Cosmic rays and internet memes
When a CERN paper on cosmic rays was published last month it was quickly picked up by skeptic bloggers and the mainstream media as proof that climate change is caused by the sun. As James Dellingpole put it on his Telegraph blog:
If Michael Crichton had lived to write a follow-up to State of Fear, the plotline might well have gone like this: at a top secret, state of the art laboratory in Switzerland, scientists finally discover the true cause of “global warming”. It’s the sun, stupid.
But, as this video by Australian science journalist, Potholer, points out: Dellingpole doesn’t read science papers. He gets his information from other bloggers, who have also probably not read the science.
The video does a good job explaining both the science in the paper and the role of bloggers in spreading skeptic memes.