Originally a comment by Bjarte Foushaug on Highest ever.
I never bought into the “Information Deficit Model” of climate change denial (people don’t accept the science of climate change because they just don’t know what it says), nor for that matter do I buy the idea that “they have just been misinformed”. Sure, there is plenty of misinformation out there, but that in itself doesn’t explain why people actively and selectively seek out the misinformation, and are determined to believe it over the real information, which, after all, is also out there.
Which is not to say that there isn’t also plenty of plain old bad communication going on from the “right” side. My favorite candidate for the worst piece of science communication ever are the endless debates about whether or not a particular year is “the hottest year on record”. If you look at all the heat trapped in the Earth system (the “energy imbalance”), every new year is now the hottest on record, but how much of this excess heat is measured at the Earth’s surface varies because of the constant exchange of heat between the oceans and the atmosphere (through phenomena like El Niño / La Niña). When scientists argue over whether this is the “hottest year on record” what they actually mean is “hottest as measured at the Earth’s surface” for the simple reason that that’s the signal that’s easiest to detect (cf. looking where the light is good) even though everyone agrees that most of the heat ends up in the oceans. Still I don’t think I have ever talked to another lay person (even ones who are not climate change deniers) who didn’t take a formulation like “the hottest year since 1998” to mean that the Earth system as a whole was hotter in 1998.
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