People gather outside the White House in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, June 1, 2017, to protest President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate change accord.
AP Photo/Susan Walsh
While many people are willing to happily gamble with pharmaceuticals, which may offer the most trivial of benefits, they are not ready to believe the facts on climate change.
A shot of fake news now and your defenses are raised in the future?
funnyangel/Shutterstock.com.
Does science have an answer to science denial? Just as being vaccinated protects you from a later full-blown infection, a bit of misinformation explained could help ward off other cases down the road.
Science is not religion, and we should not have blind faith in its powers.
Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters
What if extreme weather events could be attributed to human-induced climate change with confidence?
Nobody can observe events in the future so to study climate change, scientists build detailed models and use powerful supercomputers to simulate conditions, such as the global water vapor levels seen here, and to understand how rising greenhouse gas levels will change Earth’s systems.
NCAR/UCAR
Kevin Trenberth, National Center for Atmospheric Research and Reto Knutti, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich
People worry Washington is losing respect for science and even the centuries-old scientific method. Two climate scientists explain how science can be done when talking about the future.
Scientists address the prime minister at last year’s Science Meets Parliament.
Mark Graham
Elizabeth Suhay, American University School of Public Affairs
Scientists are concerned that politics will trump evidence in the new administration. A researcher of political psychology explains why these worries matter far beyond questions of science.
Pardon me while I blow this out of proportion.
Blowfish image via www.shutterstock.com.
Laser-like focus on a tiny, unimportant detail can mean you miss the gorilla in the room – a tactic climate change deniers use to cast doubt on the science.
Janna Rose, Grenoble École de Management (GEM) and Marcos Barros, Grenoble École de Management (GEM)
There’s never been greater need for the study of what we don’t know, and why we’re not supposed to know it.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, often called the ‘father of the atomic bomb’ who chaired the ancestor of today’s Department of Energy, had his security clearance revoked during the ‘Red Scare’ of the 1950s.
AP Photo
A historian of science and technology says Trump team’s request for names of Department of Energy employees working on climate change recalls worst excesses of ideology-driven science in government.
So many voices but who should you listen to in any debate on science matters?
Shutterstock/coffeehuman
Modern science can be difficult or complex for one person to understand and verify, especially a non-scientist. So who should we believe when scientific evidence is met with denial?
NASA has a long history of conducting climate science. Here, a NASA camera captures a storm over South Australia.
NASA
One of Donald Trump’s senior advisers has recommended cutting NASA climate research because the science has become “heavily politicised”. The question is: by whom?
Not exactly a sustainability agenda.
AP Photos/Evan Vucci
Trump has promised to abolish Obama’s Clean Power Plan and back out of the Paris climate accord. But business could become a key firewall that won’t let Obama’s sustainability legacy die.
Yes, climate change came up during the debate but there was little substantive discussion of energy or environment.
Rick Wilking/Reuters
Trump is following in Ronald Reagan’s footsteps by pushing against regulations, but in the 1980s, it only awakened the public to environmental concerns.
Science works in ways that reflect our rationality.
armymaterielcommand/flickr
There’s a big difference between science and pseudoscience. But if people don’t understand how science works in the first place, it’s very easy for them to fall for the pseudoscience.
Galileo was right, but that doesn’t mean his fans are.
Justus Sustermans/Wikimedia Commons
One Nation Senator-elect Malcolm Roberts lauds Galileo as a hero who turned scientific consensus on its head. But the ‘Galileo gambit’ is just one weapon in the climate conspiracists’ arsenal.
Malcolm Roberts was number 2 on the Pauline Hanson’s One Nation ticket.
AAP Image/Dan Peled
Contrary to the claims of One Nation Senator-elect Malcolm Roberts’ that climate change is not happening, there is abundant evidence it is, but it might not be enough to persuade him.
Turnbull might be hamstrung by his barely-there majority.
AAP Image/Paul Miller
Malcolm Turnbull returns to the helm with a wafer-thin majority and a significant element in his government who still oppose climate action - can he defy the odds and serve up some credible policy?
Re-analysed data shows that Australia has indeed been hotter over the past 30 years than any time in the preceding millennium.
AAP Image/Dan Himbrechts
Australasia’s warming in recent decades is unprecedented in the past millennium. But a mistake in the paper reporting this finding took four years to fix, and was viciously attacked by bloggers.
Fossil fuel industry-funded organisations have played a big role in climate denial.
Coal power image from www.shutterstock.com
Professor of Management & Organizations; Professor of Environment & Sustainability; Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the Ross School of Business and School of Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan