Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
FEEDBACK is always pleased to extend, enlarge and engorge our vocabulary so we are particularly pleased to discover a paper by Rasmus Benestad and colleagues in Earth Systems Dynamics entitled "Agnotology: learning from mistakes" (vol 4, p 451).
We see this as a sort of anti-review article. Whereas a review article tries to draw together the state of knowledge, this focuses on ignorance, examining the errors in 17 papers that question climate change, and looking for patterns.
A subsequent blog posting at skepticalscience.com defines "agnotology" as "the study of how and why we do not know things" (bit.ly/studyofignorance). It, too, goes on to discuss climate change denial in this light.
The coiner of the word turns out to be Robert N. Proctor, a science historian at Stanford University in California, ...
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