This
week I read two parts of The Global
Warming Reader. Both of these
readings were pulled from climate change deniers, and more importantly, from
people who tried to spread the denial to other people. The first article was a speech written by
James M. Inhofe to the United States Senate.
This speech used science and scientists to show that there is no
scientific consensus on climate change and that if the climate did warm up, it
would be good for humans. The second
article was from the book State of Fear,
in which Michael Crichton tells a story of environmentalists lying about
climate change for publicity and money.
Both of these excerpts are very convincing. Inhofe uses scientific “facts” to support his
claims, which sound convincing even to me at first because experiments were
done to support the other side of the debate.
Crichton uses a more emotional, story-like approach, which may not
convince people that environmentalists are distrustful to start but may get
them thinking that way subconsciously.
Acquiring good information is an
incredibly important life skill. How a
person acquires their information and what they choose to believe dictates how
they live their lives. People say that
college is all about learning how to learn.
Learning some things can be very straightforward because there is no
controversy or debate on what it is or how it may be done. But when a person is confronted with two
sources with completely different claims, how does one determine which is
correct and form an opinion on the subject?
This is an incredibly important
question for environmentalists in general to answer because many environmental
topics are controversial, deal with society and their views, and are made more
confusing by industrial campaigns. This
confusion can lead to people not supporting an environmental cause, or even being
avidly against it.
I think overall, people do not have
time in America to read into depth on different subjects. Most Americans probably believe some form of
the media, and are especially influenced the first time that they hear about a
topic. The media is rich with industrial
propaganda and research. As this book
has discussed, climate change skeptics many times get as much news time as the
people claiming that it is real. This
results in confusion. Ross Gelbspan’s
article “The Battle for Control of Reality” brings up a few great points on
this subject. The first is that
industry-funded research does not need to be peer-reviewed the same way federal
government research needs to be, which makes it less reliable. Only peer-reviewed research should be
considered seriously, for obvious reasons.
Additionally, people should look at who funds the research to get an
idea of if it could be swayed as a result of the funder. These two things can help people to get
through a large amount of information and find out what is the closest thing to
the facts.
As I brought up before, even if
people knew that these checks should be done before believing a study, people
do not have time for all of that. It
takes good research to find out who funded a certain paper or if a journal is
peer-reviewed or not. So what can an
environmentalist do to help make this job easier for the average citizen? Again, the options are top-down or
bottom-up. Top-down regulation could
involve only allowing journals to call themselves scientific journals if they
are peer-reviewed or to not let non-peer-reviewed scientific journals advertise
their results in the media. The other,
more realistic option would be to spread knowledge to the general population on
how to choose reliable sources. More
than anything, explaining what peer-reviewed science means and making sure that
the words “peer-reviewed” shows up in the media during debates on subjects like
climate change may help the most. This
would take all of the guessing out of it and make it easy for people to believe
in environmental causes like climate change.
No comments:
Post a Comment