The Wild West of Online SciComm: a conversation with Heidi Roop and Daniel Swain

Digital news and social media has rapidly changed how the public consumes information about science. Join us for a discussion with two geoscientists forging new paths in this new media landscape to bring climate science to the public. Conversation will include questions around:

professional ethics in science communication
emerging best practices on social media
responding to questions about politics and public policy
building a respectful online culture
countering misinformation and fake news
Open Q&A

Speakers:

Heidi Roop is Lead Scientist for Science Communication with the UW Climate Impacts Group and an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the UW Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences. Heidi is also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Science in Society at Victoria University of Wellington, serves as an editor for the new open-access EGU journal Geoscience Communication, and featured speaker for the upcoming CrossCut Ideas Festival.

Daniel Swain holds joint appointments as a Climate Scientist within UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, a Research Fellow in the Capacity Center for Climate and Weather Extremes at NCAR, and the California Climate Fellow at The Nature Conservancy.  In addition, he authors the widely-read Weather West blog, which provides real-time perspectives on California and western North American weather, climate, and regional change.

Both speakers engage extensively with journalists and other partners to promote accurate and accessible media coverage on climate change.

Moderator: Judy Twedt is a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington, designing acoustic representations of climate data through data sonification.

Suggested reading for attendees: 
Dietram A. Scheufele and Nicole M. Krause (2019)  Science audiences, misinformation, and fake news