A large survey of corn farmers in twelve US midwestern states (n = 6849) was used to determine the role of multiple dimensions of uncertainty on prior experience with climate change, attitudes towards climate adaptation, and use of climate outlooks in agricultural decision-making. Epistemic uncertainty refers to a perception about the level of information about a phenomenon. Aleatoric uncertainty is a perception that a phenomenon occurs at random and no new information will reduce uncertainty while response uncertainty refers to the perception of the efficacy of an action to reduce a risk. Epistemic and response uncertainty explained a large portion of variance of farmers’ attitudes towards adaptation and their willingness to use weather and climate outlook tools. Aleatoric uncertainty however did not add or added only a small portion of variance explaining farmers’ attitudes climate adaptation or use of climate tools. Our results indicate that climate scientists should not treat farmers’ uncertainty as a monolithic concept, but instead embrace its multidimensionality. We also suggest that reception of expert-led presentations or tools that have a lot of modeling data, which are often layered with statistical uncertainty, can negatively influence farmers’ model uncertainty.

中文翻译：

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美国农民的气候变化不确定性：对农业适应气候变化的多维不确定性和态度的考察

对美国中西部 12 个州 (n = 6849) 的玉米农民进行的一项大型调查被用来确定不确定性的多个维度对先前气候变化经验、对气候适应的态度以及在农业决策中使用气候展望的作用。认知不确定性是指对现象信息水平的感知。任意不确定性是一种现象随机发生的感知，没有新信息会减少不确定性，而响应不确定性是指对降低风险的行动有效性的感知。认知和响应的不确定性解释了农民对适应的态度以及他们使用天气和气候展望工具的意愿的很大一部分差异。然而，偶然的不确定性并没有增加或只增加了解释农民对气候适应或气候工具使用的态度的一小部分方差。我们的研究结果表明，气候科学家不应将农民的不确定性视为一个单一的概念，而应接受其多维性。我们还建议，接受专家主导的演示或具有大量建模数据的工具，这些数据通常带有统计不确定性，会对农民的模型不确定性产生负面影响。