Open access notables
It s always a special pleasure to note an article including Skeptical Science s founder John Cook in the author roster. Misinformation and the epistemic integrity of democracy includes not only Cook as a collaborator but also a cast of other familiar authorities on human cognition in connection with climate science, in particlar how our mental equipment struggles with following a continuous thread of truth through a tangled knot of disconnected confusion in the form of misinformation. We re not necessarily very good thinkers in the best of circumstances. We often fail to think clearly when we re in the presence of misinformation or synthetic ignorance, especially when it s calculated and crafted exactly for the purpose of paralyzing competent thinking. In their abstract the authors note Democracy relies on a shared body of knowledge among citizens, for example trust in elections and reliable knowledge to inform policy-relevant debate. One can extend that th
Open access notables
In this week s government/NGO reports section, another rapid assessment by World Weather Attribution, an outfit dedicated to keeping us informed of the impacts of climate change on weather events happening around us right now. WWA s new report Climate change more than doubled the likelihood of extreme fire weather conditions in Eastern Canada finds: