The Peter Gleick Incident: All Heat and No Light: Scientific American
The proper response to misinformation is better information. Heartland and other groups like them just repeat the same old nonsense over and over again. You can spend your time trying to show that they are corrupt in some way, but that doesn’t help. Everybody knows there are fossil-fuel interests that are fueling these groups. It’s not news to demonstrate that. As scientists, we're supposed to be ethical, and upstanding, and we’re supposed to have truth and light on our side, and generally we do, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not human, that we’re not sometimes prone to irrationality in the heat of the moment.
...If you went out on the street right now and you asked people, “Hey, have you heard about this Peter Gleick climate thing?”, even in my educated neighborhood where everybody is working at Columbia University or Barnard College none of them would know anything about it. So are we getting worked up about this? Yes. Does it affect the larger discourse? No. Inside baseball becomes outside baseball for a brief moment.
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2 comments:
It ain't so much what we know that gets us into trouble, it's what we know that just ain't so?
Let's see if we can fix something that Scientific American's "consistently moderate voice" guest said for the sake of telling the whole truth:
[It is critical that we push a portrayal implying] everybody knows there are fossil-fuel interests that are fueling these groups, [otherwise the public will instead notice how our side of the issue is so reluctant to engage in any genuine scientific debate with skeptic scientists.]
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