Science Community Considers Approaches to Climate Disinformation

Despite overwhelming scientific agreement on the question of human-caused global warming, a major gap exists between this consensus and the public’s understanding of the issue. Writing in BioScience, Jeffrey A. Harvey, of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, and his colleagues examine the causes of the consensus gap, focusing on climate-denier Internet blogs and the ways in which they use topics such as Arctic sea ice extent and polar bear well-being to foment misapprehensions about climate change among the public. Harvey and his colleagues performed an analysis of 45 climate-denier blogs, noting that 80% relied primarily on a single denier blog for their evidence, which itself had a single author who “has neither conducted any original research nor published any articles in the peer-reviewed literature on polar bears.” This paucity of expertise and evidence is common among such blogs, say the authors, as are personal attacks against researchers and attempts to misstate the extent of scientific uncertainty about crucial issues. Such narrowly framed attacks are designed to generate “keystone dominoes,” say the authors, which deniers can then use as proxies for climate science as a whole. “By appearing to knock over the keystone domino, audiences targeted by the communication may assume all other dominoes are toppled in a form of ‘dismissal by association.’” Such misinformation poses a particular problem, because “a...
Source: BioScience Press Releases - Category: Biology Source Type: news