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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @05:30AM (1 child)
So when it fails you'll claim that the people in power dropped capitalism and thus it wasn't the ideologies fault... Wow. Just. Wow.
Humans will never respect an ideology "just cause", and so you will always end up with people trying to game the system. So we must try and set upa system that makes it difficult for one person to gain too much power. We aren't there yet, but democracy is the first step.
Oh ya, and you're either old and crazy or young and naive, anything else is stupid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @02:05PM
Governments cannot be further reformed; democracy is the last step in governmentalism.
The next step is market competition in those sectors of society that have come to be viewed as the purview of government.