How do you persuade an Anti-Vaxer to change their mind?

vaccines

From last August there is a great Canadian article that lays out a good way to effectively communicate to people who have serious doubts about vaccines. It is worth reading in full, but since they have proposed seven steps, I’d like to chime on and comment on each myself. There was and still is a … Read more

Climate: How have humans transformed the planet?

vegetation biomass

Rather obviously our planet contains rather a lot of vegetation. What is also understood to some degree is that this vegetation does influence our climate (Hint: plants absorb CO2). What is perhaps not so well appreciated is that humans have had a rather profound influence upon the currently existing quantity biomass. Well yes, we all … Read more

Output from the 2017 AGU meeting – Scientific Activism

AGU

Once a year the Comic-Con of the Earth, space and climate sciences holds a meeting, and in 2017 it was in New Orleans. This is the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. As a result Reporters will inevitably suffer the horrendous stress of being sent to hang out in New Orleans for the weekend (oh the … Read more

2017 Arctic Report card published by NOAA

Arctic Report Card

For the past 12 years now NOAA has been published an annual Arctic Report card and the 2017 issue is now available on-line. The report card exists because something quite extraordinary has been happening in the Arctic and 2017 has not seen any pause in that. Highlights Arctic shows no sign of returning to reliably … Read more

The seven censored words at the CDC – #CDC7words

banned words #CDC7words

Given the uproar I’d be surprised if you have not picked up on this, and yet knowing that you will most probably know about it does not prevent me writing about it because it is just so utterly bizarre. The Alpha Source A couple of days ago the Washington Post wrote about the CDC being … Read more

Exploring Science Denial – New study published

science denial

A new paper has been published within the Personality and Social Psychology bulletin entitled  … Not All Skepticism Is Equal: Exploring the Ideological Antecedents of Science Acceptance and Rejection We report three studies—including an analysis of large-scale survey data—in which we systematically investigate the ideological antecedents of general faith in science and willingness to support … Read more