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: 0, Troll) by VLM on Sunday June 11 2017, @07:29PM (4 children)
My guess is they're not who they say they are.
The problem with a bunch of scientists becoming a mere mouthpiece of one political party is last century they ended up causing a mixture of destruction and laughing stock.
We know the effect of ending them is even worse, mass death on a global scale at best. Mixed with a large dose of feel good that does nothing to solve the problem.
Speaking of
there's a large cultural gap in how the political parties prep for "dire consequences" so asking the right wing to basically suicide the country and give the world economy to someone else not dumb enough to suicide (China, Russia, take your pick) isn't going to sell well to the right. Meanwhile the left none of whom took any STEM classes in college sees symbolic acts as being more important than scientific results, so the natural response to global warming is to brag on twitter about how you bought a new Prius and thats all you need to do, to show your superiority at social status signalling on the topic of global warming. It won't actually help the situation at all, which for the left is good because that means more meaningless status signalling.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 11 2017, @09:07PM (1 child)
Mass death on a global scale would be best! Man! Nothing would be better than to be able to prune about 6 billion off the planet. Just keep the Aussies, Canadians (except this time let's grant Quebec its separation) and Americans (well, the better ones anyway) and Germany and Scandinavia... okay, and a few Brits, Scots, and Irishmen, what the hell. But that's it!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @03:09PM
But only the true irishmen?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 11 2017, @09:28PM (1 child)
An entire post of partisan bullshit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @04:32PM
Yup, that's VLM for you.