Believers vs. Skeptics

There is fierce competition around the science of climate change for a few reasons. The first reason is politics; more specifically, the partisan U.S. Congress has not ratified any type of Protocol that would support the fight against climate change. This is mainly due to the political nature climate change has taken since Al Gore promoted action around climate change. Unfortunately, climate change has become a Democratic issue and therefore Republican Senators will not even touch this issue. The second reason is denial on the part of these skeptics about climate change. Some say that this denial happens because these skeptics do not want to face the fact that they will have to change their lifestyle. The third reason is the lack of information released to the public because many governments, namely the United States, do not want to alarm the public with climate change statistics. This is truly unfortunate because this is how fearing either for or against climate change begins. Misinformation can be a powerful tool and can lead to naïve arguments against climate change.

In terms of making sense of and evaluating the scientific claims these two differing websites assert the viewer must go into both of these websites with critical and yet open-minds. This is important because we have to act as analyses of this problem because there is no clear answer to many of these questions. Learning as much as possible from credible sources is the only valid way of differentiating all the accurate information from all the inaccurate information. These credible sources would be resources such as scientific journals, government documents, NASA and other organizations and literary sources along those lines.

Personally, I liked the Grist website the best because it seemed more credible. There were advertisements on the page and there was more discussion of politics on this website than on the friends of science website. The thought process behind advertisements being a positive sign is companies felt confident enough with the message of the website to advertise their company on this webpage. Also, politics is an important part of climate change no matter how much it is hindering the action around climate change. On the friends of science website, I read the myth/fact page and it seemed as though they were attacking believers in climate change, whereas Grist worded their website as if they were defending themselves from attacks a skeptic might have when discussing climate change.