Scientists have a tendency to deal with nonsense by ignoring it. Papers that make it into the peer-reviewed literature that are obviously wrong are usually left to die a quiet death. They don’t get cited, they don’t get replicated, they don’t even get talked about (at least among the experts). It’s not worth anyone’s time (or career) to publish response papers demonstrating that nonsense is nonsense. And of course, nonsense that doesn’t even get into peer reviewed papers is even easier to ignore. The mainstream media and internet discussions are so full of it that many scientists just tune it out.<\/p>\n
But outside of a particular scientific field, lay observers find it hard to tell nonsense from sound science. So the nonsense spreads insidiously, and the public discourse diverges ever further from the scientific one.<\/p>\n
Luckily, there are a few people who are willing to devote themselves to tackling the nonsense head on. Ben Goldacre is my favourite example – he runs a newspaper column, blog and book called Bad Science<\/a>. It helps that he’s a witty writer and an even wittier speaker<\/a>. (It probably also helps that he’s British).<\/p>\n Of course, climate science gets more than its fair share of nutters spouting nonsense, so it’s good to see at last a more coordinated effort among science communicators to counter it. SkepticalScience<\/a> has been doing a wonderful job over the past couple of years at documenting all the false memes about climate change floating around on the internet, and countering them with actual science. Now they’ve ratcheted it up a notch, with a complete round up of all the nonsense spouted by a certain Christopher Monckton<\/strong><\/em><\/a>. I sure hope this becomes a series, as there are plenty of other<\/a> serial nutcases out there spreading misinformation about climate science.<\/p>\n