Science, nonscience, and nonsense: approaching environmental literacy

Abstract

As the role of science and technology in everyday life grows both more pervasive and more complex, it has become ever more difficult for a scientifically illiterate public to make informed judgements. In this text, Michael Zimmerman takes on a wide range of falsifiers, disinformation specialists and charlatans to provide readers with the scientific background necessary to evaluate environmental and other current issues that increasingly may be a matter of life and death. Zimmerman begins by showing just what science is - and how the criteria of scepticism and falsifiability distinguish it from pseudoscience and mysticism. He offers analyses of bad science - from lottery systems and creationism to graphologists and homeopaths, from food and product safety scams to outright scientific fraud. In each case he shows exactly what to watch for - how the most outrageously false claims often contain a grain of truth, and how valid scientific findings may be distorted or selectively quoted to serve the ends of government, business, or special interest groups.