4 January 2015, Washington Post, Here’s how scientific misinformation, such as climate doubt, spreads through social media. Social media is no doubt a powerful force when it comes to the sharing of information and ideas; the problem is that not every article shared on Facebook or Twitter is true. Misinformation, conspiracy theories and rumors abound on the Internet, helping to propagate and support sentiments such as climate doubt and other forms of environmental and scientific skepticism. Figuring out how such ideas diffuse through social media may be key to scientists and science communicators alike as they look for ways to better reach the public and change the minds of those who reject their information. A study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences sheds new light on the factors that influence the spread of misinformation online. The researchers conclude that the diffusion of content generally takes place within clusters of users known as “echo chambers” — polarized communities that tend to consume the same types of information. For instance, a person who shares a conspiracy theory online is typically connected to a network of other users who also tend to consume and share the same types of conspiracy theories. This structure tends to keep the same ideas circulating within communities of people who already subscribe to them, a phenomenon that both reinforces the worldview within the community and makes members more resistant to information that doesn’t fit with their beliefs. Read More here
25 August 2015, The Guardian, Here’s what happens when you try to replicate climate contrarian papers. A new paper finds common errors among the 3% of climate papers that reject the global warming consensus. Those who reject the 97% expert consensus on human-caused global warmingoften invoke Galileo as an example of when the scientific minority overturned the majority view. In reality, climate contrarians have almost nothing in common with Galileo, whose conclusions were based on empirical scientific evidence, supported by many scientific contemporaries, and persecuted by the religious-political establishment. Nevertheless, there’s a slim chance that the 2–3% minority is correct and the 97% climate consensus is wrong. To evaluate that possibility, a new paper published in the journal of Theoretical and Applied Climatology examines a selection of contrarian climate science research and attempts to replicate their results. The idea is that accurate scientific research should be replicable, and through replication we can also identify any methodological flaws in that research. The study also seeks to answer the question, why do these contrarian papers come to a different conclusion than 97% of the climate science literature? Read More here