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On November 6, 2024 the Consortium for Climate Risks in the Urban Northeast (CCRUN) hosted a webinar within the Green Infrastructure, Climate, and Cities Seminar Series about climate change misinformation and disinformation. CCRUN is a NOAA-funded initiative that has been studying the impact of climate change on the Northeast since 2010. The webinar was moderated by Franco Montalto, one of the co-investigators of the initiative. This webinar series began in 2014, and all previous seminars are archived on the CCRUN website for reference.
The webinar's topic focused on climate change misinformation and disinformation and included three speakers: Dr. Gavin Schmidt, Dr. John Cook, and Dr. Emily Vraga who each gave a presentation on this critical topic. Below, we feature each presentation separately to make the 2-hour long webinar easier to take in. Clicking on the image will take you to the relevant timestamp within the video in a new browser tab.
First to speak was Dr. Gavin Schmidt, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the principal investigator for the GISS Earth System Model. This model has been used extensively in GISS contributions to CMIP3 and CMIP5 databases, which have informed the IPCC Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports. Dr. Schmidt is also the co-founder of the Climate Science Blog, Real Climate. His research focuses on understanding past, present, and future climate changes, including the impacts of multiple drivers such as solar radiance, atmospheric chemistry, aerosols, and greenhouse gases. He holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from University College London.
The second speaker was Dr. John Cook, a senior research fellow at the Melbourne Center for Behavior Change at the University of Melbourne. He is also affiliated with the Center for Climate Change Communication as adjunct faculty. In 2007, Dr. Cook founded Skeptical Science, a website that has received several awards, including the 2011 Australian Museum Eureka Prize for the Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge and the 2016 Friend of the Planet Award from the National Center for Science Education. He has co-authored several books, including Climate Change: Examining the Facts, Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis, and Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand. In 2015, Dr. Cook developed a massive open online course at the University of Queensland on climate science denial, which has enrolled over 25,000 participants. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Western Australia. John's presentation is available as a PDF here.
The third and final speaker was Dr. Emily Vraga, a professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. Her research explores methods for identifying and correcting misinformation on social media, enhancing news literacy (particularly outside the classroom), and helping audiences distinguish between high- and low-quality information. She also focuses on encouraging the consumption of more diverse information online. Dr. Vraga investigates how social media shapes interactions and perceptions, especially regarding political, scientific, and health-related topics. She earned her PhD from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
The three presentations were followed by a panel discussion, leveraging questions from the online audience which had come in during the webinar.
