 Hello, everyone. Welcome. Happy Friday, and thank you for joining us for the 2021 NCAR-UCAR-WALTOUR Roberts Distinguished Lecture. As you listen to the lecture, we invite you to submit questions for Dr. McMutt using the Slido platform. So to do that, you simply scroll down below the webcast screen to find Slido where you can submit questions and upvote others' questions as well. This lecture will be recorded and will be made available on the lecture web page following the event, and we will share that link with you. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to UCAR President Tony Busilaki. Thank you, Tiffany, and good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the 14th Walter R. Roberts Distinguished Lecture. As many of you know, Walter Roberts was an American astronomer and atmospheric physicist. The first director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the founding president of UCAR are nonprofit consortium of 120 universities that manages NCAR on behalf of the National Science Foundation. Walter was a true pioneer in studying the sun and the earth's atmosphere, had tremendous influence over the growth and direction of the atmospheric sciences in Boulder and the nation as a whole. Dr. Roberts became a visionary leader in broad international scientific communities, and was also a pioneer in sounding the alarm about the potential impacts of human-induced global warming. This lecture is supported by private donations, including those from members of Dr. Roberts' family. It was established in 1998 to pay tribute to Dr. Roberts and to highlight and honor the work of the chosen speaker, and asserts, as Tiffany said, to be part of NCAR's and UCAR's public outreach to the broader community. So many thanks go out to Dr. Roberts' family for continuing his legacy, and also want to thank Tiffany Formant of UCP Syed for all her tireless efforts in organizing today's lecture and the series as a whole. And it's now my great honor and privilege to introduce today's Walter or Roberts Distinguished Lecturer. Dr. Marsha McNutt is a geophysicist and the 22nd president of the National Academy of Sciences. From 2013 to 2016, she served as editor-in-chief of Science Journal. Prior to that, Marsha was director of the U.S. Geological Survey from 2009 to 2013, during which time the USGS responded to a number of major disasters, including the deep horizon oil spill. And so for her effort to help contain the spill, Dr. McNutt was awarded the U.S. Coast Guard's Meritorious Service Medal. Before joining the USGS, Marsha served as president and chief executive officer of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, California. And during her time there, the institution became a leader in developing biological and chemical sensors for remote ocean deployment, installed the first deep-sea cabled observatory in U.S. waters, and advanced the integration of artificial intelligence into autonomous underwater vehicles for complex undersea missions. Marsha's work has taken her to distant continents and oceans for field observations. And she's a veteran of more than a dozen deep-sea expeditions. And so we are thrilled to welcome Dr. Marsha McNutt today. She brings a valuable experience across the country in Washington, D.C., and insight into the current state of Earth system science, especially within the context of today's political and cultural challenges to our scientific understanding and communication of our scientific understanding. And so our topic today is very much along these lines. And so Marsha, a very hearty and virtual welcome to you. Thank you for joining us today. Well, thank you, Tony, for having me. I feel very honored to be invited to give this distinguished lecture. I looked at the previous lecturers, and they are a most distinguished group. So I'm proud to be part of this Walter Orr family, Walter Orr Roberts family right now. Any case, I'm sorry that we can't all be together. Of course, the pandemic continues to create havoc in our ability to do our work and create opportunities for misinformation, which is the topic of my talk today. Misinformation is, of course, now in the news a lot, but it's something that I've encountered at nearly all phases of my career. I remember back when I was running, actually when I was an employee at the USGS back in the early 1980s, I had to deal with misinformation on earthquake predictions, where people were using crackpot theories to scare the residents of California about impending earthquakes that never happened. And then, of course, with Deepwater Horizon, another opportunity for misinformation, with people peddling all sorts of crazy ideas of what the impacts of the oil spill would be, and what sort of really dangerous solutions we should be deploying to stop it. But you might wonder, why is the president of the National Academy of Sciences now talking about misinformation? Well, the National Academy of Sciences plays many roles in this nation. One of them is, of course, the purely honorific role of electing distinguished scientists to our ranks. But that is just a means to an end. And the election of distinguished scientists is one way to get the best and brightest in this country involved in advising the nation. So a second role that we have is to give sound science to inform far-reaching and important government policies. And as part of that, we are sometimes likened to the Supreme Court for science. Because when there are differing opinions on what the science says about some topic, people turn to the National Academy of Sciences to provide an authoritative opinion just the way the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of what the law says. And therefore, misinformation is of great concern to the National Academy of Sciences because it confuses the question of what does the science say and how policy should be crafted from it. Now, I'm sure I don't have to tell this group that misinformation, let's see if I can get this to advance, that misinformation is rampant out there in the public. We see it in politics. For example, on the right, you see a tweet that was posted saying that Christine Ford, who testified against the confirmation of Brent Kavanaugh, was some coddling up to Soros. Well, the problem with this tweet is that, first of all, that's not even her. It's an intern that was at some event with Soros. And the person who posted it says, share the hell out of this, basically pushing it out to become a viral post when there's no truth behind it. We also see misinformation in health. This is just another picture that I pulled off Twitter of a group of mothers who posed with t-shirts they had made up declaring vaccines as being implicated in all these diseases, SIDS, seizures, autoimmune disease. And of course, there's no evidence to support any of the claims on these t-shirts. And just to show that this is not a problem that is unique to the United States, here are a bunch of British tabloids with all sorts of misinformation about climate change. So let me, first of all, describe the sort of the landscape of information. We can look at information along the horizontal axis as to whether the information being passed is not misleading on the right or whether it's misleading on the left. And the vertical axis is showing whether there was no intent to deceive, which is above the horizontal line, or an intent to deceive below the horizontal line. So up in the upper right hand quadrant of this diagram is where we start with trustworthy information. It's not misleading and it's not deceptive. Over to the right of that is the territory for misinformation, where it is misleading, but there was not necessarily intent to deceive. In the lower left hand corner is misleading information, which is intent with the intent to deceive, and that has been labeled disinformation. In this talk today, I'm going to deal with both misinformation and disinformation. And recently, the WHO has combined both miss and disinformation to declare that we are dealing with not just a pandemic, but an infodemic. Now, let's start with disinformation regarding climate change. I'm calling many of the posts about climate change as disinformation because there is both a misquoting and a misinterpretation of the information, and there is often an intent to deceive by powerful lobbyists and powerful corporations that have a financial stake in the status quo. Because of this disinformation, it impacts the willingness of society to take the mitigating measures required to avoid the cascading consequences of climate change, which impact our economics, they impact our health, they impact our national security, they impact the stability of world order. Now, disinformation often has its origins in what is legitimate information. And let me give you just one example here. On the right side, you'll see a blog that was posted by NASA, a perfectly legitimate blog, and it says that the sun powers life on earth, it keeps the planet warm enough for us to survive, it also influences climate because of orbital perturbations. But it goes on to say the warming we've seen cannot be linked to changes in Earth's orbit, the recent warming, because the warming is too large to be caused by solar activity. So this started with a perfectly adequate and perfectly informed scientific posting in a NASA blog. But this NASA blog that came up in September 2019 was likely the source of an October 2019 disinformation campaign. And this disinformation, which claims NASA admits that climate change occurs because of changes in Earth's orbit, and not because of SUVs and fossil fuels, was actually the top performing climate post of all of 2019. It outperformed any other information, misinformation, or disinformation on the web, this one post. It had 4.2 million impressions, which were tweets, Facebook shares, Reddit posts, etc. And it starts out with saying that for more than 60 years, the NASA has known that changes occurring to planetary weather patterns are completely natural and normal without saying the other part of what the blog said that the current warming is too large to be described. And it goes on to link this to NASA promoting a man made global warming hoax that is to the detriment of human freedom, detriment of human freedom because of NASA's failure to admit that this is all due to solar activity. Now, if we look at this disinformation, it performed very well, the top performing climate item in 2019. And it was based on a very selective representation of reputable science. We've known about Milankovic theory for 60 years, but it did not appropriately represent Milankovic theory. What should have been read flags on this post is that it came from a known purveyor of disinformation, a group called Natural News. And as a result, there were many fact check corrections of the story that were posted. For example, a prominent one from Reuters in February of 2021, or I'm sorry, I think that's supposed to be February 2020. But anyway, it came late. It came months after the misinformation was posted. And the corrections did not get the same engagement from the online community. And this is always the case. This even happened in newspapers where some scandal is on the front page above the fold. And the story showing that the scandal really wasn't a scandal is on page eight in a little box at the bottom. So this is very typical. Although the posting contradicted best science, it played on Reuters bias in wanting a continued lifestyle. They wanted their freedom. They wanted to be able to burn fossil fuels. And so Reuters felt that this misinformation is something that they wanted to embrace. And because they wanted to embrace it, it was easily shared among like-minded social groups that did not include those in a position to debunk the claims. Now, if you look at search engines now, if you put in this, NASA admits Sun is responsible for global warming. The first things that pop up are actually the fact check corrections. So that's good. Not the original, but the original is still available. It's still on the web. The posting has not been taken down. So that was disinformation. Let me turn now to an example of misinformation regarding COVID. And I'm going to call this misinformation rather than disinformation in that I don't think there is an intent to deceive. I mean, after all, most people don't want to intentionally kill their peers and others who might be influenced by their posts. So I think this is people who think they are doing the right thing, but they are sharing misinformation. And it also impacts the willingness of society to take the appropriate mitigating measures required to avoid the worst outcomes from COVID because they're following these phony options. And one of the best cases of this is the promotion of ivermectin as a COVID preventative. Now, ivermectin is readily available without a prescription. I give it to my horses to get rid of worms. But if you want it in a version that is safe for humans, you do have to get a doctor's prescription and it's used to treat river blindness and a few other sort of rare parasitic diseases in which a dewarmer will actually work. Now, the way ivermectin got started as a COVID preventative were the publication of a number of poorly controlled studies which hinted at possible benefits. These were not clinical trials. These were not double blind experiments as we know are being the gold standard for how you decide whether a treatment is effective. What happened was then a surge in overdoses