Warren Pearce
Biographic Data
| ID | 3474062 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Warren Pearce |
| GIVEN NAMES | Warren |
| FAMILY NAME | Pearce |
| SIGNATURE | PEARCE W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sheffield |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6884-3854 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 270 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
From authority to similarity: How Google transformed its knowledge infrastructure using computer vision
We investigate the impact of computer vision models, a prominent artificial intelligence tool, on critical knowledge infrastructure, using the case of Google search engines. We answer the following research question: How do search results for Google Images compare internationally with those for Google Search, and how can these results be explained by changes in Google's knowledge infrastructure? To answer this question, we carry out four steps: (…
Ethics-policy advisory ecosystems: Enhancing operative, discursive and adaptive capacities
The organisational practices, status and role of policy-focussed ethics advisory committees are significant in relation to scientific advances, societal transformations and crisis situations. Existing research has explored the effectiveness, de/politicisation and deliberative aspects of national ethics bodies, but their role in wider ecosystems of policy advice is neglected. It is sometimes argued that ethics committees have little impact on prac…
Anticipating the Challenges of AI in Climate Governance: An Urgent Dilemma for Democracies
There is increasing interest in AI as a means of accelerating climate policy interventions. While undoubtedly promising, AI's recent history in other fields demonstrates the risk of significant unintended consequences that widen social inequalities or reduce democratic engagement. In this perspective, we review recent developments in climate governance and in AI governance and anticipate several potential problems when the two are combined. In pa…
Socially-distanced science: How British publics were imagined, modelled and marginalised in political and expert responses to the Covid-19 pandemic
In early 2021, the United Kingdom (UK) had the highest per capita death rate from Covid-19 of any large country. Yet it had previously been ranked as one of the best prepared countries for a future pandemic. This gap between preparedness and performance has been the subject of intense debate, including as part of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry. In this paper, we contribute to this ongoing process of reflection by identifying the imagined public(s) withi…
Three institutional pathways to envision the future of the IPCC
Growing polarization around climate change on social media
Climate change and political polarization are two of the twenty-first century’s critical socio-political issues. Here we investigate their intersection by studying the discussion around the United Nations Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP) using Twitter data from 2014 to 2021. First, we reveal a large increase in ideological polarization during COP26, following low polarization between COP20 and COP25. Second, we show that this inc…
Trouble in the trough: How uncertainties were downplayed in the UK’s science advice on Covid-19
The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic has forced science advisory institutions and processes into an unusually prominent role, and placed their decisions under intense public, political and media scrutiny. In the UK, much of the focus has been on whether the government was too late in implementing its lockdown policy, resulting in thousands of unnecessary deaths. Some experts have argued that this was the result of poor data being fed into epidemiological m…
Learning the lessons of Climategate: A cosmopolitan moment in the public life of climate science
A decade after Climategate, climate change may be established as a social fact, yet the after‐effects live on. This Advanced Review assesses the impact of Climategate on public talk about climate change in the last decade. Reviewing academic articles, blogs, reports, books, and media articles, we identify three norms that set the foundations for Climategate to be seen as a scandal: (a) using scientific consensus to justify climate policy; (b) tha…
What do we know about public attitudes towards experts? Reviewing survey data in the United Kingdom and European Union
Recent developments in contemporary politics have cast doubt on the status of expertise and led to the oft-repeated claim that the public have had enough of experts. In response, we review existing survey measures on experts and expertise in the European Union and United Kingdom with three main findings. First, there is insufficient survey data available to strongly support any claims regarding public attitudes to experts. Second, the evidence th…
NGO perspectives on the social and ethical dimensions of plant genome-editing
The social media life of climate change: Platforms, publics, and future imaginaries
Social media is a transformative digital technology, collapsing the “six degrees of separation” which have previously characterized many social networks, and breaking down many of the barriers to individuals communicating with each other. Some commentators suggest that this is having profound effects across society, that social media have opened up new channels for public debates and have revolutionized the communication of prominent public issue…
Visual cross-platform analysis: Digital Methods to Research Social Media Images
