Researchers find climate denial blogs lack science

[Cara J]

Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) have long been a “poster species” for climate change, but researchers looking into global warming skepticism say that has also made them the target of global warming deniers. Studying blog posts about polar bears on websites dedicated to casting doubt about climate change, researchers found these blogs “disregard the overwhelming scientific evidence of Arctic sea-ice loss and polar bear vulnerability,” even the blogs that claim to be based on science. “They’re using science as a camouflage,” said Jeff Harvey, a professor at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology and lead author of the study published in BioScience. Harvey and his colleagues looked at 90 climate blogs that mentioned both polar bears and sea ice and checked the blogs against 92 scientific papers focusing on polar bears and climate change. The team found that while 45 climate change denial blogs claimed to be based on science, they didn’t overlap at all with the peer-reviewed evidence in the papers. Instead, about 80 percent of the blogs relied on a single blog, polarbearscience.com, which Harvey said had no original research or peer-reviewed papers published on polar bears. On the other hand, the team found, 45 science-based blogs did match the [...]

 

Read more: http://wildlife.org/researchers-find-climate-denial-blogs-lack-science/