How To Communicate Science to a Polarized US Audience

Prescott writes "Given the divisions in the US around subjects like evolution and climate change, scientists face challenges in how to communicate good science to a polarized US public. Speakers at the recent AAAS meeting talked about how scientific information is delivered to and understood by a public that interprets it via personal beliefs, religious and otherwise. 'The talks were organized by Matthew Nisbet, a professor of communications who is a proponent of the framing of science, in which communications techniques borrowed from the political realm are applied to promote scientific understanding. As such, a number of speakers advocated specific frames for publicly controversial scientific issues. Unfortunately, the use of those frames appears likely to generate controversy within the scientific community, and several speakers noted that science faces challenges that go well beyond communicating knowledge to the public. There were some hints of a way forward that might work for both the scientific community and the public, but the challenges appear significant.'"

Comments

Bigger Science

[ghostpirate_jay]

Lets tackle the major issue here...how to communicate science to a Polarized US Audience that they are NOT infact the only country in the world interested in science.

actually, lets just focus on getting the idea of other nations accross first.

Re:Science of Political Agenda?

[WheelDweller]

So much of American scientists are religous- not about an expressed creator, but instead how faith in what the media parrots (as if it knows anything at all) has become "the truth". See also: 1937-or-so when Himmler and Hitler learned that "A lie, repeated often enough, becomes the truth."

Like how "CO2 causes man-made climate change", when, in fact, CO2, when the ocean...ya know...that 3/4 of the Earth's surface, spews CO2, it cools, not heats the surface air. It's an 'inconvenient truth', but is core to the problems with this, the world's biggest hoax.

It's no surprise; these are the people trying to tell us that killer bees would kill us all before 1980, and the only way to change that was to vote Democratic and send money to Washington. But those lucky enough to survive that barrage had to also clear the acid rain, who, media types were convinced, would prevent children from playing outside, as early as 1980.

And let's not forget that large, invisible barrier with a hole in it, by which sending money to Washington and voting Democratic was the only way to survive. The nearly world-class hoax of the ozone hole. Such a non-event.

I'm tired of this, folks.

Science is science. It doesn't come by consensus- F=MA is not subject to opinion: it's fact. That's science. And it doesn't matter what the political context is at the time.

Nowdays science is a harlot, all for being paid, and happens when people align their favorite project with "Global Warming". It's unseemly to be this way, believing on faith that something is true, despite large volumes of actual science that refutes it.

Doesn't anyone care about freedom anymore? Must we all join the fascists? Any problem that can be solved by sending money to Washington or voting Democrat isn't worth solving. Can we stop it, now?