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by smolder 1794 days ago
Where normally this gets brought up as some reason we shouldn't trust climate science, this is actually a good example of how media sensationalizes shaky science to get people riled up. (The cooling theory, at its height of popularity, coexisted with a larger body of research predicting warming. I.e. it wasn't well supported.)
2 comments
coldtea 1794 days ago
The problem is this is based on "it's different this time", which doesn't preclude hearing the same kind of excuses in the future: "how early 21st century climate change stories was mostly sensionalization by the media, and real scientists differed (what with "global weirding")" and so on.
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exporectomy 1794 days ago
A recent survey in New Zealand found that 7% of people believed the worst case credible predicted sea level rise by 2100 is 15 meters or more, which is wrong. More people underestimated it too. But it shows that media sensationalism is probably leading people to ridiculous beliefs about climate change too.

People saying climate change is a disaster, crisis, catastrophe, etc. use those words because they haven't got a clue what's going to happen and are just hyped up on fear. The media sensationalizes it out of proportion while the solid science is relatively boring. There's also media sensationalizing it as a false bogeyman which encourages denialism. But either way, most people are just tools of the media because it's so much easier and more entertaining than reading dry science papers.

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tomjakubowski 1794 days ago
> found that 7% of people believed the worst case credible predicted sea level rise by 2100 is 15 meters or more, which is wrong

7%? Not very many. I would imagine much of it is random / thoughtless guessing, as opposed to someone strongly believing it to be true.

edit: presuming it is the survey from this paper, they didn't offer respondents an "I don't know" option. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

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exporectomy 1793 days ago
Yep, it might be that. But at the same time, who would even consider sea level might rise if not for the media talking about climate change? Surely, for many of them, the general idea came from sensationalization.
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