from use of the animal version that people could get at feed stores without a prescription. There was a 24-fold increase in physicians writing off-label prescriptions for COVID treatment despite the fact that this off-label use had no FDA approval. In a number of cases, the courts have been asked to weigh in. When a patient wanted a doctor to give them ivermectin, often these were COVID patients dying in the hospital who were grasping at straws, and the courts have typically ruled that there is no right that a patient has that would demand that a doctor give them an unproven medication. But the attitude of many people who saw the claims about ivermectin on the internet is that as long as they're not overdosing from the animal version, how can it hurt to take ivermectin? Well, I think the main point is yes, it can hurt if it diverts people from adopting proven interventions to prevent and treat COVID preventative mechanisms such as vaccines and masks, and treatments include a number of new drugs which are helping to prevent the shutdown of organs. Now, the failure to vaccinate causes hospitalizations and deaths, and the promotion of ivermectin could be linked to reduction in the willingness of people to be vaccinated. Here's just an example from the state of Wisconsin, which was published recently. This is from July 2021, and what it shows is the case rate for fully vaccinated people versus not fully vaccinated people per 100,000, the number of people who are hospitalized, and the number of deaths. What you can see is there's a three-fold increase in the number of cases if people are not vaccinated. There's nearly a four-fold increase in the hospitalization and a more than 10-fold increase in the death rate between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated populations. So anything that is discouraging people from getting vaccinated is indeed a problem. Now, the reason why this misinformation got so much traction, I would argue, is that it has too much nuance for the public. For example, the FDA posted this on Twitter, which was good because it's actually trying to get to people where they get their information, and it says, you're not a horse, you're not a cow. Seriously, y'all, stop it. And why you should not use ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19, and you can click on this, and it will take you to the full description. But the problem in this case is that it pitches doctors against doctors and doctors against the FDA. There are actually licensed doctors out there that were promoting ivermectin as a potential solution for COVID. Another problem that contributed to the uptake of ivermectin is the ease of publication of poorly controlled studies that makes off-label use appear scientifically defensible. Some of these studies were actually posted on pre-print servers. Some of them were taken down later, but in general, people in the public don't understand the difference between something being published on a pre-print and published in the New England Journal of Medicine and that there might be different standards between those two. I think we as a community have all benefited from greater access to science through the creation of these pre-print servers, but they confuse the public as to what has survived peer review. Another problem is that some patients given ivermectin actually did improve, but if you have someone who's been put on a ventilator and has a 40% chance of improving and their doctor or their partner gives them ivermectin, you would expect that four out of ten times they should survive, and unfortunately too much of the information on the web is anecdotal. Just an anecdote that I gave my husband ivermectin and he survived, therefore ergo proof that ivermectin works. The other thing that's tricky about this is that I would argue no one wins when legitimate debate is prevented. When there are some studies which haven't proven much yet, but you don't necessarily want to shut down studies that actually could show that something is more effective than people previously thought. So we have to be careful that we don't label something as misinformation to the point where debate about the potential benefits can't continue to occur within the research community. Now of course misinformation spreads through many channels. It has always spread to some extent through broadcast media and print media, but we have seen an increase because of the vast expansion of networks, vast expansion of print media, and not always the same quality control that we would expect of Time or Newsweek or that we'd expect of NBC or ABC compounding the problem is the rise of social media and of course the web. In the case of broadcast media and print media there's controls on who is actually allowed to give their message through those channels, but on social media in the web there is no control. Anyone can post, anyone can share and it makes it even more difficult. So as I as I argue here web and social media have amplified the problem. Anyone can create content. Secondly the business model for platform providers for both the web and social media is measured in eyeballs. How many people have seen the post meaning that content being viewed, shared, and going viral is actually their goal. They want to make things go viral. So what goes viral? Well social science research shows that the more salacious the content the more likely it is to spread. So anything that is that is somewhat tinnolating or exciting or newsworthy is more likely to share than perhaps just the sound science. And finally bad actors, those who really want to spread disinformation know how to prey on readers preconceived biases to influence their opinions, to harden their positions and to create polarization. They understand that everyone has a preconceived bias and if they can make their message reinforcing of that bias. So for example remember that one on NASA and climate change the posting was trying to reinforce the reader's view that they want to be free and that NASA was limiting their freedom by not admitting that the sun causes climate change. So anyway what is there to do to address the problem? Well let me give you some examples of things we might want to do. First of all anyone can create content on the web or social media that's a problem. But is science going to be able to limit who can post on the web? I don't think so. That cow has already left the barn and there's not much we can do to put it back in. We have seen some social media providers preventing some people from posting but basically there's nothing that science can do about it unless the platform hosts decide to cut someone off. Secondly the business model for platform providers for the web and social media is measured in eyeballs. Is there anything that we as scientists can do to change the business model for platforms? I don't think so. Congress might be able to weigh in on making them more responsible or whatever but I don't think scientists can change business models of legitimate businesses. Social media research shows that the more salacious the content the more likely it is to spread. I don't think scientists while we can do lots of social science to understand what sort of content is more likely to be picked up I don't think we can change basic human nature here. And finally the bad actors. These are the corporations the special interest groups that are paying for the misinformation and the disinformation. Again I don't think scientists can do anything to control what these groups are doing. So the question is what can scientists do to stop this infodemic? So I'm going to give you a list of my top things that I think we as scientists should be doing to help address the infodemic. Well the first thing we have to do better is anticipate. Anticipate how if we put out a blog the communication could be distorted and secondly how existing phobias will be amplified. So for example if that NASA blog had instead of having a title climate change and the sun's effect which of course when the misinformation links to NASA or someone googles nascent sun it doesn't say anything about what the bottom line is. So I would suggest always using titles that have the bottom line. NASA shows solar influence not responsible for current climate change. Something like that make it really clear what the bottom line is and therefore there's less chance of the message being distorted. And then how existing phobias will be amplified? Well I would argue that when it came to operation warp speed and trying to come up quickly with a vaccine that would address COVID-19 it was preordained that the existing anti-vax community would mount a campaign to try to discredit the vaccine. Now one thing we did early in the pandemic at the National Academy of Sciences was we set up a scientific scenario planning group to look at what the future might be of the pandemic, what those futures might reveal in terms of the spread of the pandemic and what might be some no regrets actions that we could take immediately to prevent the worst outcomes. So we began by doing this pattern of four different scenarios and the four scenarios because we can't predict the future at least we can say what are some of the drivers that will determine what future we have. And on the vertical axis the unknown driver is how does the virus actually behave? And you'll recall that when we were doing this scenario planning nearly a year and a half ago we didn't know whether the virus was going to be a one-and-done kind of thing and or whether the virus would be constantly mutating to more contagious and more vaccine resistant forms. We know now with the benefit of hindsight that the lower half of this diagram is where we're finding ourselves. And then on the horizontal axis we asked the question what will society's response be to meet the challenge of COVID-19? Will society on the right hand side be proactive to meeting the challenges or will it be reactive to challenges constantly playing catch up? Well when we looked at these four different quadrants obviously everyone wants to be in scenario one where the virus behaves pretty simply and the society is proactive to meet the challenge people wear their mask people get vaccinated once it's available etc. Well how we've actually seen this play out is that different areas of the country different countries in the world and different states in our union all find themselves in slightly different parts of this space because some have been proactive to the challenge and some have been reactive. But when we did this exercise almost a year and a half ago one intervention that came up regardless of which of these quadrants you found yourself in was that mounting a public relationship campaign to counteract vaccine hesitancy before it even began was a no regrets action. And yet that never happened despite us flagging this as an important thing to do. So number two after doing a more careful work on anticipating what the problems are going to be the second thing that scientists can do is educate. I mean after all many scientists either work in educational institutions or they have impact over what is being communicated to students. Students need to come out with more critical thinking skills more healthy skepticism of things that sound just too good to be true and more access to how they find the resources to verify certain claims. So I attended in 2017 a meeting that was called the National Intelligence Council Global Trends Meeting. I was actually there to speak in a panel on the impact of environment and climate change on national security. But after my panel there was a second panel on international threats and after the panel was done speaking I asked a question and I asked the moderator of the panel doesn't it worry you and the panelists that the average American cannot distinguish between fact and misinformation on the web. And the moderator said to me I think this is actually fascinating that you would ask that question in a meeting on international threats because of course we were just starting to learn after the 2016 election about the impact of misinformation from foreign bad actors that had influenced the voting patterns in the election. So clearly critical thinking skills and blunting the opportunity of the web to be a source of misinformation is important and it has to reside in the person who is receiving the information. They are the final person that will decide whether to believe it or not. So one program we started at the National Academy is a program called LabX which has its target audience young people from say 15 to 30 and it has a number of projects to show these young people how science is important in their daily lives and how they can incorporate science into their decision making. One of the activities of LabX was to put together a game called cat colony crisis. This game is played online and the scenario for the game is that there's a spaceship of cats that is going to another planet and an epidemic breaks out in this colony of cats that are limited to this spaceship and the gamers have to figure out how to get the cats to the other planet with the minimum death and the minimum illness of their colony of cats. And so of course the analogy here is the colony of cats is us, the spaceship is our planet and what do we need to do to minimize the impact of COVID-19? This game was developed in just two weeks time during the get jamming the curve game jam in 2020 and it was awarded the winning prize so we were really proud of our people from the academy who put this out. The game has now been downloaded more than 65,000 times. Okay so my third piece of advice for scientists is we all need to broaden our information channels. Algorithms on the internet are set to direct you to feeds that reinforce what they think the algorithms think you like to see and you actually have to put in extra effort to seek out dissenting views. For example when that post went up that misinformed people about the NASA views on global warming I'm guessing that no one involved in climate research was following the same feed that the disinformation came out on or the yeah disinformation and so there was really this was probably one explanation for why it took so long to get corrections out to the internet so we we can't understand what other people unlike ourselves are thinking unless we broaden our information channels. So one project that the national academy has to try to address this is a project called based on science. This began as a joint project between Google Bing and the national academy and the premise for this was that the people from Google came to us and they said you know there are all sorts of high performing articles on the web that we think are scientifically unsound and we would love to boost the degree to which people who are seeking answers to questions actually go to reliable sources but there actually aren't any reliable sources on the web that we can point them to and a good example is a lot of people were searching on the internet for will sucking lemons cure cancer and believe it or not there were all sorts of postings on the web that were promoting so sucking lemons as a way to cure cancer and of course no reputable scientists had thought to say oh by the way people here's the science that shows that sucking lemons doesn't cure cancer because why would you but anyway so Google gave us a list of all these things and we actually commissioned articles on the web on things like does ultraviolet UV kill the coronavirus does global warming contribute to extreme weather events does the flu vaccine affect COVID-19 test results or the likelihood of catching it can COVID-19 test tell me how sick I will get can COVID-19 tell me if I'm contagious or can a COVID-19 test tell me if I'm contagious and what's the best type of COVID-19 test to get these are all questions that people were asking often so we we quickly got these up on the internet um and um this has been a huge success um for example uh here shows one can ginger treat a coronavirus infection something else that was going around on the web which with no basis ginger does not prevent or cure COVID-19 was the clear result but the answers we had to give were in plain direct language we wrote these um pieces at the eighth grade level to make sure that we would not um uh inundate someone with terminology they didn't understand all of the uh postings kept a respectful tone and every posting had to take less than one minute to read all of them were based on the evidence of experts and we posted them both in English and Spanish um you can see from uh the little um bar chart on the right that um uh the access to these is increasing in August almost two million views and September just in the first two weeks was more than 1.2 million views so um we really are reaching a lot of people with this kind of content and it is has been very helpful in countering this information some of these based on science answers are the top performing in a google search so number three on my list is we need to communicate how we ourselves as scientists determine what we're going to trust and um the the issue here is that when we talk about science there are really three different things we're talking about we're talking about the scientific method we're talking about individual science studies and we're talking about the scientific consensus and the difference between these i try to um the analogy i use is a giant jenga game now i don't know how many of you have played jenga but you take these wooden blocks and you stack them up three across this way three across that way three across this way three across that way all the way up to make a tower and what the game entails is one by one people have to pull out one of these blocks from somewhere in the tower and put it on the top in such a way as to keep the tower balanced and the um uh keep the tower from tipping over now i would say that the scientific method is analogous to the base of the giant jenga game the base is stable the base is what all scientists accept they um the scientific method is the most proven self-correcting approach for revealing the laws governing the natural world we trust explicitly in the scientific method then i consider the top of this um giant jenga game to be the scientific consensus and scientists trust the scientific consensus which is carefully achieved on this foundation of these individual studies all these individual studies are here um promoting the scientific consensus now let's suppose one study is shown to be wrong and so we pull it out from this um jenga game and we put it we put it on the top so we've revised the scientific consensus every time a study is revised it will require some adjustment to the scientific consensus and sometimes the adjustment is minor but sometimes we start getting exceptions to the consensus we start getting a more complicated scientific consensus and once we pull out too many of these studies which are supporting the consensus the um consensus will fall and we call that a paradigm shift we need a new scientific consensus because the old one got too unwieldy and toppled and i forgot to say that scientists are always skeptical of any individual studies an individual study is just that and it has to be reproduced has to be extended it has to be demonstrated through some different systems all of these individual studies are subject to revision but the problem is this is not what we communicate to people people don't necessarily if they're not scientists understand the difference between the scientific consensus and what an individual study says people read on the news um that uh coffee is good for you oh no coffee is bad for you and they cite these um individual studies proving it but but they never say what does good mean does good mean it wakes you up or does good mean it makes you live longer and they don't define who is you is you a five year old or is you a 50 year old so um we aren't really communicating how scientists decide what to trust and what it actually means when they come to a conclusion so to address this one thing that the academy is doing is we have a program called the science behind it and these are a number of videos and essays that are on the web that show science as a way of knowing and here's a list of um some of the topics on there and in each case we not only say what does science tell us about these different topics but we also say why do we know that why do we trust that information how did we come to that conclusion so it tries to counteract the idea of science as a list of facts but rather science as a way of knowing um what what to believe I think we could do a better job in um education at all levels of teaching science as a way of knowing and then um next uh we need to find better ways to communicate risk anecdotes are not data you know you can't say I gave my husband ivermectin and he came out of the hospital and now I know that the risk of ivermectin is low and it's a cure for um covid this um diagram um I modified off the web and risk is actually a two-dimensional issue because we have to look at on one hand the vertical hand what is the likelihood of an event happening and then on the horizontal what's the outcome of the event if it does happen um do you die or um you know do you only have a minor injury um and in terms of likelihood are happening it's nearly impossible to it has or it's already happened and so finding where you are in this if um it's highly likely to happen but um you're you're not going to be hurt by it then it's no big deal whereas if it's um nearly impossible to happen but it's a major event in terms of cost environmental impact or human health um then maybe you you do want to worry about it and we don't communicate risk um in this kind of framework um one uh example I pulled from NOAA um is their guidelines for risk communication which I thought are are good and I wish we had done more of this um in covid and gotten this out further first of all make an informed plan what is your communication plan speak to the audience's interests not yours this is not about you it's about your target audience explain the risk using stories and visuals to make the case clear um this is really important when people um can't really understand the abstract so giving examples is good but this is very difficult when an event has no precedence um only a handful of people living today have been through a major pandemic then you have to offer options to reduce the risk and and then before you communicate work with trusted sources and trusted messengers the messenger is so important the messenger has to be someone that your target audience will trust not to steer them wrong and number six test your message on the intended audience um there I've seen all sorts of studies that have been done in climate change communication about how to communicate the risk of climate change to conservative audiences to liberal audiences to rural people to city people and they're all different messages and then finally use multiple channels to communicate don't just put out a press release um get it on social media get it on um the nightly news etc um you can imagine if this had been followed uh in the early days of um operation warp speed to try to get out trusted information through trusted messengers on the um relative risk of vaccines versus COVID how much different the outcome might have been um here's one example of um this risk communication from hurricane harvey you remember hurricane harvey um uh stalled um off um near houston and dumped um uh feet of rain I calculated at one point it was equivalent to 13 mississippi's um pouring into houston over several days 13 flows of the mississippi and the natural national weather service at corporate christie offered this very stark warning locations may be uninhabitable for weeks or months but also adding that all impacts are unknown and beyond anything experienced so that was uh that was a pretty scary warning and um probably an honest one at that point too and so um then next I uh wanted to to say I think this is my last one to build trust in science by first of all being trustworthy we as scientists have to ensure that we are so trustworthy that we have the support of the public this is a diagram that was put together um by Susan fisk um who's a social scientist and she looked at um trust as a two-dimensional plane here where for someone to be trusted they have to be viewed as competent but they also have to be viewed as warm and warmth is um a short term for um the the consumer believing that you actually have their best interests at heart you may be very competent but if you don't have the person's best interest at heart then you won't be trusted and you can see that on the competence scale scientists and engineers are basically pegging the limit as being the most um competent but we're kind of in the middle of the ground in terms of people believing that we have their best interests at heart compared to a nurse or a teacher or a doctor or a child care worker everyone thinks they will do what's right for me or my child or my health but scientists and engineers don't have that degree of warmth and for that reason we suffer in being trusted so um why is that well i think part of the reason is we're trying to communicate in two different worlds the scientific world on the left and the public sphere on the right we know as scientists that it's only worth publishing something if it is a major advancement on or an overturn of accepted scientific views it's hard to get something published which is just reconfirming what everyone knows but yet what the public wants is consistent messaging to reduce confusion many have been taught science as an internal body of facts and if they get different messages from different individual studies even if the weight of the evidence is clearly on one side the public gets confused also we're taught as scientists to not put ourselves into the study we have to be unbiased we have to be dispassionate we have to be only pure truth seekers whereas scientists and their story are interesting to the public that's what gives warmth they want to know what motivated you to look at this um you know a great story of this is the young woman at the NIH who worked on the vaccine whose grandfather and grandmother were at risk from COVID she's African American and the fact that she was doing this for her grandparents gave her trust in the eyes of the public scientists also believe that all caveats and uncertainties need to be included that's part of showing what in your study may not be completely resolved and what could be subject to revision whereas uncertainty makes the public think scientists don't know what they're doing so this is a problem one way we're addressing it is at the national academy we put out this report in 2016 fostering integrity and research which gives guidelines for journals to improve authorship policies to respond to