Analysis of social media using digital methods is a flourishing approach. However, the relatively easy availability of data collected via platform application programming interfaces has arguably led to the predominance of single-platform research of social media. Such research has also privileged the role of text in social media analysis, as a form of data that is more readily gathered and searchable than images. In this paper, we challenge both …
Science and the politics of openness: Here be monsters
examines the collaborations between scientists and the entertainment industry.He is currently writing the book Indecent Science, which will explore the historic interactions between science, religion and movie censorship.Adam Kokotovich is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Minnesota, studying invasive-species risk assessment and management.An interdisciplinary social scientist, he is interested in highlighting and opening to …
Beyond Counting Climate Consensus
Several studies have been using quantified consensus within climate science as an argument to foster climate policy. Recent efforts to communicate such scientific consensus attained a high public profile but it is doubtful if they can be regarded successful. We argue that repeated efforts to shore up the scientific consensus on minimalist claims such as “humans cause global warming” are distractions from more urgent matters of knowledge, values, …
A Reply to Cook and Oreskes on Climate Science Consensus Messaging
In their replies to our paper (Pearce et al., 2017), both Cook and Oreskes agree with our central point: that deliberating and mobilizing policy responses to climate change requires thinking beyond public belief in a scientific consensus. However, they both continue to defend consensus messaging, either because of ‘the dangers of neglecting to communicate the scientific consensus’ (Cook, 2017, p. 1) or because ‘“no consensus”...remains... a contr…
Science advice for global challenges: Learning from trade-offs in the IPCC
In the context of ongoing debates about the place of knowledge and expertise in the governance of global challenges, this article seeks to promote cross-sectoral learning about the politics and pitfalls of global science advice. It begins with the intertwined histories of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the global climate policy regime, before examining the politics of different ‘framings’ of the climate problem and the c…
Against the tide of depoliticisation: The Politics of Research Governance
Research has identified a general trend towards depoliticisation. Against this trend, we identify opportunities for politicisation through the international emergence of a research governance tool: ‘responsible research and innovation’ (RRI). RRI provides a focus for political struggles over the public value of research and innovation at a time when science policy is given a privileged role in driving economic growth
Communicating climate change: Conduits, content, and consensus
Climate change has been the subject of increasing efforts by scientists to understand its causes and implications; it has been of growing interest to policymakers, international bodies, and a variety of nongovernment organizations; and it has attracted varied amounts of attention from traditional and, increasingly, online media. These developments have been aligned with shifts in the nature of climate change communication, with changes in how res…
Climate Change on Twitter: Topics, Communities and Conversations about the 2013 IPCC Working Group 1 Report
In September 2013 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its Working Group 1 report, the first comprehensive assessment of physical climate science in six years, constituting a critical event in the societal debate about climate change. This paper analyses the nature of this debate in one public forum: Twitter. Using statistical methods, tweets were analyzed to discover the hashtags used when people tweeted about the IPCC report,…
Scientific data and its limits: Rethinking the use of evidence in local climate change policy
Climate policy is typically seen as informed by scientific evidence that anthropogenic carbon emissions require reducing in order to avoid dangerous consequences. However, agreement on these matters has not translated into effective policy. Using interviews with local authority officials in the UK’s East Midlands region, this paper argues that the ideas, arguments and data informing local climate policy have been grounded in evidence from the nat…
Evidence and meaning in policy making
In 2011, Sense About Science launched a campaign backed by various celebrities, academics and other public figures entitled Ask for Evidence, 'saying that consumers, voters and patients should demand evidence for scientific and medical claims to counter a tide of misinformation' (Sense About Science, 2011).The campaign website provides examples of people asking for evidence on public claims in such disparate policy areas as video game addiction, …
Evidence and policy: Discourses, meanings and practices
The new randomised controlled trials (RCT) movement in public policy: Challenges of epistemic governance
Since 2012, a new movement of government departments, think tanks and high-profile individuals within the UK has sought to promote the increased usage of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in public policy. They promote RCTs as an evidence-based corrective for the inappropriate certainties of experts. Recent government reports and public debate around this initiative are reviewed and analysed within a framework for epistemic governance: normativ…
Visual cross-platform analysis: Digital Methods to Research Social Media Images
