CLIMATE SCIENCE COMMUNICATIONS
Responding to Climate Misinformation
How should climate scientists respond when their results are cherry picked or misrepresented to further an ideological agenda? The ACE CRC is hosting a seminar for scientists by the founder of Skepticalscience.com, John Cook, on the psychology of climate science denial and productive strategies for handling the problem.
Climate misinformation has a potent, negative influence on public perceptions about climate change. Further, misinformation can potentially cancel out scientists’ attempts to communicate accurate science. Nevertheless, responding to misinformation presents opportunities for scientists to communicate important scientific concepts and boost critical thinking skills.
In this presentation, John Cook from Global Change Institute at The University of Queensland will explain the psychological research into misinformation, outline the structure of an effective debunking and describe how this can be applied in newspaper op-eds, MOOC videos and peer-reviewed papers.
Date: Wednesday 27 July
Time: 3:00pm
Location: Aurora Lecture Theatre, IMAS Building, University of Tasmania, Hobart
John Cook is the Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at The University of Queensland. He created the website SkepticalScience.com, which won the 2011 Australian Museum Eureka Prize for the Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge.
John co-authored the college textbook Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis and the book Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand. His writing was included in The Best Australian Science Writing 2014, a collection of Australia’s finest science writing of the year.
In 2013, he published a paper analysing the scientific consensus on climate change that gained worldwide media attention, being tweeted by President Barack Obama. The paper was awarded the best paper of 2013 published in Environmental Research Letters and is the most downloaded paper in the 80+ journals published by the Institute of Physics.
He developed a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC), Making Sense of Climate Science Denial, which is currently available at http://edx.org/understanding-climate-denial.
Authorised by the CEO of the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre October 2019.
The ACE CRC was established and supported under the Australian Government’s Cooperative Research Centres Program.
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