On Climate Communication
Everything you need to know about this AAAS session, called “Why Climate Communication Continues to be Colossal Botch,” can be summed up by this famous 40 second clip:
Yes, I made that title up, too, but really, that’s what it was about. Panelist Gavin Schmidt, echoing the sentiments expressed by Kerry Emmanuel in a session from the previous day, asserted that “media reports [of climate change research] are not generally accurate,” because they are “sensationalized” and rife with “false balance.” Speaking for himself, and perhaps many other climate scientists, he said:
You generally feel you are being rolled over by the media.
Naomi Oreskes, the second panelist, mostly talked about how to distinguish between “mules” and “mavericks” in the climate debate, but she also said it was time to stop focusing on the “deficit model”–a lack of adequate knowledge or facts– for the failure to sway the hardcore bloc of climate skeptics. She said that cultural or ideological predisposition explains why “many highly eductated people do not accept the scientific evidence for climate change,” rather than a lack of factual information.
Thomas Lessl, the third panelist, who referred to himself as a cultural anthropologist of science, brought a scholarly perspective and stated that “the scientific community was collectively naive about communication.” He suggested:
What the scientific community needs most is a fundamental reflection on the complexities of human communication.
In his closing remarks as a discussant, Dot Earth’s Andrew Revkin said
One reason I left journalism is that the deficit model doesn’t work.
He used to think:
If you just tell the story, just right, we’d get into gear, but that’s not the case.
Whatever the case is, it seems clear to me that some climate scientists are insistent that journalism as a whole is not getting the climate story right, and that this is contributing to a big communication failure in the climate debate. What do you think?
Trying to communicate climate science as a ‘story’ is I think a big part of the problem. I would also like to know what part of this story do people such as Gavin and Emanuel think is not being told, or is being badly mismanaged by journalists? Most articles related to climate change that I come across take the simple form of pronouncements along the lines of ‘scientists say…’ etc. No mention of Moranos or Moncktons. The only Australian newspaper I read- The Age, gives no time to skeptics of climate science, it’s straight down the line consensus reporting. Most other papers are what my aging mum likes to call ‘tits and bums’ papers… they are not regarded seriously.
IMHO The problem isn’t that there is an information deficit.
It appears to me that most of the serious money being spent on ‘climate change advocacy’ follows the NGO model. I.E. Show a picture of a starving child from some awful place and make an emotional appeal to make a small sacrifice in order to help this starving child/polar bear/ baby seal.
‘Save the childrens’ $1 billion annual spend is better then nothing but realistically it is not much more then a symbolic gesture considering the size of global poverty. (No criticism of save the children is intended)
The progress on action for climate change is right up there with the progress of ‘save the children’ on stamping out global poverty.
No one denies there are starving children in the world, yet there is very little progress as to doing anything about it.
Andy Revkin is a pretty perceptive guy and has occasionally tried to re-frame the debate in terms of ‘energy quest’. I’m sure I don’t subscribe to Revkins politics, but IMHO he is correct trying to reframe the debate in terms of ‘Energy Quest’.
Andy Revkin tended not to get his teaching responsibility right when he was a journalist. So frankly, sorry, that’s not a data point.
Oddly, as his institutional connection loosens he gradually gets better at producing a balance that is centered on the evidence and proportionate regarding the extent of confidence and uncertainty. I truly wonder why this is.
Had he done a job more like this at the Times he might have more to say about whether the deficit model works.
And look, the deficit model has to work. Facts emerge and cultures change in response. As the facts emerge more unambiguously, the cultural shift needs to “get in gear” and not sooner. If we have any semblance of democracy, we know or don’t know collectively, and communication is how that knowledge is brought to the sphere of action.
I honestly think you all are hair-splitting, but fine. Suppose you are right.
Information has to flow from science to policy or policy will be incompetent; and from science to the public or policy will be impotent. Whose job is that? If you don’t want to call them journalists please tell us what to call it and what profession to join, because we desperately need such people.
If the whole mission is impossible, then how is democracy to work, if it has no capacity to judge between truth and fiction?
Michael writes: “And look, the deficit model has to work. Facts emerge and cultures change in response.”
Ironically, MT is a living, breathing example of why the deficit model doesn’t work. You don’t see it, do you?
MT- have you stopped seeing articles on climate change appearing in the media? I still see them, almost every day in fact. Here’s one for today that took me 2 seconds to pull up…
http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-world/global-warming-could-spur-toxic-algae-bacteria-in-seas-20110220-1b0oz.html
These stories do not just magically appear- they are written by journalists. Again, I just don’t see what the problem is here.
Perhaps the climatologists could try somethings such as honesty and transparency. Also, if found out to be wrong, try humility aswell.
In the light of Steig v. O’Donnell, Gavin Schmidt and Real Climate have a lot to learn.
But they cannot learn anything, until they accept they have a problem.
Those that deal with addiction issues refer to it as “denial”.
Maybe it is just too hard to overcome the legacy of Walt Disney.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vnp4kj5lLOU&NR=1
All you are saying is “no”.
But what is the alternative? How should democracies absorb new facts in preparation for acting upon them?
The Surgeon General’s 1964 report on smoking-disease linkage was convincing enough to doctors that the smoking rate among them dropped fairly quickly. Yet, 46 years later, 20% of US adults still smoke:
http://www.usatoday.com/yourlife/health/medical/2010-09-07-smoking-rates_N.htm
The demographics means that most current adult smokers started after 1964, and most started as kids, given “the Importance of Younger Adults”, meaning 12-18-year-olds (which is when most people need to get addicted or it doesn’t stick very well):
http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/eyn18c00/pdf
Now, this might have occurred because:
1) Medical researchers have done a poor job explaining.
2) Journalists haven’t done a good job.
OR
3) Tobacco companies have superb marketeers and great lobbyists (classic grassroots/treetops), still use Hill&Knowlton-designed tactics, have used thinktanks like Heartland to help, and all this works.
Certainly, confusing people about (complex) climate and energy issues is child’s play compared to getting kids addicted to make them lifelong (well, not as long as might be) customers.
Much of the cigarette strategy arose from a 1953 meeting of tobacco CEOs (Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century, p.165, http://www.cigarettecentury.com/), after which they really got Hill&Knowlton involved.
The nearest obvious equivalent for climate was the1998 GCSCT meeting, sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, with various fossil fuel companies, thinktanks, and PR agencies. See pp.19-20, 82 of http://www.desmogblog.com/crescendo-climategate-cacophony, or see the 9-page plan:
http://www.edf.org/documents/3860_GlobalClimateSciencePlanMemo.pdf image
http://www.euronet.nl/users/e_wesker/ew@shell/API-prop.html text
These folks are very good marketeers and have executed well, and now have more people in the House who can ignore basic physics. Perhaps they can succeed in eliminating NOAA satellites, the IPCC, the EPA and most DOE energy research, which will make them even more successful than the tobacco folks, who were able to keep only 20% of adults as smokers. But then, the Kochs and allies can spend a lot more money on these efforts.
I think that many people, whether in a democracy or not, don’t “absorb” facts as abstract things very well. They have to learn them personally, often in their daily lives. This isn’t an absolute of course, and there are always counter examples. This is separate from ideologues, who don’t accept facts that are counter to their ideology. But most people aren’t ideologues (though they are quite strong on the blogosphere).
I think that if and when society broadly supports much stronger action, whatever policy that might be, it will probably be the result of events and actions that leave scientists scratching their heads. Maybe it will be a collection of extreme weather events. Maybe it will be a movie that is made just so. Maybe the same movie or events two years earlier wouldn’t have had the same effect.
There are some kinds of things that may well be beyond what journalism can handle. That doesn’t mean that there are no problems with journalism on this issue, just that there will be no silver bullet coming from that area.
I’m sure I saw Gavin on a grassy knoll. He passed something to Naomi. I coudn’t tell what it was, but she kept glancing at the school book depository. Then I saw Emanuel in a black helicotpr. The letters API were stenciled on the side. I smelled CO2, so I lit a cigarette.
There is a guest post at Climate Etc. entitled “Believing Science” by Thomas Brown, that is very relevant to this issue.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/20/believing-science/
I asked this question in the last thread and MT asked it on both threads. If it’s not journalists’ job to accurately report science, whose is it? Do we need a whole new profession of figure-it-outers? Can we have a functionally democracy without such intermediaries… or worse, if the people currently in that role are disseminating misunderstandings?
This seems a much more relevant question than whether State of Fear was a good book.
Who gets to define accurate.
“many highly eductated people do not accept the scientific evidence for climate change”
This, from Naomi, is interesting. It can be parsed: educated people do not accept facts. One supposes Naomi doesn’t actually believe that in general (or maybe she does?). So, one wonders which are the facts that educated people don’t believe.
Is it the fact the we should do something, high CO2 sensitivity, 20 ft sea level rise. Or the fact that CO2 absorbs certain IR bands, or that some ice is metling.
It matters.
Michael Tobis: on the deficit model, we know from extensive psychological research that people make decisions and choose policies largely based on their emotional, not rational, response to risks and hazards. Information shapes those emotions, but decisions are made largely on an emotional level.
This has wide-ranging consequences. When someone thinks of dangerous radioactive waste or Chernobyl, they tend to resist acknowledging the positive aspects of nuclear power and when they focus on the positive aspects (electricity with no atmospheric emissions of CO2, mercury, particulate matter, sulfates, or NOx), they tend to resist acknowledging the dangers.
We see something of the same with respect to climate change: people who focus on the positive benefits of burning fossil fuels are emotionally primed to minimize the negative consequences and those who focus on the dangers of climate change are primed to neglect the benefits (e.g., cheap energy to drive economic growth in the poorest parts of the world).
Paul Slovic’s new book, “The Feeling of Risk” (Earthscan, 2010) presents an extensive review of this line of research. (the book doesn’t discuss climate change much, but focuses on other hazards, such as smoking, nuclear power, nanotechnology, biotechnology, and terrorism; global warming is mentioned briefly in Dan Kahan’s chapter, “Fear of Democracy”)
Dan Kahan has also made big contributions to understanding the emotional and social context of information in an environmental policy context. Anthony Leiserowitz at Yale has done a lot of excellent work on the way people assimilate information about climate change.
Information is important, but if you ignore the role of what Slovic calls the “affect heuristic” and focus on presenting only information without taking its social and emotional context, you’re going to be ineffective.
PDA, here is my perspective on the answer to your questions. It is the job of scientists to figure out how to explain the science to the public. There have been a number of superb science communicators: Feynman, Sagan, etc. The job of journalists is to provide news, be a watchdog, and do investigative pieces which can include digging into the science. For a science topic that has political ramifications, NGOs and advocacy groups play a big role in communication and educating the public, e.g. PEW Climate, Climate Central, etc.
Climate scientists got lazy and thought communicating that there was a consensus among the scientists was sufficient to convince the public. Now they seem annoyed that this didn’t work and are blaming the journalists.
Stepping back just a bit, special interests, lobbyists and political parties have always hammered on the press for not being more persuasive about communicating information of interest to their group. Especially when they’re not winning. I don’t know why we’d expect policy advocates in the global warming debate to behave differently.
And journalists have often been blamed for failure to get the ‘truth’ across, when pet projects and policies fail to win approval.
The fun part is when journalists get blamed by both sides.
You nattering nabobs of negativism, you.
It is the job of scientists to figure out how to explain the science to the public.
I disagree.
Climate scientists got lazy and thought communicating that there was a consensus among the scientists was sufficient to convince the public.
I disagree, and it seems like you do too:
The problems in making the overall the argument aren’t associated with any particular incompetence on the part of climate scientists, but rather arise from the complexity of the climate system.
The job of scientists is to do science. The task of communicating scientific understanding in areas that are fraught with such complexity as climate is, as you yourself pointed out in that same post, a “huge challenge.”
It may be the status quo that the role of scientists is to both do essential research in their fields and also to be excellent communicators, while that of journalists is to be their stenographers. I don’t find that to be a compelling vision of a functioning democratic society on a small, crowded planet, however.
PDA, this particular statement of mine that you quote
The problems in making the overall the argument aren’t associated with any particular incompetence on the part of climate scientists, but rather arise from the complexity of the climate system.
Is not about communicating the science, but about the actual logic used by scientists in making their arguments. And scientists need to explain this in a clear and logical way.
Once you have something that is explained in a clear and logical way (note, I do not view the IPCC Reports as having accomplished this), then the next challenge is communicating this to the public. Not every scientist is a good communicator (most arent), but there are many scientists that are good communicators (typically those that teach).
The problem is too much emphasis on the IPCC and the consensus, and too little emphasis on clear and logical arguments and communicating with the public.
Success in communicating the science to the public does not equate with success in implementing the scientists’ preferred policy option. Failure to implement the scientists’ preferred policy option does not necessarily imply a failure to communicate the science to the public.
Failure to implement the UNFCCC policies is an a large way associated with a framing of the problem and its possible solutions in a way that is far too narrow.
So blaming all this on journalists seems to be complaining about the symptoms rather than the underlying disease.
But hey, Nixon got a lot of mileage out of blaming journalists for the U.S. failures in the Vietnam war. Why shouldn’t a clique of advocates try it too?
When a journalist writes “scientists say… the Yellowstone super volcano may erupt at any time causing human extinction…”, you can be assured that the inaccuracies in the article would be scrutinised and corrected by vulcanologists, especially the immediate, fear-inducing expressions. “Any time” can indeed mean any time between now and the next 100 thousand years.
Ditto with astronomers, and there really are many more disaster coming down from the skies. More than a journalist can poke a pen at. Again, astronomers are very quick to jump in to correct the record and allay the fears.
As far as their areas of expertise are concerned astronomers and volcanologists are very quick to respond and cut down to size all journalistic excesses that play on readers’ fears.
Now, compare and contrast this with Climatologists. Just where the hell were they for years after years after decades, as journalists went about describing as future certainty every climatological claim that entertained the possibility of a climate disaster.
Unlike vulcanologists, climate scientists have computer models that do make predictions at various certainty levels. So the certainties and the uncertainties are better quantified (one would hope) than those in vulcanology.
But instead of chiding journalists for creating the imagery of a climate catastrophe by 2100, climate scientists engorged themselves in it. Climate fears meant lots of money, power and influence for climate science. What other explanation could there be for Climatologists indifference to journalistic excesses in climate reporting?
Now, I am fairly new to the debate, having followed it closely only from early 2009 onwards. The only reason that I finally decided to pay close attention to this otherwise very boring scientific field was because this particular science tells me that my actions have moral consequences. And when I finally decided to do away with the intermediaries (the journalists) and go directly to the sources, I was completely underwhelmed by the evidence for a CO2-caused climate catastrophe.
For example, Catlin Arctic Survey of 2009 was a complete fiasco from start to finish. You can read about it here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/15/top-ten-reasons-why-i-think-catlin-arctic-ice-survey-data-cant-be-trusted/ Yet, the whole expedition was reported step by step by the Guardian and the BBC as though this was the first time ever humans walked on the Arctic ice.
Having just concluded that the Catlin survey was a scientific embarrassment, that night I watched in disbelief as one TV network after another reported the end of the expedition and its ‘worse than we thought’ findings. On TV, the report was accompanied by the footage of expedition members <i>swimming</i> from one ice-floe to another, as though this became necessary only recently.
But of course, <i>the worst</i> shock (to me) happened when I later found out what Catlin, the sponsor of the expedition, was: an insurance and reinsurance company that began selling policies against risks caused by climate change.
So here we have a most <i>non</i>dangerous liaison involving a corporation who make money on buying and selling fears, a small group of CAGW believers who put their lives and credibility on the line for money and adventure, an array of ‘credible’ MSM outlets ready and willing to propagate false but fearful stories because fear sells, and a whole lot of climate scientists sucking on their thumbs and saying nothing. The baby out of this incestuous affair is certain to be badly deformed. Why the surprise?
The establishment climate scientists are falling over each other to stress the point that their science is “not settled”. And a new phenomenon, a trend, has just emerged. Now, after two decades of ‘certainty’, the establishment climate scientists have finally decided to confront and criticise journalists for misrepresenting uncertainties, like astronomers and vulcanologists always did.
Once you have something that is explained in a clear and logical way (note, I do not view the IPCC Reports as having accomplished this), then the next challenge is communicating this to the public.
Yes. You are saying is that scientists need to make better arguments, which you call an “extremely difficult” problem for which you “don’t have any solutions,” and then they have to master communications skills. What I don’t get is how their failure to do this makes them “lazy.”
Success in communicating the science to the public does not equate with success in implementing the scientists’ preferred policy option. Failure to implement the scientists’ preferred policy option does not necessarily imply a failure to communicate the science to the public.
I agree. I never said or suggested otherwise, so I’m not sure why you felt the need to make this point, but I agree.
I think that the following example makes a good case study for exploring the Scientists/Government/NGO/Journalist/Media Owner intersections which are really at the heart of the communication discussion above.
This comes from a very recent conference held in Aspen Colorado, which seems to be sponsored by a group called For the Forests which had Al Gore as its keynote speaker.
The article as it appears in the AP sponsored online link for one of my local newspapers, the Loveland Reporter Herald, is here: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CO_DECLINING_FORESTS_CLIMATE_CHANGE_COOL-?SITE=COLOV&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
But, the headline they chose to run the story under in the local print version was: “Researchers say aspen in peril” with a sub-heading of “Evidence of Climate change role in trees’ loss ‘overwhelming’.”
Near as I can tell the quote they got the word overwhelming from was: “Jim Worrall, a U.S. Forest Service plant pathologist who studies aspen deaths, told a conference Friday that “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” indicates climate change has left aspens stressed and vulnerable.
Miscellaneous things I think I know about trees in Colorado include: Forests were heavily logged starting with the gold rush in 1858. More recently, humans have acted to heavily suppress fire. Aspen trees sprout in sunny spots. Aspen trees are really a root system, the upper parts are relatively short lived, but the system can re-sprout from the roots. A decade or so ago, before the pine beetle took off, there was some concern that maturing evergreen forests were going to squeeze out the aspens, which are desirable for attracting tourists to the Rockies for the annual fall color season. Pine trees also have a life cycle, overcrowding (second growth?) makes infestations worse. Climate change is also a factor.
In my opinion, everyone involved in the above is courting publicity for their own purposes. Whose job was it to convey the complexity of climate change and its impact on biological systems to the general public? Who is to blame if the public remains (or even feels re-enforced in remaining) skeptical?
PDA re this statement:
What I don’t get is how their failure to do this makes them “lazy.”
Their failure is oversimplifying a very complex problem and making overconfident pronouncements to policy makers.
John Mashey writes:
Now, this might have occurred because:
1) Medical researchers have done a poor job explaining.
2) Journalists haven’t done a good job.
OR
3) Tobacco companies have superb marketeers and great lobbyists (classic grassroots/treetops), still use Hill&Knowlton-designed tactics, have used thinktanks like Heartland to help, and all this works.
I don’t see “4) 20% of people exercise their freedom to choose to do things which are bad for them” listed. I suppose as-yet-unnamed lobby groups have been successful in convincing all the world’s base jumpers, sky divers, hang gliders and parascenders that the theory of gravity is a fraud, too. You never seem to spot the obvious, John, in your search for the proponents of The Conspiracy Theory.
Doctors may have given up smoking, but has MT given up his car yet?
Jonathan: “Information is important, but if you ignore the role of what Slovic calls the affect heuristic and focus on presenting only information without taking its social and emotional context, you’re going to be ineffective.”
Let’s distinguish between propaganda and discourse, please. Information is important, as you stipulate. It is perfectly obvious to anyone with a modest grasp of the climate situation that most of the public lacks an understanding. True, they are presented with stories of varying quality about climate change, yet they fail to emerge with a sensible understanding of the scope and time scales of the problem.
Of course they vote on how they feel about what they understand, but what they understand is hopelessly muddled. In particular, the zero-sum nature of carbon emissions is missing from most people’s understanding: that if we avoid the abyss, then the amount of carbon that can be emitted is finite and must somehow be capped. A gram of net emissions on my part is a gram of emissions not available to me. The public simply doesn’t get it. Until this is broadly understood, most people’s expectations of what a reasonable course of action would look like is based on a fallacious understanding of the problem.
There’s nothing conceptually difficult about it. The hard part is that some very wealthy interests are motivated to obfuscate it. If in this context the press throws up its hands and says “we aren’t here to adjudicate” then the press is part of the problem. People don’t even understand what the scientific mainstream is saying even to this very conceptually simple level.
Yes, of course you have to give the devil his due. But the press is utterly failing to convey the broadest and most easily understood aspects of the mainstream position. What people feel about what to do depends on their perceptions of what is happening. Somebody has to convey the real outlines of the problem.
So, sure “Information is important, but if you ignore the role of what Slovic calls the affect heuristic and focus on presenting only information without taking its social and emotional context, you’re going to be ineffective.” But if you ignore the information and focus only on the social and emotional content, you are being malign. Our opposition has the advantage that they can do this. Some of our allies are no better. We as scientists don’t have that option. We are constrained by the real information.
We expect journalism to be allied with truth. When journalists shrug and say “not my job” I shrug back and say “wtf is your job about, then?” I’ve yet to see an answer to that question or even a gesture in its broad direction.
The public has been bombarded with Global Warming stories in papers, magazines, on TV and radio for the past 15-years. 99% of these stories report on a prediction of biblical calamity for some species or other.
Also, human instinct and common sense that has evolved over the eons informs us that GW can’t be all bad, but every story you read, watch or hear is a disaster. People know when they are being fed hysterical crap over and over again. If one wants to blame the press for anything, it is their hunger for tragic stories and environmental sensationalism.
The hubris of the CAGW grant eating industry is so great, they now are left to complain that their biggest propaganda tool is not doing enough to carry their water. Then they retreat to their rarefied lairs for another circle-jerk of consensus.
MT:
You are wrong. Reporters are supposed to report the news and the citizens are then responsible to weigh these reports, determine the facts and define their own truth.
Only government controlled media reports truth (Pravda!)
@29 Most people, even those who “get to think for a living” operate under some economic constraints in terms of what thinking it is exactly that they can get paid to do.
We expect both science and journalism to be allied with the truth. But in terms of real day to day life not everyone is going to be able to spend their time pursuing their precise favorite version of the truth or in promoting its underlying wisdom to others.
In terms of the journalist, who is hiring this person, editing the work, deciding to place it in the media venue, writing the headlines or promotion? The average journalist is probably trying to wedge in as much of their favorite versions of the truth as they can within the venues which they can access and still make a living. Similar questions could be asked of a scientist. It isn’t about the truth in totality, it is often about such things as landing research grants.
Ultimately, if the scientist wants funding, they are going to have to convince others to fund their work. That involves communication. It would therefore be useful to figure out in advance, like a politician would, which words or phrases tend to lead to less than desirable results. “Overwhelming” for example.
Reporters are supposed to report the news and the citizens are then responsible to weigh these reports, determine the facts and define their own truth.
“Truth” didn’t used to be a dirty word, not even in Russian. Tell me, what are criteria that should be used in determining what is “news?” Is “truth” really orthogonal to “news?” In other words, does something like “local man stated today that the sky is green; some scientists disagree” qualify as news, or should there be some validity test applied before publication?
Some things actually <b>do</b> have truth values.
Scientists can be 100% right on the science, and if the public in a democracy decides to take society to hell, what should scientists do?
Feynman discusses this to a small degree in Cargo Cult Science.
Rather than failing to persuade the public, the press seems to be entirely responsible for persuading the public. Just not in the direction the alarmists intended. The press is responsible for reporting FAR TOO MUCH of “what scientists say”. The public has become “scientist deaf” rather like kids become “parent deaf”, when parents forget the importance of picking their battles.
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
Michael Tobis –
You wrote:
In particular, the zero-sum nature of carbon emissions is missing from most people’s understanding: that if we avoid the abyss, then the amount of carbon that can be emitted is finite and must somehow be capped. A gram of net emissions on my part is a gram of emissions not available to me. The public simply doesn’t get it. In particular, the zero-sum nature of carbon emissions is missing from most people’s understanding: that if we avoid the abyss, then the amount of carbon that can be emitted is finite and must somehow be capped. A gram of net emissions on my part is a gram of emissions not available to me. The public simply doesn’t get it.
Michael – I am a chemical engineer and have been doing mass and energy balances for 30 years. Yet I have no idea what you are talking about here. Likewise, the whole notion of “warming in the pipeline” that is pushed by you and your co-religionists is nonsense. You folks have not made the case for alarmism because you are deficient in your understanding of simple concepts, or you are dishonest. You can hoodwink journalists with no relevant training, but there a whole lot of us other folks out here who are not easily fooled.
damn Tom, you stole my line on the Nixonian angle
The failures of communication are pretty clear to anyone with any marketing experience.
As long as people like Gavin and Tobis speak for those of us who believe in AGW we are doomed.
@Tom C: warming in the pipeline is a concept that should be very familiar to a chemical engineer: things have thermal inertia, so when you increase the heat flow—say to a pot of water on top of a stove—it takes time for the temperature to reach its new steady state. There’s no great mystery about the thermal equilibration time of the oceans: it’s of order 1000 years, because that’s the time scale on which overturning takes place.
I strongly doubt that in your professional work design processes on the assumption that they instantly achieve chemical or thermal equilibrium when an input is changed, so I can’t see why you’d be so hostile to the idea that the flow of heat in the earth system behaves any differently.
@Michael: You’re making straw men by reducing everything to binaries. Yes, information matters, and I’m not proposing that we ignore information and just spout propaganda, as you seem to think I’m saying. I’m saying that information matters, but that if we think simply providing information without thinking carefully about the way people assimilate information, we’re going to get nowhere.
Let’s step back and take a look at what journalism does and does not do from a broader perspective than just climate: The US budget is conceptually much simpler than the climate system, yet there is a huge disconnect between what’s possible and what polls consistently report the public wants: the public wants a balanced budget without either raising taxes or cutting services. Similarly, as Pielke Jr. has commented on, the public mostly wants global warming stopped without raising the price of energy. What you say about grams of emissions is pretty much identical to the problems we have convincing the public to take sensible action on government budget deficits.
As I look at things, and as I follow the journalism, reporting seems to be pretty consistent on the large scale that climate change is real, is supported by solid science, and that it’s likely to bring serious problems in the future. What I see a lot of folks on the science side asking for is not so much journalism as remedial science education, which isn’t the job for newspapers. Looking at the federal budget, I don’t think journalism is to blame for people demanding that the budget be balanced without either cutting services or raising taxes. Nor do I think journalism is to blame for the views the public holds on evolution or vaccine safety.
The public is paying less and less attention to journalism. The number of people reading a daily newspaper or watching a daily news broadcast on a major network is dropping. Evening news viewership is down 50% since 1980. Budgets for science and environmental coverage are down.
Meanwhile, there’s a wealth of high-quality information on climate out there for free on the web at any level of detail that someone might want. We’ve got Tamino, Science of Doom, and RC for detailed scientific treatments. We’ve got catchy videos from Peter Sinclair. We’ve got an extraordinarily clear FAQ from Skeptical Science. There was even an Oscar-winning movie that did much better box office than the Bjorn Lomborg farrago (AIT brought in about 400 times more money than Cool It).
Snarling at journalists is futile. I think they’re doing as well as they can reasonably do within the constraints of the system. I don’t think they’re being lazy or malign. Our energies will be better spent coming up with better ways to reach and engage the public. And part of this is paying attention to what research tells us about the way people learn and using it to become more effective educators of the public and more effective advocates for the policies we want to see enacted (two different, but connected goals).
It’s interesting to look at the plan Mashey linked to.
Victory depends upon.
1. Average citizens understanding the uncertainty in climate science
2. Media understanding the uncertainty
3. Industry understanding the uncertainty.
4. Supporters of Kyoto being seen as out of touch of reality.
They also laid out a national strategy to achieve these goals. Looking at that strategy one can see that history really didnt play out how they envisioned it. Instead AGW folks fumbled the ball
Let’s go back to the plan and look at it more closely. Basically it boils down to two goals. get the supporters to look like kooks and spread the meme of uncertainty. From 1998 to today What actually happened?
Well, the supporters of AGW delivered item 4 gift wrapped. They continue to be perceived as out of touch with reality. It’s our own damn fault. As to the “uncertainty” message. The way I read it a small group of scientists were so concerned about this meme of uncertainty spreading, that they took actions to prevent it. Actions that caused more damage than the uncertainty meme could ever. As history unfolded from 1998 to now, the uncertainty meme is late to the game. The corruption meme, has been far more effective than the uncertainty meme.
Rather than facing the uncertainty of climate science squarely, certain folks hid data, denied FIOAs, underplayed the uncertainty and got labelled with charges of corruption. They handed their opponents a far better hand that the opponents could have dreamed of.
Now we are at a point again where the uncertainty question can be faced. And what do we see? we see a scientist, Judith Curry, suggest that this question should be talked about. And the response,
Attack Judith Curry and Attack the press.
Not a good plan.
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Jonathan:
Thanks for your contributions to this dialogue. I hope Michael gives your comments some serious thought.
But when it comes to your read on news consumption (#38), I’d like to add a bit more nuance.
It’s true that people are tuning in less to broadcast news, but because the digital landscape rules the day, this means that the major papers, such as the NYT, have seen huge increases in readership, via the web. (Just no way to truly monetize these gains yet.)
Also, let me point you to the Online portion of that Pew State of the News Media, which, to me, is a better indicator of how news and information is being consumed. The following two graphs are telling:
One thing that is becoming clearer is the way people use digital technology to acquire news. The American news consumer is increasingly becoming a grazer, across both online and offline platforms. On a typical day, nearly half of Americans now get news from four to six different platforms””from online to TV to print and more, according to new research from PEJ and the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Within the online universe the same pattern holds true. People graze across multiple websites for their news. Only 21% say they tend to rely primarily on one destination; only a third even say they have a favorite news website (35%) among those they use. But these online news grazers do not range far. Most (57%) usually rely on two to five websites.
Of course, these stats do reinforce the other part of your comment, about “a wealth of high-quality information on climate out there for free on the web at any level of detail that someone might want.”
To me, all this is further proof that the deficit model is not part of the problem when it comes to communication of climate change and climate science.
Keith:
Thanks for the broader perspective on news consumption. You’re right that the growth of online consumption means people are reading what journalists report even as consumption of traditional media declines, so I was completely wrong when I said that “the public pays less and less attention to journalism.”
But my other point from that paragraph is still valid, I think: because news media aren’t earning much revenue on web views, the decline of print and television consumers means less money for the newsroom, even if more people are reading/viewing online, and the science and environment desks suffer particularly when this happens.
As to MT: he’s a good guy and in my exchanges with him, he always thinks seriously about what I write and responds fairly and sincerely. That doesn’t mean he always agrees with me, which is fine because I’m not always right and I learn more when someone pushes back.
Jonathan Gilligan –
Thank you for your measured tone and constructive comments.
“Heat in the pipeline” makes no sense. If you think that added CO2 heats the atmosphere and this heated atmosphere will then take 1000 years to heat the oceans you don’t understand the masses, heat capacities, and rate constants involved. Roger Pielke Sr. has tried vainly to explain that this concept is incoherent, but the MTs of the world will have none of it.
Anyway, Pielke is right, the alarmists are wrong, and again, I thank you for maintaining decorum.
There isn’t an information deficit; there’s a science deficit.
I don’t want or need more propaganda. What we need to know is the value of climate sensitivity to CO2 and more definitive information on the behavior of clouds in response to increased CO2 and/or water vapor content of the atmosphere. Until those pieces of the puzzle are accurately defined, activist scientists are just moving furniture around for appearances sake.
I’m not sure of its exact origins, but the “heat in the pipeline” phrasing appears to be primarily used as a distraction and misdirection tactic by Pielke Snr and his acolytes. Hansen has talked of “warming in the pipeline”. The distinction is important when people try to nit-pick the analogy to death Pielke style. The “heat” does not actually exist in the climate system at present, it is an unrealised warming due to the energy imbalance. The pipeline is a metaphor not a physical reality.
Of course this point is trivial and well understood by every competent climate scientist who isn’t engaged in deliberate misdirection. Pielke asking where the “heat” is hidden is a classic example of the latter, unfortunately. The heat does not exist within the climate system any more than it exists somewhere hidden in my house when I turn on a heater. Nevertheless, both systems will warm, for the same basic reason (energy imbalance).
And, as an example of that online grazing consumption: I, newly introduced to the existence of Jonathan Gilligan, did a quick Google search and have just read the paper: Household Actions Can Provide a Behavioral Wedge to Rapidly Reduce US Carbon Emissions.
