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Meteorologists targeted in climate misinfo surge:
Once trusted faces on the news, meteorologists now brave threats, insults and slander online from conspiracy theorists and climate change deniers who accuse them of faking or even fixing the weather.
Users on Twitter and other social media falsely accused Spain's weather agency of engineering a drought, Australia's of doctoring its thermometers and France's of exaggerating global warming through misplaced weather stations.
"The coronavirus is no longer a trend. Conspiracy theorists and deniers who used to talk about that are now spreading disinformation about climate change," Alexandre Lopez-Borrull, lecturer in Information and Communication Sciences at the Open University of Catalonia, told AFP.
[...] "In this context people feel alienated and end up listening to people they never listened to before, with messages appealing directly to the emotions."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by driverless on Tuesday May 16, @06:09AM (2 children)
Although it's small consolation to people being victimised by this, one response is to point out to the nutters that reality is that which refuses to go away even if you've stopped believing in it.
Unfortunately by the time the reality sinks in for them it may be too late to do anything about it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16, @08:58AM
There might be a bit of both sides tho. Not to defend the nutters but sometimes they have a point, usually just not the one they think they have.
There are people in science that have strong social media, and old media, presence these days, where they usually share aspects of their science or act as experts or talk about their latest projects and results, usually the version for non-academia. So they are sort of inviting them to communicate. It's just not the communication anyone wants.
Another aspect is that while the science might be right, it doesn't mean the public or fringe nutters likes to hear it. I find that this appears to be very common in things to have to do with certain topics such as the environment, how much we must save or use less of things to somehow survive into the future. If you have little and they ask you to sacrifice more then that isn't going to be popular, if you need your car to get places etc you don't want to hear that you should pay more for gas etc. It doesn't necessarily mean they don't believe the science, it's the proposed solution they don't agree with. It doesn't matter even if it is the only solution. Nobody wants to have it worse now for some pipedream or potential future.
There are also things that have later been shown to be false or less correct that fuel them and their theories, usually reports containing a large amount of probabilities. A lot of modelling falls into this problem. As worst-case scenarios where everything is pulled to 11 are presented as highly probable or THE one and only truth and are a sure thing that will happen if we don't do things yesterday. If they had all come true I would have posted this while sitting in my underwater lair as the sea level was supposed to have raised several meters by now. Yet it didn't. Science that gets it wrong, even if it's just the probabilities that are wrong fuel their weird and wacky theories.
It probably doesn't help either that there are scientists with agendas that gets mixed into the bunch. They clearly have an agenda to push and science to match what their message is. My impression in that some fields of science these agenda-driven scientists are becoming more and more common.
Pointing out the nutters? It's not really a solution. First they don't care if you would name and shame them, they would probably just see that as validation of their theories as you are trying to ridicule them or trying to cover up the truth. So while amusing perhaps it wouldn't accomplish anything. Secondly they want you to respond so they can get their message, aka their truth, out to more people. Why help them with that? While probably futile it's containment of stupidity to not respond to them.
Having worked on several projects that have had published reports I can tell you there is a certain uptick of email with their theories and what we did wrong or how we are hiding the truth or how we are part of the lizard-people-cabal-keeping-the-humans-down etc after they are reported on. You can't really respond to them, at this point you don't even read them anymore. They just get sorted into the nutter-folder, they are saved if they somehow later would go crazy and try to take things beyond the emails.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17, @11:10AM
The predictions by scientists show the sea levels won't rise by that much to affect me. As for more bad weather - just look at history there's been plenty of bad weather. Heck there was a Year Without Summer. There have been big floods.
If you're getting big multi-decade loans to buy property close to the "normal case scenario" high tide mark, your main problem is something else and not climate change.
Also a lot of the floods nowadays are worse because of over development and poor development. If a city grows in size and you don't enforce a requirement to store/slowdown rainwater and runoff (water detention/retention basins, roof rainwater collection etc) no surprise the floods will be bigger and happen more often than the times when the city was smaller. If a lot of the rainfall gets stored and slowed the floods will be fewer and smaller.