UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Enrolling in Geoscience 435 in fall 2021, fourth-year Penn State student Alysha Ulrich did not expect to end the course with a literature review on-track to be published in a peer-reviewed academic journal.
“The final project for that course was a literature review, and our professor, Peter Wilf, encouraged students to consider publishing their papers,” Ulrich, an earth science and policy major, said. “So, by the end of the semester I had poured so much time into this paper that I felt like it would be a disservice to myself not to at least try.”
The effort paid off. Ulrich’s review, titled "Climate Misinformation: Communicating Climate Science in an Era of Misinformation," was published in the 2023 spring edition of the Stanford Intersect Journal of Science, Technology and Society.
Ulrich combined a passion for communication and climate change in composing her review, encouraged by Wilf.
“My goal for the literature review was to synthesize the current understanding of climate misinformation, and its impacts on public perception of and support for climate policy and findings,” Ulrich said. “I looked at the factors of misinformation, who spreads it, how it is spread, its implications on the public’s support for climate policy, and then I also looked at potential ways to move forward.”
Her writing process began with many early mornings at the HUB-Robeson Center, said Ulrich, annotating papers and synthesizing the current literature around climate misinformation.
Ulrich said she was surprised by some of her findings, for example, the kinds of factors that play a part in influencing a person’s belief in climate misinformation. She found evidence that the greater exposure a person has to extreme weather events, the less susceptible they seem to be to climate misinformation — possibly, she said, because they themselves see firsthand the impacts of climate change.
Once the course was completed, Ulrich spent her spring and summer months working alongside Penn State professors to revise the paper. Addressing comments from the peer-review process proved to be a challenging, yet integral part of the learning and writing process.
“A big difficulty I faced was being confident enough in my knowledge about the topic to be able to put my stamp on it, and at the end-discussion section of my paper, having the confidence to make my critique,” Ulrich said. “But Dr. Wilf helped me with that, because he told all of us, by the end of the semester you will be an expert on that topic since you've looked through all that literature. He encouraged us to have confidence and to be able to say if we disagree with a finding.”
These relationships within the tight-knit College of Earth and Mineral Sciences’ community helped her reach her goal, she said, adding that she hopes that her work helps provide people with knowledge to help navigate climate change misinformation.