SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
NASA chief scientist weighs in
Americans are "under siege" from disinformation designed to confuse the public about the threat of climate change, Nasa's former chief scientist has said.
Speaking to the Guardian, Ellen Stofan, who left the US space agency in December, said that a constant barrage of half-truths had left many Americans oblivious to the potentially dire consequences of continued carbon emissions, despite the science being unequivocal.
"We are under siege by fake information that's being put forward by people who have a profit motive," she said, citing oil and coal companies as culprits. "Fake news is so harmful because once people take on a concept it's very hard to dislodge it."
During the past six months, the US science community has woken up to this threat, according to Stofan, and responded by ratcheting up efforts to communicate with the public at the grassroots level as well as in the mainstream press.
"The harder part is this active disinformation campaign," she said before her appearance at Cheltenham Science Festival this week. "I'm always wondering if these people honestly believe the nonsense they put forward. When they say 'It could be volcanoes' or 'the climate always changes'... to obfuscate and to confuse people, it frankly makes me angry."
Stofan added that while "fake news" is frequently characterised as a problem in the right-leaning media, she saw evidence of an "erosion of people's ability to scrutinise information" across the political spectrum. "All of us have a responsibility," she said. "There's this attitude of 'I read it on the internet therefore it must be true'."
No editorial comment included.
(Score: 5, Touché) by theluggage on Sunday June 11 2017, @09:13PM (1 child)
Ah, yes, that famous climate scientist Professor Al Gore. Yes, lets take his "inspired by real scientists" speeches as the yardstick by which to judge the actual scientific evidence. I mean, its 2017 and the ice caps are still there. OK, they may have retreated to a record extent, and even archive sites specifically chosen for their permafrost [slashdot.org] have turned out to be not so perma after all . ...but, hey, a leading after-dinner speaker said they'd be gone so global warming must be wrong.
So, lets not do anything to avert a possible catastrophe until the scientists can guarantee that it will happen on October 15 2024, just before teatime (GMT) - while they're at it, why don't we have them predict the next 5 years baseball results so we can place some bets and raise a bit of cash to tackle the issue. Because, if its a false alarm, we'll end up with all of these leftover irreplaceable fossil fuels that can only be used for making plastics, drugs, agricultural chemicals etc. when we could have burned them instead.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday June 12 2017, @12:05AM
Larsen C [abc.net.au]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford