For those reading this, it should come as no surprise that the media doesn’t always get climate right—especially on the opinion pages. Unfortunately, there’s little that can be done to correct a piece once it’s published. One can write a letter to the editor, but that is unlikely to receive the same amount of attention as the original, full-length article.
Helping to address this problem is the website Climate Feedback, who has just launched a new crowdfunding campaign, described by its founder and editor in a piece in the Guardian. The site works by reaching out to scientists to ask them to “grade” and fact check climate pieces. For example, they looked at Bjorn Lomborg’s recent WSJ piece and rated its overall scientific credibility to be “low to very low”. It uses the hypothes.is annotation system to even provide the fact check overlaid on the piece, a great way to read the truth along with the “opinions” like those found in Forbes posts by Heartland’s James Taylor.
With this system, they’ve successfully gotten at least one correction to a story made, so it’s clearly an effective tool for improving scientific journalism. Now they’re asking for everyone’s support, so that they can hire an editor to coordinate the reviews and facilitate the analyses. While not everyone is in a position to provide monetary support, you can amplify their message with #StandWtScience on Twitter.
Speaking of which, deniers got ahold of an email circulating in preparation for the launch of this campaign, and immediately began flooding the original hashtag (#StandWithScience) with denial in a vain attempt to get outside their fringe Twitter echochamber. But since this was before the launch of the campaign, deniers were yet again outsmarted by the clever folks who #StandWtScience instead of against it.
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