Shock News : The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy Operates On A Shoestring Budget

2 Responses to Shock News : The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy Operates On A Shoestring Budget

1. daveburton says:

   May 17, 2013 at 1:18 pm

   A few weeks ago I attended a Sea Grant (part of the UNC system, but funded by NOAA) workshop on “Communicating Changing Conditions at the Coast.” It took place in Jacksonville, NC, which is an hour up the road from NC’s best tide-gauge, at Wilmington (where there’s been no sea-level rise at all in the last 20 years). A couple of dozen mostly-young, mostly-women heard lectures and did exercises on how to teach people about the dangers of sea-level rise, critique fliers on the subject, etc. Almost all of the speakers and attendees were CAGW true believers, of course.

   Back when I signed up, I had offered to give a powerpoint presentation, 15 minutes or more, on the science of sea-level rise, gratis. But the organizers told me there was no time for that in their tightly scheduled, two-day workshop. (However, when I got there I found that they did manage to add a speaker from the NC Nature Conservancy, who wasn’t on the printed agenda.)

   One of the fliers we critiqued contained a graph of sea-level at a particular tide gauge, which just about everyone there hated. I hated it because it was out-of-date, and ended on a positive noise spike, creating the illusion of accelerated sea-level rise at the very end; if it had been up-to-date, there’d have been none. Most of the rest of the people there hated it because graphs are just tooo hard to understand.

   The fee was nominal ($25 for two days, including two catered meals). The workshop itself, and just about everyone else there, were on various government agency tabs.

   We divided into small groups, and each designed a little “communication” project. In my small group, I complained that the biggest problem with communicating about climate change is that most of the people doing the communicating don’t understand the science. It frustrates me, I said, that when I give my presentations on sea-level rise, many listeners don’t understand it, because they lack basic scientific literacy, such as the ability to understand graphs. Most can’t look at a graph, for instance, with time on the x-axis and some quantity on the y-axis, and tell you whether the quantity is accelerating or decelerating. So I’ve taken to adding a short digression to my sea-level presentations, to teach the audience how to recognize acceleration in a graph. What would benefit me, I said, would be critical review of my presentations, to teach me where I need to explain better, etc.

   Someone in the group got the idea, then, of making our group project be designing a workshop to teach scientists how to communicate about science to non-scientists. They got all excited about it, and one, a University professor, declared that she could probably get grant money to fund the project!

   “What very different worlds we live in,” I said.

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2. phodges says:

   May 17, 2013 at 6:02 pm

   That’s because it’s the “Ron Paul” wing of the party…who everyone wants to shut down. Everyone has their own little special interest served by the power of the state, which they are loathe to see infringed. Even if it means their own enslavement, since the state is in service of much more powerful interests than theirs.

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAPt5cxPEhs

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