Thursday, June 24, 2010

Peak readership for anti-science blogs? « Climate Progress

A potentially hopeful sign for information literacy, albeit in a stark context (see the full post)

In a AAAS presentation this year, William R. Freudenburg of UC Santa Barbara discussed his research on “the Asymmetry of Scientific Challenge”:

New scientific findings are found to be more than twenty times as likely to indicate that global climate disruption is “worse than previously expected,” rather than “not as bad as previously expected.”

The anti-science crowd, however, is stuck pushing its disinformation, that this is all a hoax or a wild exaggeration.  That limits the studies they can write about and/or forces them to repeat the same limited number of well-debunked arguments again and again and again, like attacking the uber-vindicated Hockey Stick for the umpteenth nauseating time.

It’s kind of like peak oil.  We’re not making any more oil so eventually production has to peak.  They’re not really making any new disinformation, and it just gets harder and harder to recycle the same old BS.

Peak readership for anti-science blogs? « Climate Progress

No comments: