There seems to be a pattern of thought currently floating around regarding sustainable living. The take home message goes something like this: “it makes no difference whether an individual tries to live sustainably, big corporations are the ones making all the difference anyway”. I want to challenge the notion that the actions of individuals are meaningless.
Go through any scientific paper and you’ll find it littered with uncertainty. Scientists qualify parameters, give standard errors, make way for random processes even when experiments have been planned to the finest detail. So why is uncertainty such a crucial part of science? How does this affect the non-scientific public’s perception of science? And does this relationship with knowledge need to change in the future?
You read that correctly, birds are reptiles. Now, I can hear you saying “but we learned that they are a different group of organisms, and that reptiles are just those scaly animals that have cold blood?” While reptiles don’t have cold blood per se, some of them DO have feathers. And can fly. But birds belong with the snakes, lizards, crocodiles, and turtles in the reptile group.
Scientific communication is at the forefront of what we do here at Ecology for the Masses. We like to celebrate good examples of SciComm whenever we can. But every now and then it’s misused so overtly that you have to talk about it. So today I want to use a share a recent example of scientific communication that confused and worried me.
From the California wildfires to the recent strikes across Australian primary schools, climate change is a topic that only seems to grow in its ubiquity. Yet whilst humans are increasingly focused on more obvious repercussions, such as extreme weather events, animal extinctions and shifting coastlines, we sometimes forget that climate change will have severe repercussions for plant life as well.
I spoke to Professor Johanna Schmitt of the University of California earlier this year to discuss some of those repercussions.
A short follow-up to last week’s interview with invasion ecologist Mark Davis.
This week’s paper looks at a timeless (get it?) question. What is the point of getting old?