Analysis of social media using digital methods is a flourishing approach. However, the relatively easy availability of data collected via platform application programming interfaces has arguably led to the predominance of single-platform research of social media. Such research has also privileged the role of text in social media analysis, as a form of data that is more readily gathered and searchable than images. In this paper, we challenge both …
The new randomised controlled trials (RCT) movement in public policy: Challenges of epistemic governance
Since 2012, a new movement of government departments, think tanks and high-profile individuals within the UK has sought to promote the increased usage of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in public policy. They promote RCTs as an evidence-based corrective for the inappropriate certainties of experts. Recent government reports and public debate around this initiative are reviewed and analysed within a framework for epistemic governance: normativ…
Evidence and policy: Discourses, meanings and practices
The social media life of climate change: Platforms, publics, and future imaginaries
Social media is a transformative digital technology, collapsing the “six degrees of separation” which have previously characterized many social networks, and breaking down many of the barriers to individuals communicating with each other. Some commentators suggest that this is having profound effects across society, that social media have opened up new channels for public debates and have revolutionized the communication of prominent public issue…
NGO perspectives on the social and ethical dimensions of plant genome-editing
Against the tide of depoliticisation: The Politics of Research Governance
Research has identified a general trend towards depoliticisation. Against this trend, we identify opportunities for politicisation through the international emergence of a research governance tool: ‘responsible research and innovation’ (RRI). RRI provides a focus for political struggles over the public value of research and innovation at a time when science policy is given a privileged role in driving economic growth
Evidence and meaning in policy making
In 2011, Sense About Science launched a campaign backed by various celebrities, academics and other public figures entitled Ask for Evidence, 'saying that consumers, voters and patients should demand evidence for scientific and medical claims to counter a tide of misinformation' (Sense About Science, 2011).The campaign website provides examples of people asking for evidence on public claims in such disparate policy areas as video game addiction, …
Communicating climate change: Conduits, content, and consensus
Climate change has been the subject of increasing efforts by scientists to understand its causes and implications; it has been of growing interest to policymakers, international bodies, and a variety of nongovernment organizations; and it has attracted varied amounts of attention from traditional and, increasingly, online media. These developments have been aligned with shifts in the nature of climate change communication, with changes in how res…
Science advice for global challenges: Learning from trade-offs in the IPCC
In the context of ongoing debates about the place of knowledge and expertise in the governance of global challenges, this article seeks to promote cross-sectoral learning about the politics and pitfalls of global science advice. It begins with the intertwined histories of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the global climate policy regime, before examining the politics of different ‘framings’ of the climate problem and the c…
Learning the lessons of Climategate: A cosmopolitan moment in the public life of climate science
A decade after Climategate, climate change may be established as a social fact, yet the after‐effects live on. This Advanced Review assesses the impact of Climategate on public talk about climate change in the last decade. Reviewing academic articles, blogs, reports, books, and media articles, we identify three norms that set the foundations for Climategate to be seen as a scandal: (a) using scientific consensus to justify climate policy; (b) tha…
Scientific data and its limits: Rethinking the use of evidence in local climate change policy
Climate policy is typically seen as informed by scientific evidence that anthropogenic carbon emissions require reducing in order to avoid dangerous consequences. However, agreement on these matters has not translated into effective policy. Using interviews with local authority officials in the UK’s East Midlands region, this paper argues that the ideas, arguments and data informing local climate policy have been grounded in evidence from the nat…
Science and the politics of openness: Here be monsters
examines the collaborations between scientists and the entertainment industry.He is currently writing the book Indecent Science, which will explore the historic interactions between science, religion and movie censorship.Adam Kokotovich is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Minnesota, studying invasive-species risk assessment and management.An interdisciplinary social scientist, he is interested in highlighting and opening to …
Anticipating the Challenges of AI in Climate Governance: An Urgent Dilemma for Democracies
There is increasing interest in AI as a means of accelerating climate policy interventions. While undoubtedly promising, AI's recent history in other fields demonstrates the risk of significant unintended consequences that widen social inequalities or reduce democratic engagement. In this perspective, we review recent developments in climate governance and in AI governance and anticipate several potential problems when the two are combined. In pa…
