2024 ALISE Annual Conference

Keynote Presentation:

Truth, Ethics, and Climate Change: How Can We Save The Planet in an Era of Misinformation?

Climate change has been described as “ethics smeared out in time and space.” The collective action of billions of people over many decades causes untold suffering for millions of other people, often in distant parts of the world and for generations not yet born. Our everyday reasoning about right and wrong fails us: to some degree “we” are all complicit in a global economic system that kills and displaces millions of people worldwide.
Addressing climate change requires clear, evidence-based reasoning about the causes and consequences. Yet we also live in the age of social media, when misinformation spreads like wildfire, while scholarly analysis and investigative journalism is hidden behind expensive paywalls. In this talk, Dr. Steve Easterbrook will illustrate this dilemma through case studies of misinformation about climate science, showing what happens when scientists try to correct the record. In some of these case studies, tools we normally praise for democratizing information — such as freedom of information legislation and citizen science initiatives — were subverted to amplify doubt and confusion. As a result, the public, along with many of our leaders, remain confused about the scale and urgency of the problem.
So, what do we do about this? In the second part of the talk, we’ll explore the role of open data platforms in combating misinformation. The challenges in this work arise from the scale of the global climate system, and the sheer volume and complexity of the available data. Significant gaps remain between scientific data about the climate system, and the information local communities need on how they will be impacted, and what they can do about it. These gaps also contribute to the misinformation problem. The keynote will conclude with three key challenges:

1. How do we ensure data about climate change comes with sufficient information about its provenance to guide appropriate use for decision-making?
2. How do we ensure local contextual information and marginalized voices are included in such decision-making?
3. How do we address the larger ethical questions of equity and inclusion in how we collect and share climate data?

These challenges involve some hard questions and discussions in addressing the climate crisis: who decides what problems we pay attention to, whose voices are included in decision-processes, and how we tackle the biases and inequities that are built into our information infrastructures.