Many of you will already be familiar with the Fact-Myth-Fallacy structure of a successful debunking. For a refresher, John Cook's post about "Inoculation theory: Using misinformation to fight misinformation" is a good primer on the topic.
As examples for how to make use of this structure, we have short debunkings of many of the myths covered in our MOOC Denial101x readily available on an overview page, which also includes the relevant video lecture for each of them. The list is also available as a PDF-file:
Based on this FMF-page, I created a slide-deck with one page for each debunking and an index-page utilising the short URL "code" for each rebuttal to quickly access them. Instead of a video, each slide includes a graphic to drive home the main point of the debunking. Several of the graphics were created by John Garrett (jg) specifically for this slide-deck. They have been added to our graphics resources.
This slide-deck can serve several purposes. It can be used stand-alone to briefly explain some aspects of climate science. It can be tacked on to presentations used in public talks where a Q&A or discussion section is included at the end. There's always a chance that somebody who disagrees with or outright denies the science is in the audience just waiting to raise her or his hand after your talk! Armed with slides like the ones presented here, you'll be prepared to tackle (most of) them - and while doing so, show the rest of the audience that the objection has already been tackeled and debunked.
Obviously, this slide-deck is just a start. More debunkings can be added, graphics can be replaced or tweaked as needed, and the format can be adapted to other topics.
You can download the slide-deck either as a PDF (2.4MB), as a PDF with white background for printing (2.7MB) or PPTX (14MB). The navigation from the index page to each debunking and back works in both versions but the PPTX also includes some animations where the content of each slide is revealed in stages.
Here is hoping that this will become a helpful resource! Please let us know in the comments if and where you made use of it and how it went. Also feel free to post suggestions for other/better graphics to use on individual slides.
Posted by BaerbelW on Monday, 9 April, 2018
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