Trevor Sloughter - The Epistemic Nightmare of Engaging with Climate Trolls

Trevor Sloughter - What I Learned From The Epistemological Nightmare Hellscape That Is Engaging With Climate Trolls

YouTube Live event With  the release of the latest IPCC report, the news abounds with climate  information while social media trolls spread disinformation. Trolling is  a tactic to disrupt or manipulate a discourse without regard for the  truth of the matter. This talk will examine what climate trolls do and  why they do it, but importantly will look at how they twist real  questions and concerns to make bad faith pseudo-arguments about both  science and policy. In the end, there are real lessons to learn  about scientific transparency, how non-experts can approach complex  scientific topics, and how we can critically read science news. We'll  talk about how to find and read scientific articles, where data are  published, and what sorts of tricks trolls will use (from manipulated  figures to gish-gallop arguments to straight up lies)— and hopefully  come out the other side with minimal amounts of hair pulled out in  frustration. Trevor is an ecological modeller who is just  finishing a PhD this very month at the University of Strathclyde. His  education and research career has largely focused on marine ecology by  way of numerical models, taking him from the Leibniz Centre for Tropical  Marine Ecology in Germany, to the Department of Maths & Stats at  Strathclyde here in Scotland, to the Department of Zoology in Oxford.  Along the way he's worked closely with earth scientists of all stripes  as global climate change impacts every ecosystem on the planet.