threats of integrity like bias and conflict of interest urging authors to disclose their roles and their contributions in each paper so we know who's responsible for what and we proposed policies to thwart detrimental research practices such as ghost authorship honorary authorship and the report suggested setting up something that the report called a research integrity advisory board to become an organizational focus for best practices and standards so following our own advice i'm happy to announce that we're just starting something called the strategic council for research excellence integrity and trust it's charged with advancing the overall health quality effectiveness and trustworthiness of the entire research enterprise it includes representatives from all domains from funders private and public from people who execute research at universities and research labs people who disseminate the research like publications publishers and also those who adopt that scientific work for policy that's in the public interest this group will identify challenges articulate best principles coordinate collaborative action and remove barriers to accelerate solutions some examples of some possible initials initial issues that we want to address is conflict of interest all any researcher will tell you that it's a horrible burden to have to declare your conflicts of interest to your employer then your conflicts of interest to your funders and then your conflicts of interest to when you publish a paper all of these take time everyone uses different forms everyone uses different criteria everyone uses different standards and it's not transparent i think this is low hanging fruit that can be easily addressed using our orchid IDs for example measuring impact not everything that accounts can be measured and we have to make sure that we're counting the right things and measuring the right things we look at what some funders want versus what is being rewarded at universities and we just see discrepancies and then a third example is just retractions correcting the record in journals how can we be at the same time transparent fair and fast and that's going to be a more difficult problem so thank you all for your time i will just close by saying that the national academy of sciences was founded to provide advice to the nation on matters for which evidence can better provide sound decisions actions and policies to support the public interest and i'll end by saying that science without policy is still science but any policies without science are gambling so thank you all very much and i'm happy to um happy to answer questions marsha before we turn thanks so very much for an excellent and timely presentation and your five areas of guidance and how best to respond during this era of an infodemic given how thought-provoking your presentation was we have a whole host of of questions and really thank tiffany for sort of collating and bringing them up to the top so we'll begin with a question from chris one big problem is that when scientists do offer rebuttals to misinformation is that many reject anything from authority are there ways to break through this yeah so that's a great question um we we saw that uh in the 2016 election where experts and expertise was being rejected and i think what we need to do is change the message i have a son-in-law who is very very conservative and he one day said to me something that i thought well this would be a great thing to say to someone who rejects scientific expertise and his his view on getting vaccinated for covid was he said i'd much rather get a vaccine from a us company than to get a virus from china and i thought you know that speaks to that audience and i think chris it goes back to about testing messages because the same message is not going to uh work with everyone thanks marsha from just in wild a recommendation i've seen is to never engage with a disinformation post the thought being it increases the views it will get what are your thoughts on this so i um agree with justin entirely and in fact the counters to that um disinformation post never mentioned the original post they just countered the claim and i'll tell you um i agree with justin's view that if you actually um put your um rebuttal in the same thread as the misinformation you elevate the um misinformation because all your followers are now seeing that and other people who might be um uh interested in something that comes out of your organization could see it and so never retweet never mention them by name just counter the claim um quite um quite uh forcefully thank you marsha very sage from um matias steiner it seems to me what we need to do a better job at is teaching our children common sense critical thinking skills and some basic scientific literacy so um mathias i uh totally agree with you there too um the um you know i i was um engaging with some members of the national academy on a recent report we put out on science education and that the advice to school systems was to not to um put less emphasis on science as memorization and more science and and more emphasis on science as a process for deciding what you trust and and what you should believe and what you should not believe um my view is that if everyone came out of elementary and junior high thinking i'm a scientist i'm a scientist because i know how to make a hypothesis then i know how to design an experiment or observations to test whether my hypothesis is um falsifiable and then i know how to draw conclusions from that we would be so much better off but most people are not taught science or at least were not taught science that way they were taught that they memorize a bunch of um terminology and nomenclature and stuff like that and i agree that at some point there are terms that you need to understand but if everyone felt that science was just a way of verifying what is true about the natural world we would be much better off um whether the the distinction between how much of this should happen in schools and how much of this should happen with parents is pretty interesting because there are so many success stories of parents teaching their kids despite terrible school systems and vice versa and so i think that this has to be everyone's job we agree from jeff cheeseman a recent cbs article uh has appeared and how the wellness community has become a gateway for misinformation where do we draw the line of alternative medicine with misinformation yeah so um i i think jeff you have definitely um uh run the bell for one of my um uh soapboxes i i like to get on all the time and that is um the fact that it's natural for human beings to want to take their health their wellness and their longevity into their own hands they are we're all suckers