Monday, February 11, 2008

On global warming denial

Naomi Oreskes is the researcher who sampled 928 published papers on climate change and found that zero challenged the scientific consense that anthropogenic global warming is occurring. In the lecture featured above - "The American Denial of Global Warming" - Oreskes explains in the first half of the video the science of global warming. In the second half she covers how energy industry funded think-tanks seek to use propaganda tactics to obfuscate the issue. Running time is about an hour.

h/t Deltoid

1 comment:

Spocko said...

One thing the think tanks do is to give the media an "expert" who is "on the other side". Why? Because the media have been trained that they need to cover both sides. If their are two sides they will call both sides and say "What do you think?"

So the quickest way to establish doubt is to create "the other side"

Each and every time a think tank is quoted it should have a comment after the quote that says, 'The XYZ Institute is partially funded by Exxon." And just like they had to finally say, 'Jim Smith is an and oil analyst for Big Bank, but his bank doesn't have big bank stocks" after the scandal with analysts pumping up stocks that their bank were trying to sell.

If you understand how the journalists work and how the think tanks work to subvert the discussion, you can help the journalist get to the truth. Or at least identify what is cranked up nonsense.