UPDATED: Not A Hopeful Sign

As much as I have long been an advocate for the development and honing of critical thinking skills (while readily admitting that I often fall short of the mark - for me, it is always a work in progress), I regret to report, via the CBC, that there is much, much work still to be done. In fact, many Canadians are having a great deal of difficulty distinguishing between facts and opinion, fake news and science fact. In our fraught times, that is surely a recipe for disaster.

Are scientific findings a matter of opinion? Forty-three per cent of Canadians agree that they are, suggests a new poll.

47 per cent (up from 40 per cent last year) agreed that "the science behind global warming is still unclear," despite what scientists have been calling for years "unequivocal" evidence.

19 per cent agree "there is a link between vaccinations and autism," even though the study that made the link was found years ago to be "an elaborate fraud."

The poll, commissioned by Ontario Science Centre, has results that should worry all of us. Maurice Bitran, chief executive officer of the Ontario Science Centre, had this to say:

"If you think that climate change is one of the main issues that we face as a society, and almost half of us think that the science is still unclear when there's a pretty broad scientific consensus about it, this affects the chances that we have to act in a unified way about it."

He is concerned about some of the findings that suggest a lack of trust in science and media coverage of scientific issues such as:

68 per cent agree that media coverage of scientific issues is "reported selectively to support news media objectives."

59 per cent agree that media coverage of scientific issues is "presented to support a political position."

Such conspiratorial views of the media when it comes to fact-based science should give us all pause to consider, among other things, the role media themselves play in this perception:

Kelly Bronson, a University of Ottawa professor who has studied and written about science communication, said people are confused about where to go for reliable information and how to tell facts from beliefs.

She thinks the media are partly to blame for focusing too much on telling both sides of the story: "It doesn't help the public learn how to distinguish true knowledge from mere opinion, if both are given equal weight in a news story."

An excellent illustration of this is to be found in a recent Hamilton Spectator letter to the editor:

RE: Republicans in denial (Sept. 13)

This article calls climate change skeptics "deniers", but is itself a denier. To accomplish this clever trick of contradicting itself, the Washington Post (WAPO) cunningly suppresses the huge hidden assumption behind their "denier" pejorative, which is that man-made climate change is settled science, which it isn't.

An example of the bad science behind "man-made climate change" is CO2, an essential component of all life including ours. In fact we likely need more of it. Reduce pollution, yes, but reduce CO2, no. We emphatically do not have a link between climate change and human-generated CO2.

Pedlars of bad science like Michael Mann are quoted supporting this unproven man-made climate change hypothesis. Natural phenomena like sea level rise are dragged in as proof of it, when actually the sea level is simply rising as it has been for thousands of years. Further, we should note that the climate change industry yields nice personal profits for its promoters, such as writers of columns like "Republicans in denial?"

It is difficult to connect these dots into a picture that warrants calling skeptics of man-made climate change "deniers", particularly when WAPO itself denies much.

Frank Gue, Burlington

Mr. Gue, and all others of his ilk, try to peddle the opinion that the science of climate change is not settled. The fact that it has been settled is but an inconvenience people like Gue circumvent by exploiting people's ignorance and prejudices. Are newspapers doing anyone a service by publishing such arrant nonsense?

Ignorance, sloppy thinking, mindless chatter and misdirection continue apace, but here is an incontrovertible fact: The time is growing very late, and the window to mitigation is rapidly closing.

UPDATE: Pursuant to the comments about online polls (one was used in the above Leger poll,) made by Jay and UU4077, it was not a poll in which just anyone could contribute. Here is an excerpt detailing its methodology:

QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH INSTRUMENT

A survey of 1,514 Canadians was completed online between August 15th to 16th, 2017 using Leger’s online panel, LegerWeb.

A probability sample of the same size would yield a margin of error of +/-2.5%, 19 times out of 20.

ABOUT LEGER’S ONLINE PANEL

Leger’s online panel has approximately 475,000 members nationally – with between 10,000 and 20,000 new members added each month, and has a retention rate of 90%.

QUALITY CONTROL

Stringent quality assurance measures allow Leger to achieve the high-quality standards set by the company. As a result, its methods of data collection and storage outperform the norms set by WAPOR (The World Association for Public Opinion Research). These measures are applied at every stage of the project: from data collection to processing, through to analysis. We aim to answer our clients’ needs with honesty, total confidentiality, and integrity.

My wife is part of a large online polling group. Originally responding to a telephone poll by EKOS, she was later contacted by the pollster asking her to become part of an online polling panel, as they needed someone in her demographic. My understanding is that such groups are meant to represent a large cross-section of Canadians, and therefore does not have the notorious self-selection and skewing that open online polls do.