Meh, somehow they think forest fires are a “new” thing, using that imagery to lead with. That, and how to tell stories nobody takes seriously. When it comes to Lewandowsky, there’s nothing [credible] about anything he says.
Confronting climate change in the age of denial: a special collection launched in PLOS Biology
People are hard-wired to respond to stories, but climate-denial narratives can be just as compelling as those that convey the facts about global warming. A new collection, “Confronting Climate Change in the Age of Denial,” publishing 9 October in the open access journal PLOS Biology, explores the challenges and pitfalls of using stories to communicate scientific evidence around climate change, offering both caveats and potential solutions to telling evidence-based climate change stories that can resonate with the public.
Science communicators and educators have long wrestled with the challenges of communicating evidence that contradicts people’s personal, religious, or political beliefs, particularly regarding evolution, vaccine safety, and climate change. A perfect case study of people’s tendency to create their own narratives to explain the seemingly inexplicable is the recent viral response to a photo of a starving polar bear. The photographers had hoped the starving bear could help people grasp what the future may hold for animals who can no longer depend on sea ice for hunting and shelter as global warming continues to melt polar ice sheets. But climate change deniers countered by circulating photos of healthy bears to claim that global warming is a hoax.
The collection features two articles by social scientists who offer different perspectives on enlisting narratives to convey climate change science and one by marine mammal experts who set the record straight on the likely impacts of climate change on Arctic wildlife.
“Marine mammals are ecosystem sentinels, capable of reflecting ocean variability through changes in their ecology and body condition,” argue Sue Moore, a biological oceanographer, and Randall Reeves, a marine mammal biologist, in “Tracking Arctic Marine Mammal Resilience in an Era of Rapid Ecosystem Alteration.” They propose a framework that adds ecological (e.g., geographic range and behavior) and physiological indicators to traditional demographics to provide a more comprehensive view of the health of populations. The authors hope that their framework, which can feed into existing global ocean surveys, offers “a path toward sustainability through improved prediction, more precaution, and wiser policy in this era of global environmental change.”
In “Climate Communication for Biologists: When a Picture Can Tell a Thousand Words,” psychologists Stephan Lewandowsky and Lorraine Whitmarsh examine strategies for using the anecdotes and images that satisfy our need for narrative without sacrificing scientific accuracy.
Science communication experts Michael Dahlstrom and Dietram Scheufele explore another dimension of the peril and promise of using stories to communicate science in “(Escaping) the Paradox of Scientific Storytelling.” Rather than telling stories to simply impart knowledge–which may prove unsuccessful, they say, since increased scientific literacy does not lead to greater acceptance of science–it may be better to tell stories about how scientific knowledge is produced. “In the end, using storytelling to primarily build scientific support through knowledge, attitude, or behavior goals without also engaging scientific reasoning might not help science in the long run.”
In publishing this collection, PLOS Biology editors hope that everyone who values unbiased scientific evidence thinks about ways to harness storytelling to help people grasp this complex but very real threat to our planet. We need to reclaim the storyline before it’s too late.
###
Articles in the Collection
Editorial:
Gross L (2018) Confronting climate change in the age of denial. PLoS Biol 16(10): e3000033. https:/
Articles:
Moore SE, Reeves RR (2018) Tracking arctic marine mammal resilience in an era of rapid ecosystem alteration. PLoS Biol 16(10): e2006708. https:/
Lewandowsky S, Whitmarsh L (2018) Climate communication for biologists: When a picture can tell a thousand words. PLoS Biol 16(10): e2006004. https:/
Dahlstrom MF, Scheufele DA (2018) (Escaping) the paradox of scientific storytelling. PLoS Biol16(10): e2006720. https:/
In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the collection’s freely available Editorial article in PLOS Biology: https:/
Citation: Gross L (2018) Confronting climate change in the age of denial. PLoS Biol 16(10): e3000033. https:/
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“Science communicators and educators have long wrestled with the challenges of communicating evidence that contradicts people’s personal, religious, or political beliefs, particularly regarding evolution, vaccine safety, and climate change. ”
Wow! They didn’t say ‘a flat earth’. And since when are endless vaccines “safe”?
A classic case of projection.
lewandowsky is a very skilled troll react- and yu become his puppet.
he knows what to wave that enrages the bull.
he prepares sharp sticks to probe for signs of hostility- and is sure to find it.
if you can’t name the game, he’ll have your 2 ears and tail as he struts around the corrida.
And how pictures can be used to deceive, again from Auntie Beeb
A plastic bottle:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-45787712
Washed up on a beach, along with 400 tonnes of other junk. The local coastguard has never seen so much all at once. The impression they’re trying to give is that it has been swilling around in The Ocean since before 1971.
Maybe even also, A Storm (strangely nameless for once) caused by Climate Change caused all this junk to all arrive at once. Strangely it will also still be present in a mid-Pacific patch the size of Texas. Time travel eh, When will it become a reality. Oh. Wait…..
In a way, the bottle and attendant junk did come from Climate Change
But the Climate Change was (obvious to me at least) a Flash Flood, caused by soil erosion, ripping through and old landfill site somewhere not far away.
Any thoughts on that Auntie?
Nah. Thought not. Don’t let the puritanical guilt ridden hands cease their wringing, even for a split-second.
Not even to engage in some honest investigative journalism which you constantly claim to be doing?
(Visit the Beeb and near the bottom of most pages is a link, asking you to find out why you can ‘Trust the BBC’. I ain’t gone there, I don’t trust my own stomach to retain its contents if I do)
aha excellent deduction on the bottle
no way could it have been exposed to sun/abrasion and kept the label as bright n clear as it was.
buried however makes a LOT of sense.
In the not too distant future psychologists will be able to devote their entire career to analysing Lewandowsky, such is the volume of material to wade through.
Peer-reviewed propaganda… what a concept.
The sooner we kill off expensive peer-review journals and force publicly funded science into open publication and open web review, the better off we’ll all be.
Basically, this is more of the “if only we could communicate our message better, people would believe us regardless of what the facts are” nonsense from the leftists/warmist. Here’s a hint for the leftists/warmist it doesn’t matter how you communicate your lies, the truth will win out in the end.
Confronting the absence of significant climate change in the age of denial
“…using stories to communicate scientific evidence around climate change, offering both caveats and potential solutions to telling evidence-based climate change stories that can resonate with the public.”
Evidence based? From this bunch?
And it’s a strawman argument he’s promoting in the first place, trying to convince us that climate change is real, something the skeptics have never denied.
Did everyone else miss it so far? He called this the “Age of Denial.”
I take this as an admission that we skeptics are largely winning the public debate.
… although I would change the label to the “Age of Realization.”