Steve Carpenter On “Fake Facts,” Trust in Science and Hope For the Future

The following “Know Your Madisonian” profile ran in today in the Wisconsin State Journal

Know Your Madisonian: UW-Madison’s Stephen Carpenter makes Madison, state lakes his laboratory

by Karen Rivedal, Wisconsin State Journal

Steve Carpenter.
©UW-Madison University Communications
Photo by: Jeff Miller

As an antidote to a proliferation of “fake facts,” Stephen Carpenter offers repeatable, observable, measurable science that is provably fact-filled.
Carpenter, a zoology professor, has led UW-Madison’s Center for Limnology for the past eight years. He has studied lake science, with a focus on Madison-area lakes and another lake group up north, for three decades.
But in some ways, he says, what he’s learned may be less important than how he’s learned it: through the indispensable scientific method.
“A really important message in these times of ‘fake facts’ is that there actually is a way to obtain correct information, and that’s because of science,” said Carpenter, 64. “It still exists, and we’re still over here doing it. When the public gets tired of ‘fake facts’ and wants to come back to work with actual facts, we’ll be here.” Continue reading –>