Title: Dealing with disinformation: why bother?

Since climate change is seen to have political, economic and ethical
implications, public discussion of the science is often highly
politicised. In less high profile sciences, poor papers with lame logic,
confused conclusions and incoherent implications are basically just
ignored. However, in climate change, these papers - which are often
accompanied by opinion pieces decrying the state of mainstream science -
get far greater attention than their science would otherwise merit. How
should scientists react to this? Are public attitudes affected by the
spread of nonsense? Should privately voiced criticisms be repeated
online? Does someone need to write a formal comment on every lousy paper
that gets published? In this seminar, I'll talk about a few recent cases
that I've been involved in.