By Jack Dini ——Bio and Archives--August 20, 2024

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Climate and radiation misinformation are rampant these days. It is the intentional dissemination of false information and can take many forms, from hard denial and conspiracy theories to softer, more insidious disinformation that seeks to muddy the waters. It is responsible for untold fears and in some cases many of dollars.

Here are three examples of ongoing climate and radiation misinformation.

“Why is it that the expert climate community has been unable or unwilling to correct rampant misinformation about extreme weather with some even promoting that misinformation?”, asks Roger Pielke, Jr. One answer he says, is that the “end justifies the means, or. in other words, doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is OK,” even if that means downplaying or even misrepresenting one’s own research. (1)

He participated in a roundtable discussion hosted at the headquarters of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) with a group of US Senators, the Secretary of the Treasury and about one-half dozen other researchers.

When the roundtable was announced, Pielke experienced something new in his professional career. Several of his much more senior colleagues contacted him to downplay or even to misrepresent his research on the roles of climate and society in the economic impacts of extreme weather. Pielke had become fairly well known in the atmospheric sciences research community for his work showing that increasing US hurricane........

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