Australia's Wildfire Crisis Faces a New Foe: Misinformation

Summary: 24 individuals have been charged with starting fires in the Australian bushes. While this is being used as a means of denying the significance of climate change in the wildfires, the amount of arson is normal in Australia for this time. It is instead the extended fire season (due to global warming) allowing fires started by lightning to grow and spread. The misinformation surrounding the cause, however, is creating a lot of confusion. Even the political leaders of Australia have attributed the cause of the fires to arson.

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/australia-s-wildfire-crisis-faces-new-foe-misinformation-n1112736

Response: The politicization of climate change has had many negative effects (particularly the polarization of individuals based on political lines), and misinformation certainly seems to be a key one. It could be seen decades ago with the news cycle and now with social media: false information spreads very easily due to the attention it gets. Unfortunately, in the case of global warming, this spread can cause the limited time that otherwise could be spent acting towards resolving the issue to be spent addressing the falsehoods. Psychological tendencies, such as confirmation bias, only heightens this, with individuals actively seeking out information which already aligns with their worldview (which could very well be based on the current binary political spectrum we have in the US), while denying anything which might reject their current perspective.

Comments

  1. AnonymousFebruary 5, 2020 at 9:30 AM

    I think that it is crazy how the acts of few people can have such a large impact on the environment.

    ReplyDelete

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