America Under Siege, Fake Climate Change News Threaten American Lives

When it comes to fake news, people automatically assume that it has to do with politics. However, this pervading presence of malice and destruction also has its tendrils wrapped around other important fields. Climate science is a good example, which a prominent scientist is now saying is under siege. The problem is particularly troubling in the US, where so many citizens are prone to becoming victims of misinformation.

The scientist in question is Ellen Stofan, who is the former chief scientist at NASA. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Stofan said that America is under siege by the proliferation of fake news, which she is blaming on the fossil fuel industry.

“We are under siege by fake information that’s being put forward by people who have a profit motive,” Stofan said. “Fake news is so harmful because once people take on a concept it’s very hard to dislodge it.”

Apparently, the scientific community has noticed the increased number of fraudulent news spreading on the internet, which contains misinformation designed to confuse Americans regarding the impact of carbon emissions on climate change. In response, scientists and communications experts have been trying to increase their influence over the conversation by actually spreading scientific data on a grassroots level.

Stofan is particularly critical of the general attitude that more and more Americans are adopting with regards to information. This concept that reading something off the internet makes it true is a clear sign of erosion of the ability to look at a particular set of information and scrutinize it.

Fake news can be a particularly volatile topic because it can be difficult to determine if the information is fake or not. The only exception is science and scientific facts, Futurism notes. In science, there is no such thing as an “alternative fact,” which is an agenda that fake news is trying to spread.