Climate Change on Twitter: Topics, Communities and Conversations about the 2013 IPCC Working Group 1 Report
In September 2013 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its Working Group 1 report, the first comprehensive assessment of physical climate science in six years, constituting a critical event in the societal debate about climate change. This paper analyses the nature of this debate in one public forum: Twitter. Using statistical methods, tweets were analyzed to discover the hashtags used when people tweeted about the IPCC report,…
Scientific data and its limits: Rethinking the use of evidence in local climate change policy
Climate policy is typically seen as informed by scientific evidence that anthropogenic carbon emissions require reducing in order to avoid dangerous consequences. However, agreement on these matters has not translated into effective policy. Using interviews with local authority officials in the UK’s East Midlands region, this paper argues that the ideas, arguments and data informing local climate policy have been grounded in evidence from the nat…
Evidence and meaning in policy making
In 2011, Sense About Science launched a campaign backed by various celebrities, academics and other public figures entitled Ask for Evidence, 'saying that consumers, voters and patients should demand evidence for scientific and medical claims to counter a tide of misinformation' (Sense About Science, 2011).The campaign website provides examples of people asking for evidence on public claims in such disparate policy areas as video game addiction, …
Evidence and policy: Discourses, meanings and practices
The new randomised controlled trials (RCT) movement in public policy: Challenges of epistemic governance
Since 2012, a new movement of government departments, think tanks and high-profile individuals within the UK has sought to promote the increased usage of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in public policy. They promote RCTs as an evidence-based corrective for the inappropriate certainties of experts. Recent government reports and public debate around this initiative are reviewed and analysed within a framework for epistemic governance: normativ…
Communicating climate change: Conduits, content, and consensus
Climate change has been the subject of increasing efforts by scientists to understand its causes and implications; it has been of growing interest to policymakers, international bodies, and a variety of nongovernment organizations; and it has attracted varied amounts of attention from traditional and, increasingly, online media. These developments have been aligned with shifts in the nature of climate change communication, with changes in how res…
Beyond Counting Climate Consensus
Several studies have been using quantified consensus within climate science as an argument to foster climate policy. Recent efforts to communicate such scientific consensus attained a high public profile but it is doubtful if they can be regarded successful. We argue that repeated efforts to shore up the scientific consensus on minimalist claims such as “humans cause global warming” are distractions from more urgent matters of knowledge, values, …
A Reply to Cook and Oreskes on Climate Science Consensus Messaging
In their replies to our paper (Pearce et al., 2017), both Cook and Oreskes agree with our central point: that deliberating and mobilizing policy responses to climate change requires thinking beyond public belief in a scientific consensus. However, they both continue to defend consensus messaging, either because of ‘the dangers of neglecting to communicate the scientific consensus’ (Cook, 2017, p. 1) or because ‘“no consensus”...remains... a contr…
Science advice for global challenges: Learning from trade-offs in the IPCC
In the context of ongoing debates about the place of knowledge and expertise in the governance of global challenges, this article seeks to promote cross-sectoral learning about the politics and pitfalls of global science advice. It begins with the intertwined histories of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the global climate policy regime, before examining the politics of different ‘framings’ of the climate problem and the c…
Against the tide of depoliticisation: The Politics of Research Governance
Research has identified a general trend towards depoliticisation. Against this trend, we identify opportunities for politicisation through the international emergence of a research governance tool: ‘responsible research and innovation’ (RRI). RRI provides a focus for political struggles over the public value of research and innovation at a time when science policy is given a privileged role in driving economic growth
The social media life of climate change: Platforms, publics, and future imaginaries
Social media is a transformative digital technology, collapsing the “six degrees of separation” which have previously characterized many social networks, and breaking down many of the barriers to individuals communicating with each other. Some commentators suggest that this is having profound effects across society, that social media have opened up new channels for public debates and have revolutionized the communication of prominent public issue…
Visual cross-platform analysis: Digital Methods to Research Social Media Images
Analysis of social media using digital methods is a flourishing approach. However, the relatively easy availability of data collected via platform application programming interfaces has arguably led to the predominance of single-platform research of social media. Such research has also privileged the role of text in social media analysis, as a form of data that is more readily gathered and searchable than images. In this paper, we challenge both …
Science and the politics of openness: Here be monsters
examines the collaborations between scientists and the entertainment industry.He is currently writing the book Indecent Science, which will explore the historic interactions between science, religion and movie censorship.Adam Kokotovich is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Minnesota, studying invasive-species risk assessment and management.An interdisciplinary social scientist, he is interested in highlighting and opening to …
What do we know about public attitudes towards experts? Reviewing survey data in the United Kingdom and European Union
Recent developments in contemporary politics have cast doubt on the status of expertise and led to the oft-repeated claim that the public have had enough of experts. In response, we review existing survey measures on experts and expertise in the European Union and United Kingdom with three main findings. First, there is insufficient survey data available to strongly support any claims regarding public attitudes to experts. Second, the evidence th…
NGO perspectives on the social and ethical dimensions of plant genome-editing
Trouble in the trough: How uncertainties were downplayed in the UK’s science advice on Covid-19
The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic has forced science advisory institutions and processes into an unusually prominent role, and placed their decisions under intense public, political and media scrutiny. In the UK, much of the focus has been on whether the government was too late in implementing its lockdown policy, resulting in thousands of unnecessary deaths. Some experts have argued that this was the result of poor data being fed into epidemiological m…
Learning the lessons of Climategate: A cosmopolitan moment in the public life of climate science
A decade after Climategate, climate change may be established as a social fact, yet the after‐effects live on. This Advanced Review assesses the impact of Climategate on public talk about climate change in the last decade. Reviewing academic articles, blogs, reports, books, and media articles, we identify three norms that set the foundations for Climategate to be seen as a scandal: (a) using scientific consensus to justify climate policy; (b) tha…
Growing polarization around climate change on social media
Climate change and political polarization are two of the twenty-first century’s critical socio-political issues. Here we investigate their intersection by studying the discussion around the United Nations Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP) using Twitter data from 2014 to 2021. First, we reveal a large increase in ideological polarization during COP26, following low polarization between COP20 and COP25. Second, we show that this inc…
Three institutional pathways to envision the future of the IPCC
Socially-distanced science: How British publics were imagined, modelled and marginalised in political and expert responses to the Covid-19 pandemic
In early 2021, the United Kingdom (UK) had the highest per capita death rate from Covid-19 of any large country. Yet it had previously been ranked as one of the best prepared countries for a future pandemic. This gap between preparedness and performance has been the subject of intense debate, including as part of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry. In this paper, we contribute to this ongoing process of reflection by identifying the imagined public(s) withi…
Anticipating the Challenges of AI in Climate Governance: An Urgent Dilemma for Democracies
There is increasing interest in AI as a means of accelerating climate policy interventions. While undoubtedly promising, AI's recent history in other fields demonstrates the risk of significant unintended consequences that widen social inequalities or reduce democratic engagement. In this perspective, we review recent developments in climate governance and in AI governance and anticipate several potential problems when the two are combined. In pa…
From authority to similarity: How Google transformed its knowledge infrastructure using computer vision
We investigate the impact of computer vision models, a prominent artificial intelligence tool, on critical knowledge infrastructure, using the case of Google search engines. We answer the following research question: How do search results for Google Images compare internationally with those for Google Search, and how can these results be explained by changes in Google's knowledge infrastructure? To answer this question, we carry out four steps: (…
Ethics-policy advisory ecosystems: Enhancing operative, discursive and adaptive capacities
The organisational practices, status and role of policy-focussed ethics advisory committees are significant in relation to scientific advances, societal transformations and crisis situations. Existing research has explored the effectiveness, de/politicisation and deliberative aspects of national ethics bodies, but their role in wider ecosystems of policy advice is neglected. It is sometimes argued that ethics committees have little impact on prac…
Political science (19 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Politics (12 works) · Climate Change Communication and Perception (11 works) · Public relations (11 works) · Climate change (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Sustainability and Climate Change Governance (8 works) · Economics (7 works) · Public Administration (7 works)