From rationalization to rationality: (In)sustainability of strategic narratives in&#160; science communication, ranging from climatic change to hydro-meteorological extremes
Authors: Ribau Mónica , Perdigão Rui , Hall Julia 
Published: March 2021

&lt;p&gt;Strategic narratives (persuasive use of story systems) in science communication have been gathering&lt;br&gt;increasing support, especially in the face of misunderstandings about high-impact climatic change and hydrometeorologic extremes.&lt;br&gt;The use of these narratives reveals, in line with linguistic research, that traditional scientific discourse&lt;br&gt;conception has become outdated. Should scientific discourse be centered on the description of discoveries?&lt;br&gt;Should the role of political discourse be to convince someone to act? Before answering these, it is necessary to&lt;br&gt;understand the crucial function that uncertainty plays in communication, along with its consequences in the&lt;br&gt;concepts of objectivity and truth. More importantly, understanding its role in scientific society and sustainability.&lt;br&gt;Unable to eliminate uncertainty altogether, science becomes an essential escort to recognize, manage&lt;br&gt;and communicate its pertinency. However, the most popular strategic narratives sideline uncertainty as a threat.&lt;br&gt;Denialists follow a similar approach, though they communicate uncertainty to discredit evidence. Comparatively,&lt;br&gt;in their latest Assessment Report, the IPCC characterized uncertainty whilst stating: &amp;#8220;uncertainty about impacts&lt;br&gt;does not prevent immediate action&amp;#8221;.&lt;br&gt;Scientific discourse outputs and social reality constructions influence each other. The moralization of&lt;br&gt;science communication reveals how XVII century revolutionary skepticism can now be perceived as a threat, and&lt;br&gt;facts expected from science can be deemed dogmatic truths and perceived as decrees through rationalism and as&lt;br&gt;an extension of Judeo-Christian philosophical influence. Equally important, uncertainty reinforces individual&lt;br&gt;freedom, while society grasps and recognizes certainty as security and demands it from institutions, accepting&lt;br&gt;degrees of authoritarianism to maintain a tolerable living condition.&lt;br&gt;From &amp;#8220;Climate Emergency&amp;#8221; to &amp;#8220;Thousand-Year Flood&amp;#8221;, public interest in climatic change and extremes&lt;br&gt;increases following high-impact events, yet trust in science plunges into a deep polarized divide among absolute&lt;br&gt;acceptance and outright rejection relative to the bold headlines conveyed not only in the media but also in some&lt;br&gt;scientific literature.&lt;br&gt;Political, religious and activist leaders strike one as prophets acting in the name of science. From&lt;br&gt;rationalism to rationality, scientific culture is pivotal to the analysis of complexity, objectivity, and uncertainty in&lt;br&gt;the definition of truth (absent from epistemological discussions for centuries). Humor/sarcasm, literature or&lt;br&gt;dialectic are examples of how to communicate entropy of scientific models, while reflecting about the role,&lt;br&gt;uncertainty, and mistake, retain in life.&lt;br&gt;&amp;#8220;People want certainty, not knowledge&amp;#8221;, said Bertrand Russel. However, neither science nor democracy&lt;br&gt;work like that, rather taking reality as having shades of grey instead of a reduced black-or-white dichotomy.&lt;br&gt;Science is not about giving just one single number to problems clearly not reducible to such, as that gives a false&lt;br&gt;sense of certainty and security in an entropic world where we cannot control everything.&lt;br&gt;In order to objectively analyze discourses in light of their uncertainty features, detecting whether they&lt;br&gt;contain polarized, absolutistic narrative patterns, we introduce a new process-consistent Artificial Intelligence&lt;br&gt;framework, building from Perdig&amp;#227;o (2020, https://doi.org/10.46337/200930). The complementarity of our&lt;br&gt;approach relative to both social and information technologies is brought out, along with ways forward to reinforce&lt;br&gt;the fundamental role of uncertainty in scientific communication, and to strengthen public confidence in the&lt;br&gt;scientific endeavor.&lt;/p&gt;