I believe that quite a bit of public response to climate change has to do with surmounting a barrier of not so much outright denial of the facts, but rather a softer psychological denial. In a busy day to day existence, a what could I do about it if it were to be true anyway, sort of attitude. Therefore, easier not to think about it. Why spend your time feeling guilty, when you could shove it to the back of your mind. Maybe even rationalize that it is all uncertain and maybe not true after all.
For this, I think that the paper offers some guidance on steps that can be taken, things that can be done. I like the “behavioral wedge concept”. I recommend that others read this paper also:
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/44/18452.full.pdf+html
I am not disagreeing with Jonathan. Certainly there is more to a successful resolution of complex problems than just conveying the information well.
But when Keith turns around and says “the deficit model is not part of the problem when it comes to communication of climate change and climate science” I am so far from accepting that that I cannot even understand it.
If there is relevant new information, I want to know about it. I want to know its context and its credibility. I want to update my opinions based on the new information. Until such time I am operating under an information deficit, and the media which convey that information to me resolve that deficit.
We must be using words differently if a representative of those media says that it is not their job to resolve that deficit. At least I certainly hope so. If Keith means by them what I would mean by them he is saying that he has no obligation as a journalist to convey useful information. In other words, he is saying worse things about journalism than I ever have; specifically, that journalists should be ignored because they convey misinformation or disinformation ad libitum. To which I can only say that I have more interesting sources of fictional entertainment to turn to.
So I must be misunderstanding something. I wish someone would tell me what.
Tom C, apparently I mis-edited and left some confusing text. I meant to say:
In particular, the zero-sum nature of carbon emissions is missing from most people’s understanding: that if we avoid the abyss, then the amount of carbon that can be emitted is finite and must somehow be capped. Given a finite cap, a gram of net emissions on my part is a gram of emissions not available to you or anyone else.
My apologies for the confusion which was due to an editing error on my part.
On your other issue, there is no literal pipeline so there is no literal “heat in the pipeline”. There is unrealized warming corresponding to existing greenhouse gas concentrations. I do not know why you choose to represent me as having said otherwise.
MT: a gram of net emissions only makes a difference if it does. Most likely natural climate variability accounts for most of what was observed in the 20th century, and CO2 emissions are just noise. Like the IPCC and most of what has been written about CAGW; just noise.
Michael Tobis,
As I said at the outset of this thread, you are an ironic example of why the deficit model does not work with some people. In comment #29, you wrote:
“But the press is utterly failing to convey the broadest and most easily understood aspects of the mainstream position. What people feel about what to do depends on their perceptions of what is happening. Somebody has to convey the real outlines of the problem.”
This sweeping, monolithic statement is utterly false.
But despite a near daily influx of stories that largely reinforce “the mainstream position” that climate change is real and worrisome, you continue to maintain that the press is “utterly failing.”
In comment #16, Jonathan Gilligan wrote: “on the deficit model, we know from extensive psychological research that people make decisions and choose policies largely based on their emotional, not rational, response to risks and hazards. Information shapes those emotions, but decisions are made largely on an emotional level.”
Somehow, in comment # 48, you say you are not disagreeing with Jonathan. Okay, maybe. Perhaps, then perhaps you just are not accepting what he says, or you are unable to assimilate it to cohere with your own biases on this issue.
Furthermore, I don’t understand what you’re attributing to me in the rest of that #48 comment. For example, you write:
“We must be using words differently if a representative of those media says that it is not their job to resolve that deficit.”
Can you point to where I said that? Then you follow with this:
“At least I certainly hope so. If Keith means by them what I would mean by them he is saying that he has no obligation as a journalist to convey useful information.”
This is wacky, because what you say is not remotely close to what I said.
This thread is about why the deficit model does not work and why. But you don’t want to engage with the real reasons for that; instead, you’d rather continue to concoct strawmen, which is something that Jonathan has already pointed out to you in an earlier comment.
@Judith
> too little emphasis on clear and logical arguments and communicating with the public
Believing that clarity and logic will win out is, frankly, naive.
Put forth a simple, logical argument, and the easy response is that you’re oversimplifying. If you’re oversimplifying, you’re not a “serious” scientist. If you’re not serious, you’re an activist, whose motives are suspect, who’s clinging to a religious belief etc etc etc. “Serious” scientists understand the uncertainty, and wouldn’t dream of trying to mislead the public with such simplistic statements. Meanwhile, the message received is: this topic is confusing, so take the natural human response of assuming the truth is somewhere between the two propositions and either temper your response or continue to do nothing.
The more you try to “reframe” the message in simple, logical terms, the easier it is to paint you as desperate, or politically motivated rather than simply responding to clear scientific evidence. The harder you work as a communicator, the more irrational you can be made to seem.
This is really simple stuff, it works, and its been going on in *dozens* of fields for decades (at least). Its a strategy that wins elections and prevents action, and the math is simple: given three possible outcomes (accept/deny/neither), two favour the party that seeks to avoid action. If your aim is simply to prevent action, you don’t need to be right, you just need to sow enough confusion or mistrust of the other guy that the actions they are advocating lose their support.
As far as I can tell, if your action requires a popular mandate, there is no adequate solution to this. Shock tactics can sometimes work, where public opinion is *forced* to one of the polarised views, but AGW is now such a long term, insubstantial threat, and all of the “shock” approaches that have been tried have effectively been painted as alarmist, which has (equally effectively) been used to tarnish the science that the statements have been based on. The only really viable approach is to convince enough people in power to take action, dragging popular opinion behind them – and the likelihood of that happening seems vanishingly small.
@Keith Kloor
As an example of how the press is failing where it matters – Fred Singer recently stated that the “hide the decline” referred to an attempt to show temperatures rising, when they were actually falling. Fred Singer, who is supposed to be one of the more respectable “skeptical” scientists, does not (or chooses not to) understand that this is simply wrong. This message is one that comes *purely* from ill-informed, sensationalist reportage.
If *a scientist working in the field* is so easily misled on this issue by the media, what hope for the rest of us?
That’s an extraordinary thing out of Fred Singer. Where did he make this statement, Dave? It’s rare to find a non-scientist who doesn’t understand “hide the decline”, so to find a scientist failing on this level is something to behold. Please point us the way.
The “experts say” headline of the morning is “Earth Unrecognizable by 2050”. I saw it online, Google lists 117 media venues that have picked this up so far. It will probably get to my local newspaper eventually.
http://ozarksfirst.com/fulltext?nxd_id=408286
I am a little unclear as to where this press release is coming from. It starts out “That’s an assessment by researchers at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.” But then elaborates to “The World Wildlife Fund’s Jason Clay says….” I don’t see any indications on the AAAS website that the release came from them. It does seem that Jason Clay was a speaker at the AAAS meeting.
The link I selected above does not lead to the most complete version of this press release, I selected it partially because the part of the release they chose to zero in on was: “A population boom in the poor countries of Africa and South America is expected to boost the number of people living on the planet to nine-billion by mid-century.” Also because the population that I would assume is served by the media outlet above, (like my local newspaper) would have plenty of people who would fit into the following survey:
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/06/26/survey-4-in-10-say-jesus-is-coming-back-by-2050/?iref=allsearch
My conclusion is that the AAAS ought to be seriously concerned that, from a public perspective, the apparent weight of “the researchers” in their organization seems to be behind this statement. I know the WWF primarily from their fund-raising letters. But I think that even they ought to be aware, in reaching out beyond their base, that their strategy of “protecting the future of nature” will reach people whose ideas about the role of nature, and the future are different from theirs.
I don’t think that the press release above (as presented) motivates any thoughts of reducing personal energy consumption. It might, however, segue neatly with a need to fund missionaries to the poor of Africa and South America.
Who failed to convey the science? Should we expect a media outlet in Springfield Missouri to run a press release in its entirety, along with enough background information for their readers to put the issues presented in context? Or should we expect those who are trying to influence public opinion (which was, I assume, Jason Clay’s objective) to be more cognizant of how pieces of their message might be received?
Simon:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/19/fred-singer-on-the-best-project/
Here’s the money quote: “However, the most serious revelation from the e-mails is that they tried to “hide the decline” in temperatures, using various “tricks” in order to keep alive a myth of rising temperatures in support of the dogma of anthropogenic global warming.”
Note the <b>myth of rising temperatures</b> bit.
James Annan: Thanks a lot for your explanation!
(this blog really needs a “preview comment” function 🙁 )
Gaythia (55):
You pose a few interesting questions towards the end, of which I’d like to add: that all sorts of interest groups, bloggers and media choose to highlight what they want in such instances.
Thanks toto!
I agree that highlighting depends on the interest group. But, referring to your original post above, I do not think that the problem in my example above is “because they are “sensationalized” and rife with “false balance.” I do agree that it is about “cultural or ideological predisposition” and that frequently “the scientific community (and I would add the non-profit community) was (is) collectively naive about communication”
I do not believe that Jason Clay was really speaking to the immediate audience at the AAAS meeting. I think he could recognize that as a form of preaching to the already converted. I personally believe that it is possible that he was using the meeting as a platform for enhancing the credibility of the press release.
So I think that both the AAAS and the WWF ought to have been much more aware of the possible impacts and interpretations of this message on people partially reached by the press release. At the very least, in this internet age, permutations of these sorts of press releases could be monitored and some sort of follow-up attempted.
re 54:
Simon be sure to read the comments at WUWT were a few of us take Singer to task for his stupid mistake
Steve, I do see it. I’ve posted my view at the end, responding to Tallbloke and Pat Frank.
Steven* sorry.
I don’t buy the nonsense argument that the trees ‘somehow’ stopped responding to temperatures from 1960s. Therefore the argument that “the decline is only in the tree ring record” doesn’t hold any water.
On this blog, Gavin Schmidt posted a comment in which he attempted to put words into my mouth. Schmidt and others in his faction of climate science wonder why they cannot convince people of their position. I wonder why. AGW is a major problem. I wish it it had better spokesmen
@Shub
You seem to be arguing that trees are better thermometers than thermometers. I suggest you take that line over to climateaudit, and see how far it gets you.
In any case, my point was not about the substance of Singer’s misconception, but the part that the media plays in disseminating this sort of thing.
Keith, we really should get that beer sooner rather than later. There is something amiss with how we are communicating.
You quote me “We must be using words differently if a representative of those media says that it is not their job to resolve that deficit.”
Then you ask Can you point to where I said that?
I am sure that you said “the deficit model is not part of the problem when it comes to communication of climate change and climate science”. I can’t make any sense of that; I can’t imagine what journalism is supposed to be for if that is true.
Your defense is:
“But the press is utterly failing to convey the broadest and most easily understood aspects of the mainstream position. What people feel about what to do depends on their perceptions of what is happening. Somebody has to convey the real outlines of the problem.”
This sweeping, monolithic statement is utterly false.
But despite a near daily influx of stories that largely reinforce “the mainstream position” that climate change is real and worrisome, you continue to maintain that the press is “utterly failing.”
I stipulate that “real and worrisome” has been conveyed. But the scale and scope of the problem, the long time scales, the dire long-run outcomes, the fundamental ethical questions about pillaging the earth vs preserving it, appear nowhere in mainstream discourse. When I tell a general audience that an urgent 80% cut in emissions in the west within the lifetimes of people now living is an absolute minimum necessity, that anything short of that is a path to disaster, the response is rueful laughter. (*) They literally have never heard this, never mind taking account of what it would mean for society to take it seriously.
This lack of understanding is at the root of the gross inaction on this problem. We are plundering from the future, permanently damaging the prospects for humanity not (at least not yet) out of a deficit of will and certainly not from lack of technical options but through sheer ignorance in the public and the polity. Perhaps that is not what you mean by a “deficit model” but that is what I mean by a failure of communication.
My claim is that historically in a democracy, the institution charged with communicating relevant information to the public and the polity is the press. Am I missing something?
(*) Cue the guys with the persona management software…
Dave H–
Do you think Singer is confused because of the media? Does the media interview Singer very often? I think the answers to my questions are “no” and “no”.
As a reasonably well-educated and literate lay person (corporate lawyer specializing in large real estate projects) I feel compelled to observe that I, on a regular basis, depend on the news media for information as to what matters I should be concerned with (economic trends, new technologies, health risks such as seasonal flu outbreaks, new medical treatments, new scientific developments, etc.).
This information heavily influences my opinions, decision-making and voting preferences. In all of these areas, I depend very heavily on reporters to evaluate, summarize and communicate accurate information — and not to simply serve as stenographers for nitwits. Thus, while I can’t look to financial reporters to provide investment advice, I do expect them to be familiar enough with their area of supposed expertise to call out or cull out information (propaganda?) that is obviously false, misleading or incomplete in light of objective evidence.
I am dumbfounded that climate science is somehow seen as some special sort of bizzaro world where what I see as the normal expectation of news consumers (factual vetting, providing context and assessing implications based on discussions with real authorities) is thrown out the window in favor of he-said/she-said. In what universe do we expect particle physicists to be personally responsible for communicating the scientific implications of their research directly to the public, and then blame the physicists if the public doesn’t “get it”? Ditto for genetic researchers, astronomers, biologists, etc.
I came late to the party regarding AGW – until 2008, the issue was on my radar as a “century away” theoretical problem — it seemed like for every “this will be a big problem” article there was a “no problemo” article. I was accordingly floored in 2008 when I had to do due diligence research for a proposed investment in renewable energy to start reading primary materials and discovering that my media derived “understanding” was grossly in error. (And yes, in an effort to evaluate “the other side of the argument”, I did wind up visiting most of the prominent internet skeptic sites and looked at materials from Singer, Lindzen, Spencer, etc. – I concluded they were virtually useless in providing accurate information.)
I conclude that the views expressed by the moderators, Dr. Curry and others as to the lack of responsibility of journalists in this arena is directly contrary to the (apparently misplaced) assumptions and expectations that lay folk such as I bring to the table – that journalists will provide factual vetting, context and implications based on information in their respective field viewed as most authoritative. If this is the case, and if the former view is correct, media are just “filling space” with random noise and are effectively useless (or worse) in helping ordinary people assess risks, make decisions and make sense of the world.
@Lucis
> Do you think Singer is confused because of the media?
Where did he get his information from? “Skeptical” blogs? But all “true skeptics” know it’s all about tree rings, right? So that can’t be it… Fuller + Mosher’s book is possible – but that was clear, wasn’t it (and does that count as “media”)? What about talking to the people whose emails were at issue, or reading the primary material? But they’ve been clear on this issue all along, so that can’t be it…
Hmm. That pretty much leaves:
– He invented it, based on no information and his own prejudice. But that’s not very flattering, is it?
– Talking to friends and colleagues. Quite likely, but one has to wonder where *they* got the misinformation from…
– The media.
Where do *you* think he got it from?
> Does the media interview Singer very often?
Why would an interview confuse him about this issue? Is that a common method for one to receive new information?
*Lucia*
Typo, apologies. Netbook. Small keys. Big ham fists.
dave
If tree rings are good for temperatures, then they are good for all periods. If they ‘diverge’, exhibiting band-pass effects, real temperatures must be understood to be higher than the tree proxy indicates during warmer period in the record.
DaveH
Where did he get his information from? “Skeptical” blogs?
Singer predates blogs by a long shot. I’ve met him, talked to him. I’m pretty sure he told me he is too busy to read blogs. That said, if Singer had read blogs, he would not have read that misinformation because the sketic blogs didn’t make up that little mistaken tidbit of Singers.
He is in some ways a nice old man, so I’ve been reluctant to write this at a blog. But, I guess it’s at the point where it sort of has to be said: I suspect he is “busy” mostly becasue he has s_l_o_w_e_d _d_o_w_n owing to advancing age. I think the word some would use is “doddering”.
But all “true skeptics” know it’s all about tree rings, right?
Huh?
So that can’t be it”¦ Fuller + Mosher’s book is possible ““ but that was clear, wasn’t it (and does that count as “media”)?
Of course self-published books are possible. Anyone with the inclination and energy can write a self-published book. I don’t think a self-published book counts as “the media”. But in anycase, Singer didn’t get his novel- misinformation about the meaning of hide the decline from that book. Fuller&Mosher’s book don’t advance Singer’s rather unique theory..
What about talking to the people whose emails were at issue, or reading the primary material? But they’ve been clear on this issue all along, so that can’t be it”¦
Fuller and Mosher read the emails and wrote their book on that basis. I should think the emails themselves are just as “primary” as talking to the authors of the emails. They may not be the primary material you prefer, but they are hardly secondary.
