Mojib Latif probably didn’t anticipate the public reaction his research would attract last year. Writing in the 1 May 2008 issue of Nature, he and his colleagues from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences and the Max Planck Institute in Kiel, Germany, predicted that increases in mean global temperatures could pause into the next decade, even though greenhouse gas levels were still rising in the atmosphere. That lull in warming, their models showed, was temporary, and due to complex interactions between the atmosphere and periodic cooling cycles in the oceans. A meteorologist and oceanographer, Latif emphasized that these cyclical variations could occur even in the face of long-term climate trends. But to his surprise, skeptics seized on the findings as evidence that mean global temperatures aren’t really rising. The website newsbusters.org, for instance, which bills itself as “dedicated to documenting, exposing, and neutralizing liberal media bias,” compared Latif’s findings to “the Pope suddenly [announcing] the Catholic Church had been wrong for centuries about prohibiting priests from marrying.” To Latif, the implication that climate change is a hoax was preposterous. “Making inferences about global warming from my short-term climate prediction is like comparing apples and oranges,” he says. Latif was caught in a familiar media trap. Research often delivers statistically nuanced findings that the lay public as well as journalists and other science communicators can find hard to understand. And just as political messages can be twisted into snippets of misinformation, scientific findings, too, are vulnerable to distortions and misrepresentations that stick in the public mind, especially if they fit ideologic biases. These distortions are becoming all too common in today’s new media environment. Although the World Wide Web offers invaluable access to information, it also gives an audience to anyone with an ax to grind. According to a commentary in the June 2009 issue of Nature Biotechnology authored by 24 experts in communication, law, and journalism, media fragmentation and the rise of ideologically slanted websites are perpetuating gridlocked opinions in science, just as they are in politics. One of those authors is Matthew Nisbet, an assistant professor of communication at American University in Washington, DC. He says people who aren’t inclined to pay close attention to an issue will learn about it from media outlets that reinforce their own social, political, or religious views. This and other types of “mental shortcuts,” he says, make it possible for individuals to draw quick conclusions about complex topics that fit their own preconceptions. Given these trends, communication experts are calling for fundamental changes in how scientists interact with the media because debates over climate change, health, energy, and technology are simply too important to lose to misinformation. As always, scientists are encouraged to communicate clearly using language that nonspecialists can understand. But now they’re also being urged to step beyond the confines of the laboratory and to become more engaged in efforts to educate the public. “The ultimate goal [in science communication],” says Nisbet, “is civic education—enabling and motivating more people into thinking, talking, and participating in collective decisions about, for example, what to do about climate change, or how to fund and oversee biotechnology.” Scientists need to somehow communicate scientific uncertainties while going head-to-head against oversimplified inaccuracies in the media. The question is how best to do that.