I started the blog largely out of frustration at the poor quality of science reporting in the media, and because I was tired of hearing people spouting unchallenged climate change myths. As the project's gone on I've realised that communicating science is more challenging than I expected. Reassuringly, I've found that many other people have experienced this too, and many have tried to find novel ways to combat it. Others however have tried to exploit this, whether that's simply by trying to get away with lazy reporting or by actively trying to obscure the truth for personal gain.
There's no silver bullet to deal with all this. With media that focuses on bad news and social media that allows us to live in bubbles of like-minded people, in many ways it seems there is little to do. However, I would argue that this makes it more important than ever to find novel ways to communicate climate science.
In some ways social media makes this easier than before, as traditional media can be bypassed. I thought the post about sea ice, in which I used graphs from twitter, was an excellent example of this. Graphics are an excellent way to communicate a lot of information in a simple way, and mediums such as twitter allow a large audience to see them without necessarily having to search for them.
However, as has been widely discussed recently, social media promotes an echo-chamber effect. Even more worryingly, it allows the proliferation of fake news. How this can be combated is a more challenging problem, one for which I'm still not sure I have any good answers.
Overall, I think the main takeaways from this blog should be:
1) Just because something is published in a major newspaper or website, it isn't necessarily true. It's worth learning which outlets tend to report science most accurately, and knowing a good place to fact check (I'd recommend skeptical science for all climate-related queries).
2) Look beyond the headline; more often than not it's clickbait.
3) The importance of effective science communication cannot be overstated, and is certainly an area that would benefit from improvement.
4) Climate change is one of the biggest threats facing the world today, but the worst thing we can do is give up the fight before its even begun. We need to arm ourselves with the facts and build a solution from there.
Finally, I hope you've enjoyed reading the blog so far as much as I've enjoyed writing it. Keep the comments coming, it's always great to hear feedback. Thanks for all your interest so far!
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