyprus at the very beginning of the Neolithic, across an 80-km-wide sea channel. Five of the
other introduced species (dog, sheep, goat, pig, and cattle) subsequently became the main domesticated animals of the Middle East. The probability that the cat could have travelled across the sea on its own seems to us to be extremely small.
During the 9th and the beginning of the 8th millennia B.C.), the house mouse and the fox (1) share with the cat the peculiarity of having been both commensal and introduced onto Cyprus. Like the cat, the fox must have been voluntarily introduced by humans; however, unlike the cat, the fox did not become a domestic species in the following centuries.
Although much more frequently recovered in the Cyprus Neolithic sites than those of the cat, its bone remains have never been found in a burial or in any symbolic situation, but only as food refuse.
As we argue in our Brevia, “[t]he burial of a complete cat… emphasizes the animal as an individual.” In this Middle East complex of cultures of the Pre-Pottery neolithic, when wild animal species appear in any kind of cultic contexts, they are symbolically represented by heads, horn- cores, antlers, jaws, scapula, and so forth, very rarely as a complete individual (2, 3);
only human beings and some domestic animal with special status such as dogs in the Natoufian culture or some sheep in the Khirokitia culture (4) are buried as complete bodies.
Rothwell seems to base his arguments on an old concept of the genus Felis. According to the most recent phylogenetic works (5), what he calls “the African wild cat” (i.e., the lybicasubspecies of F. silvestris) also includes the wild cats of the Near East. Consequently, the proximity between the domestic cat and the African wild cat does not mean that the ancestor of the domestic cat is lived in Africa.
Furthermore, the majority of modern domestic animals (and probably in Neolithic times) have no “collar, clothing, cage, … jewelry” and are not castrated. This kind of evidence is of little use in detecting early domestication. Among the few criteria that are validated by most palaeoanthropologists (6) are the occurrence of a taxon previously unrecorded in a region and incorporation into a society’s symbolic system. These are the two main arguments that we use for suggesting that the Cyprus cat was tamed.
Finally, Rothwell is correct when he writes “The transition… to a truly domesti- cated feline would have involved living and breeding as a tame member of a human dwelling.” But it seems to us and to numerous other archaeologists that the purposeful introduction of the cat onto the island at a time when seafaring was prob- ably still in existence and its exceptional presence in the environment of the burial suggest that at least some cats did live in
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such conditions in Cyprus during the preceramic Neolithic period.
J.-D. VIGNE1ANDJ. GUILAINE2,3 1CNRS–Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Department of Ecology and Biodiversity Manage- ment, UMR 5197, C.P. 56, F-75231 Paris Cedex 5, France. 2CNRS-EHESS, Centre d’Anthropologie, 39 allées Jules Guesde, F-31000 Toulouse, France.
3Collège de France, Chaire des Civilisations de l’Europe au Néolithique et à l’Âge du Bronze, 11, Place M.
Berthelot, F-75005 Paris, France.
References
1. J.-D.Vigne, J. Guilaine,Anthropozoologica39, 249 (2004).
2. D. Helmer, L. Gourichon, D. Stordeur, Anthro- pozoologica 39, 143 (2004).
3. L. K. Horwitz, N. Goring-Morris,Anthropozoologica 39, 165 (2004).
4. P. Dikaios,Khirokitia(Monograph of the Department of Antiquities of the Government of Cyprus 1, Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, 1953).
5. E. Randi, M. Pierpaoli, M. Beaumont, B. Ragni, A. Sforzi, Mol. Biol. Evol.18, 1679 (2001).
6. S. J. M. Davis,The Archaeology of Animals (Batsford, London, 1987).
Figuring Out What Works in Education
IN HIS ARTICLE“MEAGER EVALUATIONS MAKE IT hard to find out what works,” J. Mervis writes about the difficulties of assessing education research (News of the Week, 11 June, p. 1583). The only way to establish a curriculum’s effectiveness is through randomized, control trials similar to those used in clinical research. The idea of controlled trials in evaluation is certainly not new, and I learned about them in the 1970s while studying for a Ph.D. in educa- tion. Unfortunately, interest in educational program evaluation has remained theoretical in schools. In fact, in frustration, I left educa- tion studies and moved to academic medi- cine, where effectiveness research and systematic literature reviews to find best practices are the norm (1). I take issue with the idea that controlled studies are difficult to do because “[i]t’s hard to exclude people from
a program that they think is working.”
Controlled studies are based on rational inclu- sion and exclusion criteria and aim to demon- strate under which circumstances and for whom programs work best (if they work at all). Also, although it is true that measuring human behavior is “hard to quantify,” that does not mean we cannot do it reasonably well. In academic medicine, we have found ways to measure concepts like satisfaction, decision-making, and quality of life. Surely, with effort, educational evaluators can iden- tify valid measures of educational outcomes.
One possible explanation for the poor studies we find in education is that evalua- tions cost as much as program development.
The best ones are conducted by multidiscipli- nary teams of educational researchers and experts in design, measurement, and data analysis. Educational programs are always in a cash crisis. Yet the consequences of imple- menting programs of unknown quality are likely to be even more costly in terms of the educational opportunity they waste.
ARLENEFINK Center for Research, Education & Quality in Health, 1562 Casale Road, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272, USA. E-mail: afink@mednet.ucla.edu
Reference
1. See, for example, B. Stein et al.,JAMA290, 603 (2003).
CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS News of the Week:“Patient advocate named co- inventor on patent for the PXE disease gene” by E.
Marshall (27 Aug., p. 1226). The article incorrectly stated that Charles Boyd’s group at the University of Hawaii was first in a four-way race to report the gene 4 years ago. Although the four groups published within a few weeks, and Boyd’s group holds the patent, the first report in print was by Jouni Uitto and colleagues at the Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.
Random Samples:“Side effect” (6 Aug., p. 775).
The item should have noted that University of Pittsburgh geneticist Robert Ferrell resigned as chair of his department because he is undergoing treatment for recurring non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
LE T T E R S
www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 305 17 SEPTEMBER 2004 TECHNICAL COMMENT ABSTRACTS
COMMENT ON“The Early Evolution of the Tetrapod Humerus”
P. E. Ahlberg
Shubin et al. (Reports, 2 April 2004, p. 90) claimed that specimen GSM 104536 from Scat Craig, Scotland—
described as the earliest known tetrapod humerus—entirely lacks tetrapod characteristics. This unsupported assertion contradicts the published descriptions and comparative analyses of the specimen, and thus misrepre- sents this potentially important fossil.
Full text at www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/305/5691/1715c
RESPONSE TOCOMMENT ON“The Early Evolution of the Tetrapod Humerus”
Michael I. Coates, Neil H. Shubin, Edward B. Daeschler
Virtually all of the features used to associate GSM 104536 with tetrapod humeri are difficult to assess either because of preservation or differences between tetrapods and their fish relatives. This leaves two alternatives:
Either the bone is not a tetrapod humerus or it represents forms far beyond the known range of early humeral diversity. In the absence of more complete material, this bone remains enigmatic.
Full text at www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/305/5691/1715d
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