From the standpoint of an expert of climate change projections, I propose a framework of “Climate change risk communication,” in which various stakeholders, including citizens, experts, industries and governments, communicate with each other on climate change risks. For communication to support adaptation policy making, specific risk information for a particular region and a sector is required; Stakeholders’ proper understanding of uncertainties in natural climate variability and scientific projections is critical. For communication to support developing public opinions for mitigation policies and motivations for individual actions, comprehensive risk information for as various sectors and aspects as we can know at the global scale is required; I believe it important that experts provide unbiased information from a value-neutral standpoint, overcoming exaggerations seen in mass media as well as skepticisms. Overall, I regard it as important to distinguish supporting decision making from decision making itself and to develop mutual trust among stakeholders through the communication.

　 We discuss the public understanding of climate change issues from the risk governance point of view, which emphasizes “public participation for decision making process” in complex, normative-conflicted issues. The key is the relationship between individual and society.

　 There are many criticism on “the deficit model.” But our survey showed that there are significant gaps of the knowledge about the climate change issues, and this gap can be due to that public obtain information of climate change issues from mass media, or books, and those informations are often not well organized. Consequently, understanding of climate change issues is dependent on the public’s ability and trust in information sources, and as a result, people have many pieces of information, but they do not have any organized, systematic knowledge of climate change issues.

　 We observed participants’ several attitude patterns during our focus group interviews, such as confusion and conviction, suspicion and switching the issues, adaptation, and cynicism toward taking action. Some are due to the difficulty of understanding of the issues, others seem to be due to a distrust of information sources such as mass media.

　 From the standpoint of communicating the risks of future global warming in a clear, unbiased way to the society, we held a dialogue workshop between experts on climate impacts and the media, which was followed by a symposium for the citizens with a real-time survey to enhance two-way interactions. In the workshop with the media, questions regarding climate impacts were raised by the participants and classified. Through the process in which the experts on climate impacts answered to the questions, risks that are keys to effective risk communication were discussed. Based on the results from the media workshop, we designed a two-way symposium for citizens, in which we evaluated how the participants’ impression on global warming changed after listening to lectures. The exposure to lecture materials had a statistically significant impact on their perception of global warming damages, but not on the willingness to take action, while the biased composition of participants, all of whom had been conscious of global warming problem obviously, needs to be retained.

　 We discuss the possibilities and the issues of developing more effective tool for communication of climate change between mass media and researchers. Firstly, for an understanding of the actual situation of the communication between media and researchers, we explored mass media needs of information about climate change risk and issues in information-gathering by semi-structured interview surveys. We have found that confidence-building and relationship-building between mass media and researchers are the keys to promote communication of climate change risks. Based on these result, we designed and conducted the dialogue forum with the aim of building confidence and a relationship between mass media and researchers. The empirical observations indicate that the forum made some contribution for relationship-building. However, results of interview survey showed that journalists made different remarks about contents of the discussions depend on their work. We should consider the number of participants and specific target based on clear picture of the output of dialogue.

　 This paper analyzes how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is portrayed in three major Japanese newspapers by employing framing analysis, and what the social implications are. To conduct a systematic and comprehensive analysis for this purpose, we employed Pan and Kosicki’s framing devices and applied them to articles which refer directly to “IPCC” during the period of 1988 to 2007 (we analyzed a total of 1206 articles). From the results we found that the IPCC is portrayed as a “value-free,” “apolitical,” and “rational” scientific assessment body which alarms society with its predictions of disastrous climate change impacts. We also found that all three major Japanese newspapers portray the IPCC almost identically. The social implications of this IPCC portrayal to Japanese society are: 1. Considering Japan’s current level of greenhouse gas emissions and the status of proposed climate policy implementation, the portrayal of the IPCC as described above may not have been a factor influencing Japanese climate policies; 2. This IPCC portrayal may prevent rich understanding of IPCC’s climate science in Japanese society because it emphasizes only scientific aspects and totally ignores the ethical and/or political aspects of the IPCC and its reports.

　 There are many scientific uncertainties associated with global warming, and these uncertainties dis-tort the risks of climate change and make risk communication difficult to a large degree. For this rea-son, this study aims to determine how the scientific uncertainty over climate change influences the deci-sion-making of university students for plans aimed toward mitigating global warming, particularly their support for long-term carbon reduction targets. This study also determines the factors that affect indi-viduals’ responses to the scientific uncertainty. Therefore, a student experiment was conducted during lectures for university students, wherein information was dispersed in phases on issues such as the effects and costs of long-term reduction targets for global warming and the scientific uncertainties associated with the climatic sensitivity.

　 The results are as follows: (1) Recognition of the costs led 34% of the students to shift toward a pref-erence for less stringent reduction targets. (2) Recognition of the scientific uncertainties caused 19% of the students to shift toward a preference for more stringent reduction targets. (3) Individual responses to scientific uncertainty varied owing to three factors: recognition of the risks of global warming, recog-nition of the cause-and-effect relation between ozone layer depletion and global warming, and the main sources of information about global warming.

　 The “physiology” of the global warming issue is still in progress, and not sufficient yet to be applied to regional/local-based environmental policies. Thus, the topics dealt in this review are as follows: 1) uncertainties associated with temperature measurements, 2) various radiative forcing components which affect regional/local climates, 3) climate sensitivity which determines the global mean temperature, 4) the causes of several abnormal weathers and climates, 5) policies based on vulnerability/resilience approaches. On the basis of these considerations, it is shown that wide-ranging viewpoints should be employed in forming the countermeasures for the global warming issue. For example, highly developed technologies for coal-fired power plants (of Japan, in particular) can be utilized to generate a Win-Win policy, where CO2 and colored aerosol (from China for instance) can be reduced at the same time; this will give a number of merits, which cannot be obtained by concentrating on only reducing CO2 emission.

　 Global warming is an issue centered around the changes of the global climate mainly caused by alteration of concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere due to burning of fossil fuel by humans. To reduce its detrimental impacts on the human society, policies are needed in two aspects: adaptation to climate change and reduction of emission of CO2.

　 Scientific understanding of global warming emerged as a theoretical outlook. Rigorously speaking, we cannot predict future climate. Nevertheless scientists have become broadly confident about global aspects of climate change. On the other hand, it is local climate change, which is affected not only by CO2 but also by natural variability, that causes actual impacts.

　 The issue of global warming is a part of the issue of sustainability of the global human society. Human impacts on the natural environment, including those due to land use change, threaten human sustainability. Twin needs of adaptation and emission reduction urge us to face the limit of growth in the consumption of resources. They also point to the need to improve resilience of the poor part of the world by re-distributing the limited global resources.

　 This study examines the scientific controversy surrounding food safety regulation in the United States, specifically the dispute regarding health risks caused by carcinogenic chemicals, and the health benefits of Omega―3 fatty acids associated with fish intake, as presented in scientific literature. Using web searches, scientific literature and social commentary were selected, and then organized into three separate categories: (I) peer-reviewed articles, (II) research reports based on original scientific data, and (III) evaluation and commentary of these two-types of scientific literature.

　 Research was carried out by first analyzing the underlying process behind scientific controversies, and then examining the evidence using frame analysis of the actors involved. Results indicate: (1) in the case studies analyzed, scientific controversies proceed unresolved over a period of several years; (2) due to different modes of inquiry employed, there are often conflicting views among actors regarding the same issue; (3) the differences between these modes of inquiry are the result of differences in value and belief systems; (4) accordingly, frame analysis of scientific literature proves that conflicting evidence which sustains these scientific controversies is due to actors’ modes of inquiry.

　 A purpose of this paper is to reconsider a method of analyzing the issues and possibilities of modernization of societies in globalization. According to Anthony Giddens, the keyword of modernization is disembedding. The relationships with traditions change in the process of modernization. It means that a change of locality in globalization is not an extinction of traditions but their reflexive modernization. This shows that making much of locality based on pluralism is not equal to denying the change of traditions.

　 To avoid placing absolute trust in the present perspective, people need a chance to shaken their truism when they take part in the process of decision-making. A theory of reflexive modernization can work as a frame of reference which does not show one unique solution. It helps them to analyze the change of their locality from the past to the present, which can be a basis to find out the new choices they have not made.