Public opinion about solar radiation management: A cross-cultural study in 20 countries around the world

Some argue that complementing climate change mitigation measures with solar radiation management (SRM) might prove a last resort to limit global warming to 1.5 °C. To make a socially responsible decision on whether to use SRM, it is important to consider also public opinion, across the globe and particularly in the Global South, which would face the greatest risks from both global warming and SRM. However, most research on public opinion about SRM stems from the Global North. We report findings from the first large-scale, cross-cultural study on the public opinion about SRM among the general public (N = 2,248) and students (N = 4,583) in 20 countries covering all inhabited continents, including five countries from the Global South and five ‘non-WEIRD’ (i.e. not Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic) countries from the Global North. As public awareness of SRM is usually low, we provided participants with information on SRM, including key arguments in favour of and against SRM that appear in the scientific debate. On average, acceptability of SRM was significantly higher in the Global South than in the ‘non-WEIRD’ Global North, while acceptability in the ‘WEIRD’ Global North was in between. However, we found substantial variation within these clusters, especially in the ‘non-WEIRD’ Global North, suggesting that countries do not form homogenous clusters and should thus be considered individually. Moreover, the average participants’ views, while generally neither strong nor polarised, differed from some expert views in important ways, including that participants perceived SRM as only slightly effective in limiting global warming. Still, our data suggests overall a conditional, reluctant acceptance. That is, while on average, people think SRM would have mostly negative consequences, they may still be willing to tolerate it as a potential last resort to fight global warming, particularly if they think SRM has only minor negative (or even positive) impacts on humans and nature

Synformic confusion at the Advanced Level in ELT teaching in academic contexts.

Using words correctly is one component of language proficiency and must therefore be of importance to language teachers at academic contexts. This presentation will make reference to such factors as Spanish, a knowledge of the semantics of English morphology and reading comprehension skills in terms of how they impinge upon the correct choice of a word as opposed to any of its synforms, within the context of a focused practice of global comprehension skills and vocabulary formation at the post-intermediate and/or advanced level. Synforms are words with similar forms but different meanings and/or uses. This paper derives from the research project entitled Impacto de un registro de contenidos léxicos en el aprendizaje de vocabulario con dificultades generadas por similitud morfológica y especificidad semántica en niveles post-intermedio y avanzado de ILE (inglés como lengua extranjera), which identifies synformy as a source of difficulties for students? language proficiency at the post-intermediate and advanced level but does not look into the possible causes of "synformic confusion" (Koci&263;, 2008). Through error analysis (Ellis, 2008; Khansir, 2012) I undertake a classification of the students' mistakes (observed in exam exercises) and conclude that they often arise from a combination of interference of the mother tongue and an overgeneralization of the learners' interlanguage rules (Brown, 1994), or from a weak grammatical competence, regarding the semantic component that is always present in certain morphemes (Scarcella & Oxford, 1992). On numerous occasions, a lack of comprehension of a text leads to the use of an incorrect word. These are preliminary conclusions drawn from the research and they serve as a springboard for another research being carried out a micro-level (within the scope of one course at the National University of Córdoba) that seeks to confirm the conclusions and find ways to grapple with synformic confusion.Fil: Argüello Pitt, Matías. Universidad nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: González de Gatti, Marcela. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Lingüístic