It's repeated so often that it has long been regarded as a cliche, but we live in an increasingly information-intensive world, bombarded by facts and figures from an endless queue of media outlets, websites, television shows and Windsor-based science bloggers. This abundance of information often comes with a cost. If my grandfather wanted to learn something about his health - and of course like many men of his generation he didn't - he would have seen a doctor or read a reputable book. These days, we receive much of our information on the fly in bite-sized chunks from websites and media articles. Fast food culture applied to research.

The result is like trying to build an igloo by catching snowflakes. We snatch little snippets of information here and there, but often they lack any real substance, failing to really contribute to the building of a complete understanding of a subject. Stripped of context or reference, in the end these factlets are as intangible as the ether they travel through.

You've heard it before, at dinner parties, from taxi drivers, from commenters on the intertubes: "Global warming? Pah! I remember they were talking about global cooling when I was a lad." As Peterson, Connolley, and Fleckthe, the authors of "The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus" [1] explain: "the following pervasive myth arose: there was a consensus among climate scientists of the 1970s that either global cooling or a full-fledged ice age was imminent." But was it true? No.