for snake oil salesmen honestly we are and um the there is no place in my view um outside of a you know an emergency like covid where misinformation is more rampant than in the wellness community about touting things that people say and they say that it's FDA approved FDA approval all that means is you can take it without killing yourself and it's not going to harm you it does not mean that it has um any proven benefits i see these things that are on national ads pushing things to improve your brain function when there's absolutely no evidence that it improves your brain function and all they have is is anecdotes testimonials from individuals with no um double blind so um this is i think one area where we need to put more effort um in most of these cases people are not harming themselves but they are perhaps not doing things that would be good interventions thank you marsha so we have about uh five minutes left and we're going to try to go through a few more from kim is this a communications problem or a cultural problem if culture plays a part what role can science and scientists play in impacting societal culture so um thanks for this question kim my something that i've said numerous times to public audiences is that we as scientists have to get out of our silos get out of our science ghettos where we are um uh living we're playing we're um uh interacting with people who work who look and think just like we do and um so i i agree with you it is a culture problem and it's um it's it's incumbent upon us to make sure we widen our circle of um people we interact with let me just give you one example uh for 20 years now every summer i've gone up into the seara nevada on a horse camping trip with people from around the state most of them from the um central california valley or from the seara foothills all of them have very conservative views almost all of them climate change deniers i have seen over the 20 years they have all changed their tune and the reason for that is that i'm a scientist and they have gotten to know and trust me so when they when they post something on facebook and we're all facebook friends that is wrong i will write them a little note and say you know i'm sorry you really need to rethink about this post you shared here's what the actual evidence is to show that this is you know what's right and what's wrong and they'll take down the post and they'll stop sharing it and over the years they've all um uh become um quite concerned about the potential change in the ability of all of us to enjoy these beautiful places in the seara because of forest fires of course um so i think that um that that we as scientists need to to broaden our circle because this is cultural and as long as we have cultural barriers that we aren't crossing um it's going to continue to be a problem from shishpao rawa what legislative action can balance right to speech and spread of downright lies on social media platforms is it possible to do this without legislation yeah so um thanks shishpao i think you know we've all heard of attempts that the platform providers um have undertaken to try to stop the spread of misinformation and um they uh in in some cases things have been very black and white and um it it's easy but you know the um the the number of channels and the traffic on the channels makes it really difficult for any platform provider to uh do a really good job of um you know uh making sure that that nothing gets through and that's just in cases that are really black and white as as as your question implies there are too many cases that are a little bit um on the edge you know um iver mcdon is one where um to say that iver mcdon is um uh proven cure would be wrong but to say i gave my husband iver mcdon and he recovered that's an honest statement so you can't you can't squash that and so these are fine lines it's difficult to do i think ai will get better at flagging the ones that really need some kind of human um intervention but um i sort of agree that i'm worried that um the potential use of such tools to um get rid of uh open discourse and legitimate legitimate uh uh other view points um is great and we don't want to go too far thank you and we'll take one more question from sarah how do we improve public trust in awareness of reputable sources online there seem to be growing mistrust of scientists as if we have an agenda for profit yeah okay so sarah there there are several um several issues that you have there uh first of all is trust for science declining so Pew Charitable Trust has been doing uh surveys on the degree to which scientists are trusted for many years their data show an overall small decline in the trust of scientists but it is commensurate with a with a decline in trust of everyone else too so it's not just scientists who have we relative to others we haven't moved at all so there seems to be more distrust of everyone right now and um it's it's not just scientists i think that every time there is um an issue of fraud in science or um undeclared uh uh conflicts of interest those really hurt science and i think we have to make sure that every scientist who is trained is trained very thoroughly in how to how to maintain the trustworthiness of the entire enterprise and i'm afraid sometimes too much of that is left to just learning by what your advisor did and not enough by what are really the highest standards we should all aspire to so i think those are those are um two things but i think also again with my answer to the last question if they see scientists as human beings because scientists are their friends you know i always say when um if we're going to go talk to some congressman about some scientific result i shouldn't go as president of the national academy i should find someone who's from that congressperson's home district or home state and send that person and they can begin by talking about how much they love kentucky or um missouri or wherever the congressman is from and then they get to talking about what the sign says the messenger means everything and and what an apt way to finish an excellent talk with respect to your statement about the messenger that means everything so thanks so much for as i said excellent presentation very timely um and also thanks so much for your time later this afternoon to meet with our other leaders across the NCAR on ucp labs and programs and then meeting with our early career scientists there were other questions that we couldn't get to so we'll strive to get them to you in print form so you may be able to address some of them with our other leaders later this afternoon so again we're going to have congrats on being the wall of robert's lecture and thanks so much for an excellent presentation thank you everyone okay bye