Do you mean Singer should have read the emails? Maybe he did. As for theories about how Singer gets his notions… Let me suggest something. Track Singer down and speak to him. I have. When you speak with him, you might well jump to the conclusion that the man is well past his prime. Well… past…. I might suggest his confusion relates as much to the effects of age on his mental faculties as anything else. He is perfectly capable of getting confused all on his own.
The reason I pointed out the media doesn’t interview Singer is because it should be obvious that Singer’s mistakes– no matter how he came to have them– are not conveyed by the media to the general public. (Note: American Thinker has published some of his stuff. So, I guess if American Thinker is the media, then you can fault the media for presenting Singer’s stuff to the public. )
Do you think Singer is confused because of the media?
The Telegraph: “Among the leaked emails disclosed last week were… a suggestion from Prof Jones that a “trick” is used to “hide the decline” in temperature. ”
Fox News: “Hackers broke into the servers at a prominent British climate research center and leaked years worth of e-mail messages onto the Web, including one with a reference to a plan to “hide the decline” in temperatures.
Washington Times: ‘Among his e-mails, Mr. Jones talked to Mr. Mann about the “trick of adding in the real temps to each series “¦ to hide the decline [in temperature].”’
Yeah, I agree: there’s not even the remotest possibility Singer may have gotten a mistaken impression from media reports. It’s ridiculous even to speculate about it.
Fortunately, Singer’s completely unique among pundits or commenters on skeptical blogs when it comes to this misconception. It’s just not something you ever see.
PDA–
You think Singer got that idea from the articles because the authors of those articles didn’t tack on “in reconstructions” at the end? I could just as easily suggest scientists could have cleared that all up by responding “we only hid the decline in reconstructions”, instead of spending their time explaining what they meant by “trick” or how it’s ok to hide declines.
But as for your more direction question: I don’t think Singer got the impression from the media. At this point in life, I don’t think it’s really anyone’s fault when Singer gets a little confused. I think Singer is a confused old man.
We are all talking about the same same Fred Singer that’s been at the forefront of every science policy political argument since the 70’s right? He’s a bad example. He’ll say whatever he wants, whether the mainstream media pushes it or not. The point, in itself, is valid, if you look at the coverage of the ‘climate-gate’ disinformation campaign that the mainstream media bought into (until Seth Borenstein released his evaluation), versus the coverage of the panels that cleared the most egregious interpretations of those emails.
Also of note, I Googled ‘Seth Borenstein’ to get the correct spelling, and the first 3 hits further the point
Was it Seth Borenstein that, after studying the content and completing his report in the space of a whole two weeks, declared that there was nothing to see in the thousands of Climategate documents? Fnar.
No, Lucia, I was just trying to point out that you don’t have to be a doddering old fool (or whatever) to interpret “hide the decline” like Singer: many media outlets did, at least initially. How many people read the Telegraph’s first reports and interpreted every subsequent piece of information through that lens? Is that worth talking about, maybe a little?
Anyway, the topic is media coverage of climate, not the umpteenth reenactment of the “Mike’s Nature trick” blogwar. You want to spend the rest of the thread rearguing that crap, please feel free. Seventy-eight comment and nobody even wants to touch the question of whose job it is to interpret science for laymen. I think that’s way more interesting than an out-of-context quote in a stolen email about one graph on the cover of an obscure WMO report from 1999, but what the hell do I know?
He found pettiness, but no fraud, as stated in his title. He and other reporters reviewed. He also wrote this:
<i>As part of the AP review, summaries of the e-mails that raised issues from the potential manipulation of data to intensely personal attacks were sent to seven experts in research ethics, climate science and science policy.
“This is normal science politics, but on the extreme end, though still within bounds,” said Dan Sarewitz, a science policy professor at Arizona State University. “We talk about science as this pure ideal and the scientific method as if it is something out of a cookbook, but research is a social and human activity full of all the failings of society and humans, and this reality gets totally magnified by the high political stakes here.”</i>
I think the point to my is not his report 2-3 weeks after, but the reports that came immediately that were, no matter how you view the emails, just factually wrong in almost all cases, even besides the “trick” one.
But PDA is actually correct here. This is a good thread that is losing it’s traction, unless the important question is focused upon.
PDA
How many people read the Telegraph’s first reports and interpreted every subsequent piece of information through that lens? Is that worth talking about, maybe a little?
Which lens? I’m under the impression that very few people think that the decline being hidden was the earth temperatures. Singer — a confused old man–wrote a post saying that and was corrected by readers at WUWT. That’s hardly evidence that Singer’s misconception is widely shared by skeptics.
You want to spend the rest of the thread rearguing that crap, please feel free.
I’m under the impression DaveH brought up the trick intending it as an example where the media failed to correctly communicate climate. (See comment 53)
I happened to point out that that precise example seems to be one that shows scientists failing to clarify what decline was hidden. So, any fault lies at least as much with the scientists as the media.
I get that you or scientists might prefer to not discuss or clarify precisely what was being hidden. Nevertheless, it is clear that if scientists refuse to clarify this and even refuse to speak about it, then any misconceptions that might, hypothetically have occurred will not be clarified. The media cannot force scientists to clarify for the public.
So, getting to your question: it is scientists job to interpret science for the public. The media can, at best, play a mediating or facilitating role. But they can’t do it for the scientists.
LCarey, I am asking forgiveness rather than permission.
Your eloquent Jeremiad is in danger of being lost in the minutiae of Fred Singer and the nature of the hidden decline. So I took the liberty of republishing it as a top level article on my blog. Please let me know if you have any objection.
PDA, in comment #20, writes: “The job of scientists is to do science”.
Well, some scientists, such as Carl Sagan and E.O. Wilson, decided it was their job to be communicators, too. And the general public’s understanding and awareness of science is much the better for it, right? For example, nobody did more to put the issue of biodiversity on the map than E.O. Wilson. Some food for thought: do you think that he and other biologists ever complained loudly and insistently that an extinction crisis is not getting addressed because the press isn’t doing its job? Do you think any of them have said, if only more stories were written and more information got out to laymen, species would stop disappearing.
Well, I can only tell you from my own experience, having covered ecological concerns and issues since the 1990s, that I have never heard this complaint from ecologists. But somehow, climate science and climate change is different, the advocates of the deficit model would have us believe.
(Speaking of E.O. Wilson, secular climate activists looking to broaden their constituency might want to pay closer attention to the tack he took in The Creation. I know that I, as an editor at an environmental publication in the late 2000s took notice of it and moderated this e-dialogue between him, Stuart Pimm and Richard Cizik)
Now let’s go to LCarey’s #70 comment and this passage:
“I am dumbfounded that climate science is somehow seen as some special sort of bizzaro world where what I see as the normal expectation of news consumers (factual vetting, providing context and assessing implications based on discussions with real authorities) is thrown out the window in favor of he-said/she-said.”
Total strawman, and for those of you who admire Seth Borenstein’s reportage, let me remind you of what he said several days ago to Kerry Emmanuel in that AAAS session I wrote about here:
“It’s not about he said, she said. We got over that a decade ago in [reporting on] climate science.”
Let me also remind LCarey what Jonathan Gilligan said in comment #38:
“Meanwhile, there’s a wealth of high-quality information on climate out there for free on the web at any level of detail that someone might want. We’ve got Tamino, Science of Doom, and RC for detailed scientific treatments. We’ve got catchy videos from Peter Sinclair. We’ve got an extraordinarily clear FAQ from Skeptical Science. There was even an Oscar-winning movie that did much better box office than the Bjorn Lomborg farrago (AIT brought in about 400 times more money than Cool It).”
Finally, let me highlight this passage from Michael Tobis’ comment #68: I stipulate that “real and worrisome” has been conveyed. But the scale and scope of the problem, the long time scales, the dire long-run outcomes, the fundamental ethical questions about pillaging the earth vs preserving it, appear nowhere in mainstream discourse.
There are plenty of journalists who have conveyed this perspective over the years, such as Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker (and in her book Fieldnotes from a Catastrophe), to name just one. But if you think it is the job of beat reporters who cover climate science to drum this message home in all their stories, you are sadly mistaken.
To bring my point full circle: by all accounts, we still have a biodiversity crisis, no? Even after decades of tremendous coverage in mainstream and niche media, and the efforts of conservation biologists, such as Stuart Pimm.
Is this because journalism has failed to communicate the problem?
PDA’s examples of the media falsely reporting that “hide te decine” meant that temperatures have been declining were from 2009. Here are some since last June.
Irish Independent 5 Feb 2011
“It was Jones who wrote an email to a fellow climatologist about using a “trick” to “hide the decline” of data indicating global warming from the 1980s and onward.
4 February 2011, Investor’s Business Daily
The ClimateGate scandal was a direct result of scientists “” and we use the term loosely “” at Britain’s Climate Research Unit and others, such as Michael Mann, conspiring to manipulate data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures.
14 December 2010, National Post
The other issue is an infamous quote from a Climategate email in which Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at University of East Anglia in the U.K. refers to a “trick” to “hide the decline” in a graphic presentation of temperatures.
12 December 2010, The Express on Sunday
He behaved just like the academics in the Climategate scandal who were recently exposed for using selective figures to “hide the decline” in global temperatures since 1995.
16 November 2010, The Times
He said he regretted some of the language in e-mails “sent in haste”, particularly his reference to a “trick” to “hide the decline” in global temperatures.
17 November 2010, The Australian
Phil Jones told London newspaper The Times yesterday that publication of the stolen emails — in which he referred to tricking the science to “hide the decline” in global temperatures — was designed to sabotage negotiations for a climate change treaty in Copenhagen.
10 November 2010, Investor’s Business Daily
After the e-mail exchanges from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia reveled the extent to which global climate data were being manipulated to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, hopes for profiting off the scam with another scam evaporated.
31 August 2010, The Washington Times
Confidence in the IPCC was first shaken when the Climategate e- mails revealed U.N. scientists using various tricks to “hide the decline” in global temperature
8 July 2010 The Herald
Although one email contained a reference to a trick to hide the decline in global temperatures, the scientists’ data was consistent with the findings of other researchers.
8 July 2010 The Times
Phil Jones, the unit’s director, had sent an e-mail in which he had referred to a “trick” to “hide the decline” in temperature shown by his data.
8 July 2010, Irish Times
Circulated like a virus on the internet by climate change sceptics and deniers, the most infamous of these e-mails referred to Dr Jones using a “trick” to “hide the decline” in the rate of global warming; this, more than anything else, undermined the CRU’s scientific credibility.
11 June 2010, Investor’s Business Daily
Neither do we, and frankly we’re tired of the deliberate manipulation of facts and truth in the name of protecting the environment, whether it’s the U.N. con artists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the charlatans at Britain’s Climate Research Unit who tried to “hide the decline” in global temperatures or our own political hacks at Interior.
Yes but it is easy to understand numerous journalists hiding the wrong decline. It’s a subtle point to most journalists, and they just copy each other’s work, (like bloggers). Are you actually willing to defend “Mike’s nature trick”, which was patently fraudulent?
More than 90% of journalistic coverage has been very pro CAGW and that has only changed a little in the past two years. People are increasingly sceptical because it just isnt warming, or not at anything like the speeds specified by those mysterious “models”.
If the most expensive advertising campaign in history fails, its because the product just doesn’t work. (Neither did Acid Rain, the New Ice Age, the Ozone Hole, Nuclear Waste or the Pesticide Peril).
Keith @ 83 – I certainly think that the Cool Hand Luke clip is appropriate here, as we seem to have a significant failure to communicate. I tend to think I am not creating a strawman argument, since I am talking about MY EXPERIENCE and the experience of others I know. I view myself as a “regular” person news consumer, looking for general info on world events and things of import to my life — I am plenty busy running my practice, having a family, taking care of aging parents, worring about finances and the economy. Accordingly, I have no intrinsic interest in climate change whatsoever, unless something persuades me that it’s more imporant than literally dozens of other crises de jour.
Seth Borenstein is a very, very good reporter, but he is just flat wrong as to the journalistic profession as a whole. He may well have gotten over he said/she said a decade ago, but even in the NYT and WaPo RIGHT NOW, one commonly sees a climate change piece end with a quote from a prominent climate skeptic followed by the reporter’s summary.
And Jonathan Gilligan is correct that there are some great and reliable resources on the Web – I use all the sites that he mentioned. But you are not getting my point: I did not want to have to become an expert on the details of the state of climate change science in order to evaluate the reporting! Nor do I want to have to delve into the details of open heart surgery, monetary policy, vaccine risk, nuclear proliferation or literally hundreds of other technical fields that conceivably might have some impact on my life. Like, I venture to say, most typical news consumers, I look to conventional media to provide reliable information on such topics via reporters with experience in the relevant fields who provide context, fact checking and some implications. They provide the grounds for deciding which of dozens of possible issues I should actually pay attention to (since no one has time to both have a life and keep up on dozens of issues).
My experience is that, as a generalist news consumer (at least outside my professional area), the climate change reporting that I remember (before my 2008 jolt) was NOT terribly alarming, and was usually cushioned by copious qualifications and frequently offset by seeing contrarian articles. Thus, a Seth Borenstein article is followed by running across a John Tierney article, or I run across a Betsy Kolbert article after seeing a George Will column. And why should I have wanted to delve deeper? – if this stuff is actually a hundred years away and hotly contested and based on inadequate models and there’s all this scientific argument and uncertainty, WHY should I dig through a morass of data on an issue that boring as all get out and is probably less important than other stuff that’s obviously pressing (such as the economy). Again, lots of regular folk (including me) depend on the mainstream press to sift and sort competing facts and claims and provide a usable (if inexact) guide to the relative importance of a host of competing issues.
You appear to be wilfully writing off the actual importance that the really press has, both in the functioning of a democracy and to individuals in organzing and planning their lives. The fact that there is a wealth of scholarly or technical material on the Web is irrelevant – as I noted, few people want to have to become near experts in multiple technical fields just to be able to evaluat the reporting. You’re welcome to think what you like as an expert in the profession of jounalism, but from the bleachers where regular folks hang out it certainly appears that the profession of jounalism has dropped the ball in a huge way in covering the climate change issue (excepting and acknowledging the work of folks such as Seth Borenstein, Betsy Kolbert, Bryan Walsh and others, who serve as shining exceptions to the rule).
LCarey (86),
You are conflating and cherry-picking your examples. George Will writes opinion columns, and much like William Safire was about his pet issues, takes liberty with facts. But opinion columnists are known to do this and besides, they usually have a predisposed audience (like most climate blogs).
John Tierney writes opinion science columns for the NYT science section. Why would you put these guys on equal footing with daily climate reportage, which, in any event, you broadly characterized in comment #68 as “he-said/she-said.”
I suppose if you come across a story like that tomorrow in a paper then your experience will confirm your assessment. But if you read ten more stories not characterized by he-said, she-said, that wouldn’t matter.
My point being, you’re not going to see perfect journalism, especially on a topic as frequently covered as climate change. But on the whole, your view from the bleachers does not comport with reality. But I can understand why you and Michael and others persist in believing this, as frustration with inaction is palpable, and blame must be apportioned somewhere.
Keith Kloor – does the media bear any responsibility to ensure accuracy in reporting… to, at best, assist in closing the deficit model gap… to, at worst, not assist in extending the (misinformation) gap?
Just as Tim Lambert so glaringly points out, is the lack of responsible journalism principally a matter of bottom-line economics… or are journalists simply incapable… or not up to the challenge in bringing proper, accurate and understandable information to the layperson? I mean, after all… anyone can forward an unchecked newswire article… anyone can act as an echo chamber conduit… as a most selective “interpreter of the loudest, blustering and fallacious interpretations”!
“But on the whole, your view from the bleachers does not comport with reality.”
sez who? you? you’re an interested party and hardly in any position to determine the collective views of educated consumers of mainstream journalism.
In general, this is a much easier issue than most of the preceding commenters make it out to be.
1. Our society runs on cheap energy. If the IPCC is correct (or, worse, if the IPCC has been overly conservative) then industrialized societies will need to change the way they function drastically. The odds of this happening before we have food shortages in this country are precisely zero. Humans live for the moment.
2. Even if, perchance, Obama spends all of his political capital in his second term (assuming, arguendo, he gets reelected) focusing only on climate change issues, nothing will happen. The political forces arrayed against him — the oil and gas industry, coal mining, ag states, etc. — have every interest to lie, misdirect and delay. We simply cannot expect the press to ignore the stories that the opponents of whatever Obama proposes will generate; that’s not the job of the press.
The press can and does ignore cranks, even when cranks are correct. (How much coverage did the Cassandras of the mortgage meltdown get in 2005?) The press does not, indeed dare not for fear of losing its ‘credibility’, ignore the statements of various politicians on the AGW issue, no matter how inaccurate the comments are. And the very fact that the comments get aired is all that is needed to create doubt in most people’s minds.
Let’s sum up: the press will cover the statements of liars. That coverage will create doubt for many people that the truth-tellers are in fact correct. And because the likely outcome of accepting the truth is a radical change in our society, most people will seize upon any doubt, no matter how ill-founded, to continue to vote to do nothing.
I’ll most likely be dead by 2050. I do not envy the environment being left to my nieces in the second half of this century.
It is interesting to note how Tim Lambert thinks that journalists are somehow supposed to discuss ‘hide the decline’ in the proper context when it was the scientists who hid it and never discussed it openly in the first place.
It is also interesting that tree ring proxy reconstructions are the global temperatures where convenient, and the surface instrumental proxies are the real global temperatures unless otherwise specified. In other words, scientists can splice together these things in graphs, but journalists must always tell them apart.
All the paragraphs Tim Lambert reproduces above are strictly speaking, true statements. It is that a bit of context is left out. It is just the same, as with cutting off part of a graph and throwing it into the literature. Disinformation destroys disinformation.
lucia: “I’m under the impression that very few people think that the decline being hidden was the earth temperatures.”
Obviously, you’ve never met shub.
How many people do you think Shub is, Tim?
Keith, grab ten random people off the street and ask them about the biodiversity crisis. If you get less than nine blank stares, please let me know.
I retire my complaint that no one is addressing the question of who should communicate scientific issues to the public. The results appear to be in: those who believe climate change is not that big a deal/overhyped/uncertain seem to be perfectly fine with individual scientists shouldering that burden. The same people also seem to be saying that scientists are horrible at communication (with the exception, possibly, of a certain dead astrophysicist). Readers may draw their own conclusions.
To recap, I’m not blaming journalists for inaction on climate change. There’s plenty of that to go around, given the state of our politics, the recession, and how dependent the world is on cheap energy. I am blaming the journalistic profession for not doing its job, on any issue of substantive importance. Without question, there are numerous standout reporters, but anyone who wants to argue that journalism as a profession did a good job on Iraq, on the financial crisis, on health insurance and on climate change has rather a tough case to make.
Tim,
In order to object/criticize what I said, you have to first understand it.
The question is simple: How is it that no scientist in the IPCC, those who participated in putting the TAR, for example, or climate change activist objected to the hiding of the decline, but complain vehemently when context is not provided for ‘hide the decline’ in the popular press? Both are the same kind of error.
PDA, I’d like to hear your definition of “as a profession” and how you see that segueing into some idealized version of what should be happening. For example, I am an Analytical Chemist. Am I to be held partially responsible for all of the more extensive analytical work that the EPA, other government agencies, and private industry could have been doing all these years but didn’t? And how that work could have been accurately interpreted for the public?
Similarly, Keith Kloor is a journalist, If we set him up as science editor in chief of a newspaper with the reach of the NYT and the salary of a hedge fund operator, my guess is that he wouldn’t turn us down.
I would postulate that there are many potential standout reporters out there, and that some of them do not have jobs at all, and others have jobs that are the equivalent of writing obituaries or something. And others are doing what they can with the time and space with which they have been provided.
I think that how we the people become informed and address Iraq, the financial crisis, health insurance, climate change and so forth, is a complex issue.
But I don’t think that succumbing to an impulse (or is it an incentive?) to form a circular firing squad and take each other out is at all useful.
“I am blaming the journalistic profession for not doing its job, on any issue of substantive importance.”
Let’s stick to the topic at hand (I’ve already said numerous times, in posts and comments, that there was an institutional journalism failure on WMD and Iraq. The others on your list are not so cut and dry…but that could be an issue for another day.)
So please explain (and MT or anyone else with this complaint should dive in) how the press is “not doing its job” with respect to climate change.
Pretend you are assigning a grade for the report card to be sent home. What is your grade and what are your comments outlining what needs to done to improve this supposed shoddy performance. And remember, you are not judging based on the quality of a few assignments (eg., news stories) but on the quality of the work as a whole.
I can assure that some of my colleagues are reading this blog as lurkers (at least that’s what they told me at AAAS), so you’re speaking directly to them as well as me.
Lay it out as specific as you can, instead of broad generalities.
Gaythia, yes, this is exactly what I’m hoping can be spelled out:
PDA, I’d like to hear your definition of “as a profession” and how you see that segueing into some idealized version of what should be happening.
OK, let’s look at one specific example. Nicholas Dawidoff’s profile of Freeman Dyson. The reason for the piece and the major focus of the piece, was Dyson’s views on climate change. By his own admission Dawdidoff, wasn’t even interested in whether Dyson was right or not — he saw his role as just writing down what Dyson said. You’ve defended this as perfectly proper.
I disagree and think that part of the job of journalism should be communication of accurate information and not indifference to whether it is accurate or not.
Let us stick to the topic at hand, the public (L. Carey) thinks the journalists are blowing it. The journalists think the public is blowing it.
Tim.
And I specifically asked folks not to cherry pick, because all genres are not the same (see my earlier comment about conflating opinion columns with beat reporting…)
But since you want to reprise this one, I’ll go there, because it’s a classic example of what folks like you don’t understand about journalism. This was a profile of a brilliant scientist who holds views contrary to the mainstream position. And he’s outspoken about it (and BTW, gets a platform at the liberal New York Review of Books.) So it’s not like the media went looking for a conflict. It was a great human interest story.
Anyway, my impression of the NYT profile, as I noted in a post at the time, is quite similar to Bob Garfield’s take.
Your larger (and likely real) complaint about the NYT piece echoes those who complained (loudly) about the recent Judith Curry profile in Scientific American (which I discussed here): it’s that she was profiled at all.
Simon asks Tim how many people he thinks Shub is. Based on <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shub-Niggurath”>extensive research</a> many. The name itself tells you everything you need to know.
@ Keith – “Pretend you are assigning a grade for the report card to be sent home. What is your grade and what are your comments outlining what needs to done to improve this supposed shoddy performance. And remember, you are not judging based on the quality of a few assignments (eg., news stories) but on the quality of the work as a whole.”
I’d say that on something like John Sterman’s main point – cf. “Risk Communication on Climate: Mental Models and Mass Balance” – the collective grade would probably be “F”. And I would be assigning that grade based on the public’s (non-)comprehension of how the nature of the “stock versus flow” dynamic of the climate problem differs from those of their usual analogues (e.g. acid rain, river and lake water pollution, etc.).
Now, straining to keep to the “report card” analogy, maybe that is like assigning the “teacher” an “F” in algebra, based on the students’ performance. And maybe the overall grade for the teacher is a “pass”. But imho it is a very important grade, and unless that gets to a “C” level, then the rest of the story is likely to be a botch along the lines of the Iraq botch you acknowledge.
Ok. So on to the question of “is that the journalists’ job”? Admittedly, Sterman’s research has shown that experimental sampling of MIT science and engineering grad students shows that they make the same mass balance mistakes as the public at large. So, one could argue that this is more a failure of the general education system, or of the ability of scientists to communicate.
EXCEPT THAT, as Sterman also shows, this is NOT such a difficult concept to convey.
Anyway, duty calls, and I am leaving my argument half-finished. But I think that this simple context is missing from most climate science journalism. It doesn’t have to be a lecture from first principles everytime an article is written about a new finding or development. Just written with some acknowledged underlying fundamental understanding of important things we know for sure. Much as a nature writer might occassionally put a new finding in the context of evolutionary biology… I think that is a reasonable “ask” of the profession.
KK,
I wonder what they teach guys at journalism school. It is clear from TL’s comments that journalists don’t know anything about their own profession.
This is indeed a heartening development. TL’s insights, I am sure, will be turned inward at the scientists themselves (at some stage).
What’s the point of journalism, then?
1. Give a very (to the nth degree) rough first draft of history, ie, this is what a bunch of people told us yesterday.
2. Make money for the publisher by selling newspapers. Sell newspapers by writing fun / interesting stories.
That’s about it. Truth? That’s too hard. And what’s the truth, anyway? You can find people disagreeing about virtually everything.
On cherry-picking: KK, when was the last time journalists got a major and difficult story right? It’s no longer cherry-picking when the majority of the samples point in the same direction.
Francis,
All you’re doing is waving generalities, like everyone else with the same complaint.
The majority of samples of what? You and MT and PDA, et all have a selective lens. Too bad it conveniently reinforces this meme that the press isn’t doing its job on the climate change story.
I may have a way to reconcile the claims from journalists about journalists, with what non-journalists think is going on with journalism. The exchanges between LCarey and Keith Kloor put me on to it.
First, though, Keith, it is not cherry picking for someone to say “My experience is this.” It is what it is. You may not think that the intelligent layman’s self-reported experience is meaningful, but that is a very different matter than cherry picking.
The thing, I’ll suggest, is that us non-journalists are looking at the media — all articles of all types (that we read/watch — which includes the headline writers’ input). That includes a lot of articles by a lot of people (c.f. Kloor’s complaints of LCarey reading/mentioning Tierney and Will) who aren’t really journalists (according to Kloor) or in places (Kloor’s complaints re. people objecting to the science presentation in the Dyson article) where (again according to Kloor) we should not be expecting the science to be accurate.
So the apparent conflict is resolved. Us nonprofessionals are looking at the media, which we may think does a poor job covering science, but that’s because most of what we see was not done by journalists in a circumstance where journalists.are trying (permitted) to be paying attention to getting the science right. In those cases where journalists are allowed/required to do good science journalism, they do so.
So, Keith, I still look forward to that article from you about where, when, how often it is that we can expect an article in the media to represent good scieence journalism. Expect in the sense of you not complaining as you do regarding mention of the Dyson interview or Will’s articles.
Robert,
If you want me to take the time to engage with you, then don’t put words in my mouth. You write:
(c.f. Kloor’s complaints of LCarey reading/mentioning Tierney and Will) who aren’t really journalists (according to Kloor)
Where did I say they aren’t really journalists? I said they write opinion columns, which are different than standard news articles.
In that same sentence you write:
or in places (Kloor’s complaints re. people objecting to the science presentation in the Dyson article) where (again according to Kloor) we should not be expecting the science to be accurate
Did I say readers should not expect the science to be accurate in that Dyson profile, or in any other story? If so, please point where “according to Kloor,” this is stated.
You want to engage in good faith, I’m here, taking all comers. But don’t put words in my mouth to advance your argument, or I won’t bother.
I also agree with Garfield as linked to by Keith @100 above. The Dyson NYT human interest piece to me simply demonstrates that he is, in his old age, every bit the intriguing enigma that I remember from back in Star Wars days.
I think that this is a basically biographical puff piece, certainly not a report on the latest scientific research. The author does raise a number of red flags pointing out that Dyson’s opinions are not mainstream on global warming. It does raise questions about his age. Yes there are things here that the Shubs of this world could cherry pick. It does match stereotypes that scientists ought to be odd ducks.
To the extent that the article raises topics of science, I think that having this article out there as a foil is more useful than not. There are places on earth that would benefit from warming, at least in the short term. We can’t really attribute any one weather event (Katrina) to global climate change. Whether or not mitigation strategies are feasible, (a carbon bank of a trillion trees?) is an interesting concept. In my opinion this is impossible, and counter to current deforestation trends. But is it really all that far from the current carbon market being established in California or other cap and trade schemes? Can we distinguish them in the minds of the public?
Rather than getting bent out of shape by the musings of an old man, we ought to be able to use this as a springboard for a more serious discussion.
Maybe it is some sort of sexist gender identification, but the person in the article that I connect with is his wife.
“”How far do you allow the oceans to rise before you say, This is no good?” she asked Dyson.
“When I see clear evidence of harm,” he said.
“Then it’s too late,” she replied. “Shouldn’t we not add to what nature’s doing?”
Following up on Rust’s comment:
Sterman & Sweeney’s study must be a decade old by now. An early preprint was very influential in my thinking about this core substantive issue in public communication.
In short: the carbon problem is approximately cumulative. The first thing has been very crudely communicated: most scientists think carbon dioxide accumulation leads to climate change, most measurably in global average temperature, but in many other important ways. The second thing, that the problem is cumulative, has not.
Most people still, at least implicitly, think that if we stabilize emissions the problem will stop getting worse. This is wrong. And it is importantly wrong, crucially wrong. The problem will keep getting worse as long as there are any significant emissions at all.
Sterman showed that this misunderstanding is widespread over a decade ago. Various of us have been banging the drum trying to get the idea across. Dr. Ken Caldeira said it most memorably and best, and I learned about it at Keith’s bete noire site, Joe Romm’s climate progress.
“It’s wrong to mug little old ladies, and it’s wrong to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The right target for mugging little old ladies and for carbon dioxide emissions is zero. I believe that we should be outlawing the production of devices that emit carbon dioxide.”
Does the public understand that many and probably most atmospheric scientists, while perhaps not having such metaphorical wit, basically agree? No, they don’t.
Whose fault is that? Well, if it isn’t journalism’s fault then there is a crucial missing institution. Which is what we are talking about. What institution should that be? If this isn’t journalism’s job, shouldn’t journalism make some effort to disabuse people of the notion that they can be trusted as an appropriate filter on what’s important?
What we are getting here is pretty much empty defensiveness. “It’s not our job. Where did you ever get that idea? No, we don’t want to talk about what our job is or whose job that should be.”
To be fair here is Walsh covering Sterman in TIME: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1853871,00.html. Better late than never. Has this affected coverage since, though? Not that I can tell.
So it isn’t that the idea was totally missed. It’s that the idea isn’t picked up. The press adamantly refuses to move the ball forward, to advance public understanding. How democracy is supposed to cope with complexity under such circumstances is the question. What we are seeing is that the press is saying “we aren’t even supposed to try, and if that surprises you, you are being <some sort of nasty adjective I can’t quite identify>.”
What we are not seeing is anybody form the press saying “that obviously necessary job is supposed to be done by institution X”. Instead they are saying “the deficit model does not apply”, a claim I for one cannot understand. My question is what the difference is between “the deficit model does not apply” and “democracy functions equally well in the absence of reliable information as in its presence”.
Can the press really believe this? You wonder that they bother having an ethic at all if they do. So I think I must be going too far. But when I ask exactly how I have got this wrong, all I seem to get back is howling.
Bob Grumbine at #106: Yes. This. That is exactly what I thought.
Keith is looking at this through a lens distorted by his professional view, which is completely different from what the public sees.
Okay: I accept that a reasonably educated reader ought to know the difference between an opinion piece and a straight news article, although even this is not clear to many people.
But I think it is completely ridiculous to require a reader to understand that information in a portrait of a person might not be accurate, you see, because the focus of the piece is the person, and not the accuracy of his statements, because it is a portrait, you see, and it is a long form piece, and everybody in journalism school has learned what the conventions for that are.
I think this completely misses the point of communication with the audience, which apparently does not have the same expectations as the journalists.
My point is that it is unreasonable to expect the reader to be able to make that distinction, and that Keith should re-examine his expectation about the frame and context of his communication with the reader (who might be reasonably educated, but who did not go to journalism school, where you learn what the difference between a news article and a long form piece are.
Also: I would not expect the author of the Dyson piece to give equal time to the other side, I would expect him to say in his own voice what is right and what is wrong.
But apparently American journalists never do this, they only present to sides, but do not evaluate the competing claims. In my time in the US, this has always struck me as strange, me being from Europe…
@109 I’d like to see you draw a line between the media owners and the journalists. I don’t think that “the press” collectively is what is failing to move the ball forward.
I think that you could notice that matters regarding change meet with substantial institutional resistance.
Robert’s point above is correct; it caught my attention as well.
American journalists perceive a very sharp and indeed sacrosanct division between opinion pieces and news. Whether this is correct or not is actually interesting: I for one find the ideal of value-free reporting implausible. But the general public doesn’t have that distinction very strongly, and now that they read mostly online, even the spatial distinction of the op-ed section vanishes, as does the distinction between newspapers and magazines.
I didn’t mention it because I don’t think it suffices to bridge the conceptual gap between what the consumers expect or need and what the producers apparently are trying to produce. But, as I said, I noticed this disconnect too.
Per Gilligan:
“… we know from extensive psychological research that people make decisions and choose policies largely based on their emotional, not rational, response to risks and hazards. Information shapes those emotions, but decisions are made largely on an emotional level.”
If the just-the-facts model doesn’t work, and it really comes down developing a *strategy* to appeal to the irrational, emotive side of people, how does science advocacy avoid the charge of ‘marketing’ or even ‘propaganda’? The ‘skeptics’ *ALREADY* hurl those accusations at pro-science forces with all the glee of caged monkeys pitching their feces.
@70 + 86, 106, & 110. I think that LCarey’s personal perspective at #86 is a thoughtful and interesting one.
I think that one of the interesting things that arises from this is how differently one might perceive reporting of one’s own area of expertise as opposed to areas outside that expertise.
I do not share LCarey’s comfort with financial reporting. I find it fraught with pitfalls, axes to grind, and hidden agendas. Maybe this is simply because, in this area, I have a harder time picking reliable experts than I do in science.
I also believe that there have been significant failings in financial reporting in terms of messaging that the public received. LCarey mentioned real estate as an area of expertise. For the public, for example, how did so many people end up purchasing homes that were too expensive using adjustable loans that were in a matter of a few years, bound to become unaffordable? I think that the answer can be found by following the money.
I do not see why you see climate change as a special case.
Seriously, Judy Curry? You’re saying clear, logical arguments would sway the public (sounds like a ‘deficit’ model to me) and at the same time, scientists have overconfidently oversimplified a complex subject. But conveying complexity means that a ‘clear logical’ argument is unlikely to be *short*, or to sound very *confident*, and therefore to much of the public won’t be particularly *clear* either.
Gilligan:
“Snarling at journalists is futile. I think they’re doing as well as they can reasonably do within the constraints of the system. I don’t think they’re being lazy or malign.”
Except, some are. For example, ever read the (U.K.) Telegraph’s coverage of climate issues?
Point to ponder: how much damage to truth can one well-placed ‘lazy or malign’ journalist do?
@116: Having near zero experience with the Telegraph, I’d still have to ask: Why do you think that coverage of climate issues is due to “lazy or malign” individual journalists as opposed to the owner’s editorial stance and policies?
The problem is cumulative if CO2 stays in the atmosphere for millenia. (And no, I’m not talking about individual molecules, I’m referring to the bulk emitted over the immediate capacity for absorption.)
However, this is not nailed down as tightly as some seem to assume.
So maybe humans who are equated with muggers of old ladies are in fact trying to live normal lives while waiting for a bit of clarity.
Lost in all this virtual vivisection of journalists and scientists regarding their responsibilities regarding communicating to the public at large is the existence of another class of people who are doing a heckuva lot of communicating, if that’s the word.
This class includes people like Monckton and Morano, gleefully highlighting the inevitable mistakes inherent in infant science.
But it also include people like Al Gore and Michael Tobis, creating false word pictures meant to induce panic from fledgeling findings that need a lot more explanation.
(“I have mugged old ladies! I will do so again! and let me tell you, Mr. Motorcycle… you are no old lady!” Yeah, I heard just that on a street corner… but then this is Berkeley…)
Shub at #90, I think in the first week after Climategate a lot of journalists did get it wrong about ‘hide the decline.’ It’s obvious, actually, looking at the clips zealously hoarded by some (are they framed?).
First draft of history and all that… but I think journalists (and really, editors) caught off guard by a breaking story do tend to look for an easy hook. What would be more relevant is looking at who either corrected their stories or tried to ‘walk the story back’ to a more nuanced view, and how long it took.
Usually in comments I complain about holding onto the emails and not rushing into print with them. Right now, it just occurred to me that waiting probably saved me from making a lot of mistakes with the story, as I actually had time to read them.
And that’s the biggest difference between beat journalism and commentary. I didn’t have a deadline.
@118 Tom Fuller:
However, this is not nailed down as tightly as some seem to assume.
Tom, I’m not aware of (and a quick Web of Science search doesn’t turn up) anything more recent than Archer et al.’s 2009 Review [doi:10.1146/annurev.earth.031208.100206] on the subject, or of anyone posing a credible challenge to the millennial timescales discussed. Can you elaborate on what you meant by this?
Geez, let ‘s see if I have this right: (1) if specific examples of poor reportage are provided, that’s cherry picking, and (2) if more general statements are made regarding poor reportage that’s hand waving? As Bob Grumbine noted, it’s not cherry picking to discuss personal experience, and I’ve been talking about my experience as a reasonably intelligent consumer of an array of news from MSM with no significant pre-existing position on climate change until 2008. But maybe I should have used the term “news media” instead of “journalism”.
Granted I could have done better than picking Tierney and Will as counter examples (a more recent “actual reporting” counter example is Elizabeth Rosenthal’s front page story in the NYT in Feb 2010 on the IPCC by where Lord Monkton was quoted as an apparent expert). But my big point is that I was under the apparent misapprehension that there were serious, intelligent people with journalism backgrounds running major MSM jounalistic institutions such as the NYT and WaPo who would have some concern that people they employed didn’t just make stuff up or misframe facts to the extent that they become actively misleading.
I expect Tierney and Will and Friedman and Krugman to have an opinion, but I don’t expect any of them to be given a free pass to create whatever actively misleading or downright false articles pop into their head. What would the reaction be if a “serous” columnist wrote something like “Each year 20,000 American children develop autism due to toxic preservatives in vaccines” – a free pass because that’s just their “opinion” and they’re accordingly free to bend or make up facts? Or outrage that they just threw together some figures they liked and added a couple of buried qualifications for wiggle room?
KK dismissively notes “But on the whole, your view from the bleachers does not comport with reality.” THAT’S MY POINT! A huge section of the public are news browsers, and we depend on the media/press/journalism to provide a reasonably accurate overview of the world that DOES comport with reality so that we can have an idea what issues might legitimately bear digging into and worrying about! I don’t want to have to worry that the medical correspondent writing about bypass surgery quoted some prominent MD’s and then threw in “some guys with blogs for balance” and treated them all as credible experts. But that’s exactly what (often but not always) happens in climate coverage. The upshot is that a big chunk of the public doesn’t view the issue (reality) as significant enough to merit diving into the internet whirlpool and trying to sort wheat from chaff in the debate.
We’re discussing the shortcomings of MSM media/journalism here, but there’s more than enough blame to go around among politicians, interest groups, and other key institutional stakeholders, too.
Tom Fuller says “The problem is cumulative if CO2 stays in the atmosphere for millenia” which is true to a very good approximation. It is also true to an almost-as-good approximation if CO2 stays in the atmosphere for mere decades.
The actual facts are complicated: both time scales apply. Here we get into the usual puzzle about clarity versus precision. But even a decadal time scale is long enough, under present circumstances, for the problem to be best considered as cumulative.
We are used to thinking of pollutants that disperse or decay in weeks, and this thinking serves us poorly.
A leaky pipe in your basement had better be a very slow leak (comparable to evaporation) if you have no drainage. Otherwise you eventually get a flood. That is really not so hard to understand.
Please read the TIME article I linked.
LCarey, just off the cuff, how many people do you think have formed their opinion from journalists such as Andrew Revkin as opposed to self-appointed communicators such as Al Gore?
And this is where real miscommunication starts. When people say that a leak will produce a flood instead of a puddle.
Keith:
Do you think it would be fair for scientists to apply your standard to journalists? This is quite a lot lower key situation than an article being written up for large circulation. If your action here is fair and proportionate, do you then think it reasonable for scientists to quit talking to journalists who misquote them? Say, for recent case, Pearce?
My apology for getting you wrong about Will and Tierney being or not journalists. That was my inference from you, not your statement. But now I have to ask — as you _do_ consider them journalists, what is unfair or unreasonable about including them in making a judgement about journalism?
(your #87): “John Tierney writes opinion science columns for the NYT science section. Why would you put these guys on equal footing with daily climate reportage,…”
Why shouldn’t he? Do journalists writing opinions have less requirement to be accurate in writing about science than jounalists writing ‘daily climate reportage’? And at the Wall Street Journal, for an example, 90%, or so of their climate ‘coverage’ is on the editorial page. If we’re not to pay equal attention, or even half attention, to the 90%, what coverage are we to be looking at?
On the matter of scientific accuracy in a profile, you said (comment 4 a thttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/2009/04/14/garfields-take-on-romm-on-the-money/ )
As I recall, the heart of the criticism wasn’t that the profile was innaccurate, but that the Times chose to give Dyson such a prominent vehicle to air his contrarian views on climate science. And that the author didn’t make more of an effort to counter those views.
Those are phony charges. It was perfectly legitimate for the Times Magazine to feature Dyson and the author did not have to provide equal space to the other side of the climate change spectrum.
A debate over climate science was not the focus of the story. The theme was that of a brilliant scientist’s lifetime as a contrarian. It just so happened that his controversial stance on climate change was the topical hook that made the Dyson story relevant.
The science in the article, clearly (by your comment as well) did not rise _even_ to the level of ‘he said, she said’, and, according to you in the quoted, need not do so — it being a ‘phony charge’, and not the ‘focus of the story’.
I’ll apologize for the boo-boo, to use your prior established standard, of not including the exact quotes from your writing. But your praise for the article, the fact that the science contained therein is not accurate (being just quotes of Dyson), , make the conclusion straightforward.
As I took up with you last fall, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/2010/09/19/gangster-climate-talk/ , there are different notions of accuracy for different things. For science, a reader of that article is going to come away with things which are scientifically incorrect. Journalistically, the reporter (I’ll take as given) accurately reported what Dyson said, and he even mentioned briefly that some people disagree with Dyson. So, journalistically, for a profile piece, accurate.
(1) if specific examples of poor reportage are provided, that’s cherry picking, and (2) if more general statements are made regarding poor reportage that’s hand waving?
Exactly. This is like the “where is the evidence” climate complaint. Unless one can describe what one is looking for in terms that make any sense, one can always claim that they’re not getting it.
And in regards to my so-called selective lens… while I’ll certainly stipulate that I am as predisposed to confirmation bias as anyone, the reason why I discussed journalistic failings in other areas is because I think it’s a systemic problem. I think it’s as much an an issue in areas where better coverage would potentially lead to policy outcomes I don’t favor. High-speed rail is the first example that comes to mind, maybe nuclear energy is another.
#115 Steven Sullivan, my point is that a starting point for communication is for scientists have a clear and coherent logical scientific argument, which includes an assessment of uncertainties and ignorance. Once we have that, we can start figuring out how to communicate it effectively. In the absence of such an argument, we can either say we don’t really know, or let the two sides of a polarized political debate slug it out. The problem is that what the climate establishment has been trying to communicate is unconvincing, from a science perspective, from a common sense perspective, and from a policy perspective. The communication problem isn’t just a “how” problem, but rather a “what” problem.
Well, we’re really making great progress here.
Jonathan Gilligan seems to articulately argue that the communication shortcomings are mostly a “how” problem, not a “what” problem. I think that says that an “information deficit model” alone is not sufficient to “fix” things, and I think that Keith’s point as well…
But now, JC arrives – and, correct me if I am misreading here – to say that the problem is critically a “what” problem as well.
Well, there we have it. The scientists don’t know what they are trying to communicate, and they don’t know how to communicate it either.
No wonder the journalists are so testy!
#110 Shining raven:
I should have included that I don’t expect anything else from a personality profile piece. It’s about what the person being written up is like and thinks. If the journalist accurately conveys that, they’ve done well. And, over the years, I have been giving ever decreasing confidence that anything said in an editorial or opinion article has any resemblance to reality. But that’s me and not particularly apt to the point.
The thing is, most people do not get their science by reading scientific journals. Almost nobody does, including — if the topic is out of field — most scientists. We get it bay way of other routes. One route is whtaever shows up in the day’s paper (or e-paper, or rss feed, or …). A lot of that is not in articles where accurate description of the science is even particularly relevant — profiles, opinion columns, articles about personal hostilities between people who happen to study science, etc. and so on.
Next thing is, even if the article is raed in full expectation that it’s not about the science, and one shouldn’t rely on it for the science, the science bits as reported nevertheless make their way in to what people think about the science. The article about Dyson, in that vein, does matter. Now if for each Dyson-like article there were 30 profiles of scientists who were in the mainstream, the trickle-in phenomenon would be more or less representative of the balance of the field. Of course it’s nowhere near 1:30, as the ‘underdog’, ‘lone wolf”, ‘striking out on his own’, etc., is by far the more interesting piece of journalism.
It also would work out relatively ok if for each profile article, op-ed, … there were 10-30 solid science articles. Perhaps there are. But certainly at the wall street journal, for each climate change article that is not on the editorial page (not even asking the question of the quality of those articles), there are 7-8 on the editorial page.
@Tom Fuller
> I think in the first week after Climategate a lot of journalists did get it wrong about “˜hide the decline.’
Tim Lambert provided numerous examples from the last few months.
Journalists are still getting it wrong, and disproportionately affecting public perception.
Judith, do you agree or disagree with the four main points of the Texas Consensus as expressed in the Houston Chronicle article “On global warming, the science is solid“?
Specifically:
“¢ “¢”‰The global climate is changing.
“¢ “¢”‰Human activities produce heat-trapping gases.
“¢ “¢”‰Heat-trapping gases are very likely responsible for most of the warming observed over the past half century.
“¢ “¢”‰The higher the levels of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, the higher the risk of potentially dangerous consequences for humans and our environment.
I have encountered very few people educated in climate science who would take issue with any of those claims, though the general public and the press hardly seem to have converged there. Do you take issue with any of these points?
What do you mean by “the climate establishment” and what first order claims do they make that are “unconvincing from a science perspective”?
@129 Robert Grumbine
Right. This is part of what bothered me about Seth Borestein (fantastic reporter) objecting to complaints that the media still perpetuated the “He said, she said” nonsense with regard to climate change, saying something to the effect that “we [i.e. journalists] stopped doing that ten years ago”.
That struck me as wrong or at least implausible for several reasons. First, IIRC the balance-as-bias studies by Boykoff seemed to indicate that the problem extended past 2001, and moreover even stipulating that “they” had stopped some time ago, the effect on public understanding of years and years of consuming false balance isn’t necessarily going to reverse itself as quickly as the media behavior, as people tend to try to fit information into pre-existing narratives, changing established attitudes is difficult, and there is provisional evidence that it’s even harder with the specific socio-politico demographics that reject the mainstream science on climate.
But most importantly, it sounded like Borenstein was differentiating between print journalists who wrote regularly about climate and the rest of the media, which is a distinction that I don’t think the average American is making along with him. When you consider the effect of someone like George Will having a syndication audience size of ~50 million, the News Corp media empire, cable punditry, and the effect of mainstream media reports wrongly suggesting that mainstream scientific estimates of future change are generally exaggerated/pessimistic rather than conservative [doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2010.04.003], the net effect of all that remains very much false balance between the reality position and the “it’s fake, it’s exaggerated, we don’t know” alternative (i.e. “not IPCC”.
This is part of what bothered me about Seth Borestein (fantastic reporter)
Borenstein
Sloppy.
one of the best threads i’ve seen here in a while.
Keith, I hope you’ll take up some of the thoughtful comments by LCarey, MT, and Robert Grumbine, as it appears to me that they cut to the heart of the disagreements that you seem to have with many climate scientists and bloggers (Romm excluded of course).
Keith,
Your response to L Carey’s description of how he views the media is quite defensive, and is at risk of missing his point: Before delving into this issue a bit deeper, he took his only cue from mainstream media and concluded: There’s still a lot of scientific disagreement, it’s no big deal, and if it’s a big deal it’s at least 100 years away. That is the picture he got from reading mainstream media.
Simply stating that the media is past the he said/she said reporting, or that it’s pretty good despite not being perfect does not address the fact that Carey (and probably may others) got a scientifically questionable view of climate change from the media. Can you acknowledge that he did? Then after that you can discuss as to what the reasons may or may not be.
Bart, getting information from ‘the media’ is a very different thing from getting information from journalists.
Most journalistic coverage of this issue has been overwhelmingly focused on what the consensus had to say–too much in my opinion. I don’t know where Carey went in search of information, but it wasn’t the NY Times, CNN, the BBC, the major networks, the overwhelming preponderance of dailies and radio stations.
Which pretty much leaves Fox and Limbaugh, doesn’t it?
I don’t think Carey’s argument ends up being that we need better journalism; I think it ends up being that we need better decisions by news consumers.
Good luck with that–it’s worked so well with food and drink…
Bart,
LCarey offers his anecdotal experience in support for what he considers a preponderance of he-said, she-said climate journalism. He also admits that he conflates journalism genres and that maybe he shouldn’t equate a George Will with a Seth Borenstein. But hey, hell if anyone these days can expected to distinguish between an opinion column and your basic news article, right? (I guess we shouldn’t expect viewers to be able to tell the difference between a hell-breathing pundit like Beck and the evening news correspondent.)
Marlowe:
Sorry, what you consider thoughtful I consider stubbornly wrongheaded, reinforced by bias. (And these are not my own disagreements with climate scientists; it just seems that way because I’m more engaged with readers than most journalists.) I see little effort on their part to engage with what Gaythia, Gilligan and I have said throughout this thread. Instead, the press critics just dig in their heels. This thread has been interesting, for sure, but from my perspective, what’s been most fascinating is how much it has reinforced the disconnect I saw in various AAAS sessions between climate scientists and journalists.
I can’t seem to convince you guys that maybe, just maybe, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Then again, I doubt that the NPR’s Elizabeth Shogren and the AP’s Borenstein made much headway with Kerry Emmanuel, et al, either. So at least you’re in good company.
Keith, you started this conversation. Please take a deep breath and continue it.
We already know there is some sort of disagreement.
We already agree that reasonably correct and complete information is not sufficient to motivate policy, so that isn’t the disagreement.
Are you really saying such information is not even necessary?
Please try to explain the position you are so tenaciously holding. I am not actively trying to irritate you. I am trying to understand what you are saying.
Also I do not think it is fair to characterize LCarey as an unsophisticated consumer of media just because he is inclined to share the criticisms of the scientific community. We gain our opinions from the totality of the information landscape, each of us counting or discounting in ways we find appropriate. We expect people who design and maintain that landscape to provide enough information that a reasonable balance can be extracted without recourse to the primary literature. We expect that is the purpose of the news media. We are discouraged to find otherwise, and amazed to find that the media seem to be claiming that they need make no efforts to achieve that. “the deficit model is not part of the problem when it comes to communication of climate change and climate science”
Which leads immediately to the questions I have asked so many times on this thread that I hesitate to repeat them now: 1) what is the purpose of the press if not to resolve information deficits? and 2) how is democracy supposed to function if information deficits are not resolved?
Again, I stipulate that the battle is not won if information deficits are resolved. It just seems to me obvious that the battle is lost if they remain unresolved. If you really think otherwise I am baffled and would like you to elaborate.
All we have established is that you find the questions irritating. But I honestly don’t know what your answers are and genuinely want to know. I am not just playing rhetorical games. I’m trying to grasp your point of view. I think I speak for others here on this. So far I am baffled. So please slow down and address your position patiently and slowly, as if to a child, or a Bear of Little Brain.
Keith,
Easy now. What tree is it that you think I should be barking up? Personally, i tend to find Chomsky’s critiques of MSM (e.g. Manufacturing Consent) the most resonant. As a profit driven enterprise, MSM is subject to a host of constraints/influences that devalue truth-telling in favour of sensationalism and the corporate interests which own the distribution outlets. Does this mean that I blame the media? No. But it does mean that collectively we are in a very difficult situation. As MT notes above, if it isn’t the MSM’s job to convey/filter accurate information to the public on significant threats (of which climate change is only one), then whose job is it?
It seems to me that you’re taking these sorts of questions (and criticisms) far too personally and would perhaps do better if you considered the possibility that what talking about here is a systemic failure (or weakness if you prefer) rather than a personal vendetta against you or other individual reporters.
Actually, I do think that some viewers do need help distinguishing between a pundit like Beck and the evening news correspondent. I think that it is most important to remember that none of us would have heard of Beck had he not landed a position at Fox. And I think that we all need to realize, that even back in the days of the super wonderful Walter Chronkite or the near mythical Edward R. Murrow, we weren’t, getting some rarified ultra pure absolute truth free of any corporate financial considerations.
Certainly some reporters are more skilled and have higher integrity than others. But few work entirely independently and if they do, then they generally lack a large scale national stage. (Why did I put “generally”?, I doubt that there is such a person).
As I put it way at #32: Most people, even those who “get to think for a living” operate under some economic constraints in terms of what thinking it is exactly that they can get paid to do.
And most importantly, (#95) I don’t think that succumbing to an impulse (or is it an incentive?) to form a circular firing squad and take each other out is at all useful. Might make Shub happy though.
Questions for journalists.
Whose job is it correct a George Will ‘opinion’ piece that contains numerous ‘factual’ errors? Anybody’s? Is this a case where a majority of the MSM is afraid of the reaction of the growing, ever invasive conservative media? Are they afraid of being treated like Seth Borenstien did? He was basically maligned as a AGW mouthpiece following his work on climategate.
The mainstream media is 100% consensus, print and on-air. The handful of commentators that go against it are already famous for being iconoclasts. The same is true for tv specials, documentaries, etc., etc.
This is a fact-free argument. Do a search and catalogue the results. Tell me how much skeptic coverage you get in the Beeb. Show the articles that go directly to a skeptic for balance. Contrast that with the mountains of reprinted fluff direct from an environmental NGO.
Not even close.
Michael, Marlowe,
Quite honestly, I’ve been around the block already with Michael on this score way too many times.
I have stated before that there’s plenty of climate change related news on a daily basis, and admittedly it’s of uneven quality. That is the nature of the beast. You all need to accept that. So in my mind the Wall Street Journal and NYT editorial pages cancel each other out. It seems silly to take issue with something like op-eds and editorial pages. You beef seems to be with the worker bees of journalism, no?
Yet the fact is (as Tom Fuller observed in comment #36), that the biggest stumbling block here is that many of you conflate or confuse “media” with journalism.
I also can’t force someone to read a climate change story in Scientific American or the NYT instead of watching Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
In any event, the information is there for the interested consumer that does minimal searching. I stress the “interested consumer.”
Additionally, on any given day, the websites of many major publications carry news and information related to climate change. I can’t make someone become a more discerning consumer. (Although Stony Brook University, to my knowledge, does now include a mandatory course for its undergrads in how to be a discerning news consumer. Maybe a course like that should be at more schools.)
So if the question is, do I think there’s ample climate change related information available, I’d say yes. Is it conveying the information you want it to convey? Well, I’m pretty sure Gaythia and I have asked Michael and others for their ideal model of how it should be conveyed, since most stories are conveyed with news hooks and will not include a boilerplate discussion on the risks of climate change. That discussion happens in a particular context and I can understand that you’d like to see more of it. But please describe how, under the current journalistic ecosystem model, you see it playing out.
In fact, I think it would be great if someone like Joe Romm or Michael Tobis could play editor for a day or week, and decide where they will inject the information that they feel is missing from daily journalism. And how would you do it? It’s time to show, not just disparage. Explain how you would do this with a mainstream (not niche) audience. I’m all ears.
My argument is that editors and journalists are doing it. You say, not enough and not the right kind of information. Well, sketch it out for me.
Something about aiming at the messenger instead of the message would sound about right, right about now…
Quite simply, your messages have received incredible exposure in the marketplace of ideas. You would have to be a hermit not to have seen thousands of messages from the consensus.
If people aren’t ‘buying’ what you are ‘selling,’ you can either blame them, blame the intermediaries, or take a look at the ‘product.’
@Tom Fuller
> The mainstream media is 100% consensus, print and on-air.
Purest hyperbole, and so very, very wrong. Just in the UK – the Daily Mail? The Telegraph? The Spectator? Elsewhere, how about The Australian? Fox News?
Even on the BBC, Radio 4 regularly has me incensed at the amount of airtime given (without adequate rebuttal) to the Lawsons of this world. The BBC false victim to the “false balance” fallacy as much as anyone.
And your statement is hogwash.
there’s plenty of climate change related news on a daily basis, and admittedly it’s of uneven quality. That is the nature of the beast. You all need to accept that.
I’m not being reflexively argumentative, but exactly why do we “need to accept that?” I’m not assuming changing that situation would be easy and I’m not at all sure even how to begin trying to change it. You, on the other hand, seem to be suggesting that changing it isn’t even an ideal worth aspiring to.
And that seems to be the exact point of contention.
Michael, with regards to these two statements
“¢ “¢”‰Heat-trapping gases are very likely responsible for most of the warming observed over the past half century.”¢ “¢”‰The higher the levels of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, the higher the risk of potentially dangerous consequences for humans and our environment.
I have written tens of thousands of words on the first statement at Climate Etc. The statement is ambiguous, and a very likely confidence level is not warranted based on the evidence.
With regards to the second statement, it includes the word “dangerous” which is a value judgment. Potentially is an imprecise word. my reading on potentially is greater than 5% (i.e. it is not impossible). I agree that dangerous is possible. Putting likelihoods or probabilities on this, particularly when dangerous hasn’t been adequately defined or assessed (there will be both winners and losers), makes this a very ambiguous statement as well.
Like I said, clean up your arguments and make less ambiguous statements, and you might get somewhere in communicating all this.
PDA, you are being reflexively argumentative.
You do know that much news in the digital is produced on short deadlines, right? But beyond that, the sheer quantity of news stories written every day pretty much ensures that not all of it can be grade A. Additionally, in a fast-changing, 24-hour news cycle, information is always being updated.
And once again, you illustrate why it’s not worth my effort here, when you write something like this: “You on the other hand, seem to be suggesting that changing it isn’t even an ideal worth aspiring to.”
Where do I say that? But anyway, fine, I ask again: define what you are changing> Gaythia asked before: what is your ideal?
People, it’s so easy to be a critic. Tell me what you would like to see done differently. I know he-said, she-said is one thing. I’ve already explained to you why that’s a strawman but you won’t accept it, so let’s move on to another type of story. We did the Dyson profile. Sorry, you’re not on strong ground, there, either. Guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on that one.
So where else? There’s probably dozens of new stories on climate change online today. Go ahead and pick a few and tell me what they’re lacking. It should be easy as pie.
Those Brit papers were pretty late to the party, right? Just about the time Climategate broke, IIRC. Yeah, things started to change about then. But you can’t be serious arguing that some radio commentary on 4 has anything like the reach of the rest of the Beeb, where they march in lockstep to the consensus tune.
I’ll bet real money that exposure to skeptic views is pretty parallel to the percentage of skeptics in science–about 15% to 20% (and I’m not trying to start a food fight about what the right percentage is. Really.)
I think the way it works is that a scientist who has a point of view and wants to make it known eventually finds a channel for distributing it. But I think Big Media is completely tied to the consensus view.
You guys are arguing for purity in all media, all the time. PDA is actually serious about asking if he should accept that the media reports the other side.
I would understand that if Morano and Monckton were the only ones talking the other side. But does he really think that Lindzen, Curry, etc. should be shut out of the media?
PDA–real question, btw.
Top 10 results from Google News for search on ‘climate change’:
1. Allergy season expands with climate change
2. Top Three American Health Threats from Climate Change
3. ‘Climate Change Satellite’ Gets its Day in the Sun “” Finally
4. Castles of sand: The problem with peer reviewed research
5. US climate envoy: Binding climate deal remains out of reach for now
6. Team of Elon students to attend national climate change conference in Washington
7. Science Panel Says World Will See 50 Million Climate Change Refugees by 2020
8. Cimate change affecting owl color in Finland
9. Scott’s Antarctic creatures may give climate clue
10. Southern Rockhopper Penguins Listed as Threatened Species; Climate Change …
Top 10 results for Google News for ‘climate change’:
Top 10 results from Google News for search on ‘climate change’:
1. Allergy season expands with climate change
2. Top Three American Health Threats from Climate Change
3. ‘Climate Change Satellite’ Gets its Day in the Sun “” Finally
4. Castles of sand: The problem with peer reviewed research
5. US climate envoy: Binding climate deal remains out of reach for now
6. Team of Elon students to attend national climate change conference in Washington
7. Science Panel Says World Will See 50 Million Climate Change Refugees by 2020
8. Cimate change affecting owl color in Finland
9. Scott’s Antarctic creatures may give climate clue
10. Southern Rockhopper Penguins Listed as Threatened Species; Climate Change …
@ 143 kkloor:
I have stated before that there’s plenty of climate change related news on a daily basis, and admittedly it’s of uneven quality. That is the nature of the beast. You all need to accept that. So in my mind the Wall Street Journal and NYT editorial pages cancel each other out.
And you don’t see how some of us view that as problematic?
It seems silly to take issue with something like op-eds and editorial pages…
…that the biggest stumbling block here is that many of you conflate or confuse “media” with journalism.
So, wait- are we supposed to consider George Will et al. to be “journalists” or not? I thought you castigated Bob Grumbine for suggesting that they shouldn’t be confused with real journalists @107.
Because it sounds an awful lot like you’re saying, “if you ignore subsets V, W, X, and Y, and just focus on subset Z, then how can anyone complain about the media coverage of climate?”
I just got back from the convention center. Keith, the article is a good summary of what happened. I think Revkin made people’s heads hurt from time to time. Mine for sure. He missed the point Gavin et al were trying to make about the fuzzy border of semantics where deniers adopt or “science-ify” their arguments. THEN use them for horse trading in political discourse.
Somehow, we have to preserve the distinction between the measurement and interpretation by science and what politicians do with said observations.
“So in my mind the Wall Street Journal and NYT editorial pages cancel each other out.”
No they don’t. False in formation is false information. And if this is the view of mainstream journalism, then we are in trouble. This shrug-off is exactly the way that the writers of these op-eds are hoping MSM reacts. Conflicting information causes confusion and apathy. This is all that is needed for the op-eds to be politically successful.
Could we get real world examples of the phenomenon you are describing, please?
Folks,
Tom Fuller has done half the job for you, in that he’s given you a varied list of ten stories on climate change today (there are many more).
Critics, have at it. Point out the the deficiencies that you would like to see corrected. Show how the discourse in these stories can better reflect your concerns.
I get the impression that some here don’t want more responsible journalism, they want a controlled media.
The MSM, when it comes to climate reporting, I’ve increasingly found only useful as a jumping off point. And with dedicated blogs now reporting on every little climate related thing, it’s not even that useful anymore. No mainstream article on CC can go into the kind of detail and depth that a good scientific blog posting can. The generated discussion (once you pick through all the irrelevant bits and depending on the audience) is usually just as important in aiding understanding as the main post. A small page article printed in a reputable newspaper doesn’t get anywhere near close to that kind of detail. You cannot make informed decisions based on that…
And once again, you illustrate why it’s not worth my effort here, when you write something like this: “You on the other hand, seem to be suggesting that changing it isn’t even an ideal worth aspiring to.”
Where do I say that?
I said “you seem to.” If you want to tell me that’s not what you’re saying, well and good. But I can’t see how one can read “That is the nature of the beast. You all need to accept that” and come away with the idea that you think the situation should be changed.
the sheer quantity of news stories written every day pretty much ensures that not all of it can be grade A.
“Uneven quality” generally connotes something other than a normal distribution. Again, if that’s all you meant, well and good. I’ll just accept that you’re so irritated by me that you really think my complaint is that all media coverage of climate is not “grade A.”
Tell me what you would like to see done differently. I know he-said, she-said is one thing. I’ve already explained to you why that’s a strawman
You have asserted it’s a strawman, which is different than actually showing that it’s so. As evidence you have presented only another assertion from – wait for it – another journalist. Boykoff and Boykoff, who actually studied it, disagree. Freudenberg and Miselli, who actually studied it, disagree.
This might fall into the category of too much information, but I began my journey into this morass as a skeptic, experiencing a somewhat less than Damascene conversion to my lukewarmer status in 2009.
I bring this up because when I first started looking at the media for information, I just couldn’t find any skeptical voices. ‘sTruth. I was frankly looking for what we now would call confirmation bias, but in a simpler age was just signs that I wasn’t the only one out there.
I couldn’t find stories (until I found Solomon in Canada). I couldn’t find weblogs–kept running into Real Climate and Skeptical Science, Deltoid, etc. Admittedly I wasn’t searching for hours at a time, but every time I did a google search, I never found skeptics. Eventually I found them by looking at who Real Climate and Climate Progress were screaming at, funnily enough.
FWIW, I don’t think the problem that is so exercising some commenters here actually exists. Happy to look at evidence I am wrong. But show me.
I did a slightly different search than Tom, looking from 2007-2011 for “global warming” OR “climate change” in Google News, sorted by relevance.
First five stories were:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/post-carbon/2011/02/a_cool_reception_epa_secretary.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/18/AR2011021804612.html
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/story/2011/02/22/science-ragweed-allergies-climate-change.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20031180-501465.html
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hNY9IzmIjoNmOK0lS-EGP99jBodQ?docId=91260a60cd08423e9c8ede7d78355847
Haven’t looked at the articles yet. I will do so when I get back from an errand.
FYI, kkloor, I just posted something with more than 2 links, probably going to spam folder. Just a head’s up.
“Could we get real world examples of the phenomenon you are describing, please?”
LCarey’s example from this thread.
Or there is plenty of research done into the issue, especially in climate change communication
http://jee.lakeheadu.ca/index.php/cjee/article/viewFile/298/214
Interesting discussion. It has really surprised me how many people feel that the major mass media (excluding FOX) aren’t adequately reporting the “consensus” position on climate change. I am in full agreement with Tom Fuller, that in my anecdotal experience, the stories run at least 90% “it’s hotter than ever and only going to get worse” to 10% or less creating a “false” balance. This includes my local paper, the major TV networks, cable channels such as Nat Geo and Science, magazines such as Scientific American. The list goes on. I remember not that long ago, my teenage son was watching a documentary on Nat Geo (I think) about the top ten catastrophes that could befall earth. These included things such as a major asteroid impact, an eruption of Yellowstone, massive Tsunami’s. The number one catastrophe was global warming. So I think the fretting that the media and journalists are getting it wrong is not as readily apparent to me as to some others here.
As to the disconnect between what the consensus tells us and what the masses believe, I think Jonathan Gilligan did a good job describing how much of what we believe or wish to believe is shaped by emotion rather than logic. Additionally, people respond to weather events, for example the recent cold in much of the US, rather than gradual climatic events. Finally, there remains the fact that a large portion of the population is more interested in the latest gossip about Justin Bieber or Kim Kardashian or the latest sports scores and skip right past any article on climate change.
grypo, from the comment above by Carey, I did not see one example. Not one. Did I miss something?
@Tom Fuller
> The mainstream media is 100% consensus, print and on-air.
I’ve shown that this is absolutely wrong. Do you accept this?
> Those Brit papers were pretty late to the party, right? Just about the time Climategate broke, IIRC.
Ridiculous. The Daily Fail, for instance, has been publishing “Global Warming Scam” pieces for *many* years. This is trivially easy to find out. And what’s their readership? Millions, a sizeable proportion of whom use it as a primary source of information. Readerships like this are quite often loyal to a news source not because it is known to be reliable, but because it is a reliable source of *what they want to read*. If they *want* to read that AGW is a scam, and the Mail tells them that it is one, then no amount of concrete facts or rational argument is going to change that belief. This has been shown in several studies, and it is thoroughly depressing. Taking someone who has arrived at their original position through some political or personal preconceptions rather than a thorough and dispassionate assessment of the evidence, and presenting them with evidence that flatly contradicts their beliefs *only makes those beliefs stronger*. This is why I thought Dr Curry’s suggestion that what’s necessary is a focus on clearer presentation of the evidence was so misguided.
> But you can’t be serious arguing that some radio commentary on 4 has anything like the reach of the rest of the Beeb, where they march in lockstep to the consensus tune.
The Today Programme has weekly listening numbers of (IIRC) over 7 million. For comparison, flagship news programmes like Newsnight get of the order of 2 million a show – which, incidentally, has featured many “skeptics”, such as McKitrick, and (infamously) Marc Morano
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8WDcQon9DY
> I’ll bet real money that exposure to skeptic views is pretty parallel to the percentage of skeptics in science”“about 15% to 20% (and I’m not trying to start a food fight about what the right percentage is. Really.)
Right. Throw out an utterly false number that you pulled out of the air, then preemptively poison the well so no-one can call you out on it. Classy.
What’s the percentage of outright “global warming scam” stories just on Fox News? How many millions treat that as their primary source of information? How many stories across the entire news spectrum are close to 50/50 in their approach to balance? (“Some scientists say we’re all going to die, but skeptics say climategate proves otherwise, so who to believe?”)
Again, you’re speculating about stuff such that it matches your preconceptions (and supports the persecution narrative so beloved of “skeptics”), but it just has so little resemblance to reality its just not funny.
> Top 10 results for Google News for “˜climate change’:
What on earth is this supposed to prove? Its a bunch of titles, there’s no context, no idea of source, no notion of whether any balance exists within the article, etc etc.
For the *millions* who have no interest (or capability) in spending hours poring over scientific literature or just perusing blogs on the subject, the mainstream media presents a hugely confusing picture, full of wild swings from imminent doom, to corrupt scam. Reports about the science are *routinely* tempered with a contrary viewpoint in the quest for balance.
Knowing nothing about the subject, what does one end up with? The impression of huge uncertainty, mixed messages and confusion. And thus (as I pointed out above) the “skeptics” win not by convincing anyone they are right, just by preventing anyone from being convinced that the scientists are.
Dr Curry is frequently going on about the IPCC overstating certainty.
I would be *very* interested in an assessment of just how much popular perception overstates *uncertainty*.
Just for the record:
(1) I do in fact know the difference between straight reporting and opinion – but I was under the apparently mistaken impression that journalists engaged in opinion writing at major MSM outlets weren’t encouraged to just make stuff up or misstate basic facts in order to support their opinion. But now I’m confused – are we supposed to think that, say, George Will is a journalist, but he’s a special kind of journalist that’s allowed to make stuff up because people ought to know better than believe anything he says? Or is he a non-journalist working in a news medium run by journalists who don’t mind if he makes stuff up, because people ought to know better than believe anything he says?
(2) When I refer to MSM I’m speaking primarily about browsing the NYT, WSJ, WaPo, Newsweek, and broadcast network news (NOT including Fox). And I occasionally browse Scientific American or National Geographic – unfortunately, I don’t have time to watch Real Housewives.
Tom, LCarey said:
I came late to the party regarding AGW ““ until 2008, the issue was on my radar as a “century away” theoretical problem “” it seemed like for every “this will be a big problem” article there was a “no problemo” article. I was accordingly floored in 2008 when I had to do due diligence research for a proposed investment in renewable energy to start reading primary materials and discovering that my media derived “understanding” was grossly in error. (And yes, in an effort to evaluate “the other side of the argument”, I did wind up visiting most of the prominent internet skeptic sites and looked at materials from Singer, Lindzen, Spencer, etc. ““ I concluded they were virtually useless in providing accurate information.)”
Geez, folks. When I wrote about consensus dominating the MSM I provided links to, you know, actual stories. And they really were the first 10 returns from a Google search done today.
As for DaveH, I don’t read the Torygraph or Daily Mail–I’ll bow to your superior knowledge. I would bow deeper if you provided links. But 7 million for Radio 4? In a country of 60 million? And they occasionally provide a forum for skeptics? How many watch Hew every night? You never see a skeptic on there.
For some reason you didn’t see fit to mention the Guardian…
If there is someone who really doesn’t know anything about climate change and wants to find information, it is painfully obvious that using the major media and modern search on the Internet will lead them to far more consensus-driven stories than anything in opposition, by what looks to me like an overwhelming margin.
But hey, go ahead and believe what you want. But you might actually convince people by doing a bit of work on the subject.
Dave H
You seem to be arguing towards a position where any kind of sceptical presence within the mainstream is to be percieved as intolerable. The media doesn’t work that way. People don’t work that way. We argue it out- we have differences of opinion. We have differences of experience. We need to hear what the other guy is saying. Really, if you want to pick out the very few times that sceptics have actually been allowed to voice their opinions over at the BBC as some kind of systemic failure of media than all I can say is… imo that’s pretty insane.
@159
The Boykoff & Boykoff study you cite is definitely a useful marker, esp since the data it looks at stops at 2004.
Here’s a more recent Boykoff paper, which Nature, in its story coverage, titled “Media reporters get it right.”
This is acceptable data, too, right, even if it contradicts someone’s impression or personal experience?
I’ll freelance some on relevant points, rather than worry about what’s been said by whom in what order since it appears (#137) that keith has written me off as ‘stubbornly wrongheaded’, yet, still, doesn’t get around to saying what it is I or others have wrong. If you can’t or won’t say what I’ve got wrong, and what instead is right, I probably won’t change the error. I’m far from unique in that, I’d think. Apropos that, Keith’s comment again in #137 “Then again, I doubt that the NPR’s Elizabeth Shogren and the AP’s Borenstein made much headway with Kerry Emmanuel, et al, either.” Well, if their efforts were simple unsupported statements like Borenstein’s “It’s not about he said, she said. We got over that a decade ago in [reporting on] climate science.” (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/2011/02/18/who-should-be-the-climate-persuaders/) Particularly as unsupported statements that are flagrantly contrary to what a layman (such as Emmanuel, or LCarey) to journalism would feel he’s been seeing in the media for last 10 years. For what it’s worth, I can’t agree with either Emmanuel or Borenstein’s comments. Emmanuel goes too far in saying that _every_ story is he said, she said. Borenstein is clearly, at minimum, looking at different things than I in his saying that he said-she said was gotten over a decade ago (or at all).
It also looks like there are different notions of ‘deficit model’. I agree with Keith (same link) that some rather large percentage could never be persuaded of the reality of evolution, particularly (my addition) of human evolution. The fact that the public knowledge or acceptance of a scientific point is far from that of those scientists who study the topic (whether evolution or climate) represents one sort of deficit. I don’t think that this type of deficit can be addressed by journalists — or by scientists. Scientists can address those people who reached their scientifically incorrect conclusions by scientific study. Journalists who reported well what such scientists had to say could also help close such deficit.
A different sort of deficit, I think could indeed be addressed by journalists, and I tend to think they’re the better ones (than scientists) to do so. Namely the experiment LCarey conducted — what would an intelligent layman conclude regarding the science after reading broadly through the media? I think it’s one for the journalists since scientists don’t write the stories that appear in the media. With all the talk, including from journalists, that it is scientists who should be communicating science* to the public rather than journalists, it appears my thought is an outlier. Leaves me wondering what journalists are supposed to be doing, but no matter.
Anyhow, the deficit I’m interested in is the degree to which the totality of coverage in an outlet is out of keeping with what the totality of understanding is in the field at hand. This will not (cannot) solve the public perception deficit. But it would be a good thing; and if the WSJ, Fox (news shows only, of course), NYT, … did hit the same balance (which is not universal agreement) as in the field (whether climate or evolution or …), then I’d be pretty happy with journalism. Notwithstanding Borenstein’s assurance, he said-she said is still alive, and portrays 50:50. If, after one such article, the outlet ran 15 straight that were 100% consensus, the balance would be restored.
In that vein, I consider Keith’s (#143) “So in my mind the Wall Street Journal and NYT editorial pages cancel each other out.” merely a matter of saying that he said-she said is just fine, even if you have to read two different sources to find the alternate. If NYT editorial page represents the science accurately, which I don’t know, while the WSJ is portraying a serious bias (definitely is) misrepresenting the science … we’re worse off than merely he said – she said.
But let’s have some precision here about what the (my) issue is. Suppose, which is about right, George Will writes his opinion column saying that because the WMO says that climate is cooling we should make no policy changes to address climate warming. Suppose the NYT says, also on an opinion page, that because the WMO says that climate is warming we should make policy changes to address climate warming. The matter of whether there should or should not be policy changes, I’m indifferent to as to the journalism. That’s the realm of opinion, rather than science, and I have no argument with Keith’s comment. Where I take issue with journalism, if one considers journalists writing opinions to still be doing journalism, is the part where Will lied about the WMO. That’s factually false, Will misreported the science. I see no excuse for that, whether in a science page article or an opinion page.
And, if Will is to be considered a journalist, I think it’s fair to say that this represents something negative from journalism. Apparently Keith disagrees, though it’s rather hard to tell as he doesn’t say what he _does_ think, or who we _should_ be looking to in making an assessment of journalism’s coverage of science. Apropos thingsbreak in #152 — I wouldn’t object if Keith did in fact mean “if you ignore subsets V, W, X, and Y, and just focus on subset Z, then how can anyone complain about the media coverage of climate?”. I just wish he’d provide definitions of the subsets V-Z, and tell us that, indeed, it is only Z we should be examining for scientific accuracy.
* I do work on communicating the science to the public. Hence my blog, which is science-focused, and talking to, for instance, Science Cafes, schools, and any other group that will have me. (One of these days I’ll get hold of the American Legion that’s down the street from me and see if they’re interested in a chat.)
“I am in full agreement with Tom Fuller, that in my anecdotal experience, the stories run at least 90% “it’s hotter than ever and only going to get worse” to 10% or less creating a “false” balance.
Stipulated. So what?
I am so immensely tired of this idea that “global warming yes or no” is the topic at hand. It’s the distilled essence of the confusion of the populace.
The topic at hand is what are we going to do about it. What the media proposes is “continue screeching at each other and hope really hard that somebody makes a magic battery that runs on saltwater and pigshit”.
Thanks for helping us form a consensus, guys. But you know if the pigshit one doesn’t work out we have a couple of problems, and too much pigshit is the least of it.
Does this sound familiar or what? ‘We have to address this problem.’
“What problem? Where is the problem?”
‘We have to address this problem.’
Repeat ad absurdium.
Tobis, the problem as discussed here is not global warming yes or no.
It is how much, how much is caused by us, what are the likely impacts, and what can we do about it.
Your response to date is that exhaling is equivalent to mugging old ladies.
I submit you could be more useful.
“The topic at hand is what are we going to do about it.”
See, Michael, that’s not the topic at hand–at least in this thread. Perhaps that explains why you can’t seem to understand what I’ve been saying to you.
You want journalism to emphasize “what are we going to do about it.”
Plenty of outlets run these kinds of stories frequently, such as Grist, Mother Jones (at least on their env blog), the Guardian’s env blog, etc, but mainstream media isn’t going to put that story on the front page every day, or nearly enough for your liking. It will when there’s an appropriate news hook (or a meaty science-related story, like the NYT’s Justin Gillis’s from a few months back)
This is so fundamental to the way the MSM operates, and yet you can’t accept it.
Exhaling is not a net source of CO2 for creatures which do not eat fossil fuels.
There are a lot of scientific and technical components and a lot of politically substantive decisions between now and whatever stability the world achieves in the distant future. If democracy and sustainability both prevail, people need to understand the issues well enough to make informed choices. Yet all the press cares about is this week.
Here’s what would have been my substantive suggestion. A weekly insert in the newspaper, not called The Science Section, but called The Century Section. In that section we could talk about something beyond the next two goddam weeks and the next six stupid red herrings about exhaling, Al Gore, bristlecone pines, etc. etc.
Keith,
You’ve hit the nail on the head. MSM is fundamentally incapable of providing the kind of information the public needs in a timely manner to make the necessary links that would then give policy makers the ‘space’ they need to make the decisions needed to avoid really bad climate impacts.
Perhaps the nature of the beast (i.e. profit-driven) is such that no reasonable chance of reform is possible, and we therefore invest our efforts elsewhere to push the cause of enlightenment forward. If only the U.S. had instituted mandatory media literacy courses in high school and decent funding for public broadcasting 20 years ago 🙂
Where I think you stray onto thin ice is the implied equivalence you make between the George Will’s and Krugman’s of the world. You seem to be applying a strictly partisan lens to this sort of situation and assume that if one is from the left and the other is from the right, then it all evens out. This is exactly the kind of false balance tendency that drives scientists nuts. It devalues honesty and instead elevates the art of propaganda.
“A weekly insert in the newspaper, not called The Science Section, but called The Century Section”
Interesting, and so, oh 1990. And odd coming from a blogger who seems to thrive online.
So in this increasingly fragmented and customized news universe (which Kristof calls the The Daily Me), how do you propose to get readers The weekly Century Section?
@171 kkloor:
This is acceptable data, too, right, even if it contradicts someone’s impression or personal experience?
Sure, it would acceptable data. I’ll look over the paper, but it’s clearly looking at a very specific aspect of the issue rather than the more general failure documented by Boykoff’s earlier studies.
But that doesn’t address the issues I and others have brought up.
Looking at the news stories that came up in my search mentioned @161, we have in order:
1. “A cool reception: EPA administator experiences climate change in the House”
I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call it a classic example of He Said, She Said, but it does present the issue as Jackson/EPA and the Democrats vs. the Republicans, with conflicting/vague statements about the reality of the problem- do “greenhouse gases… contribute to climate change” or are they merely “linked to global warming under the Clean Air Act”?
2. “Montana bill would ’embrace’ global warming”
Pretty much the definition of He Said, She said.
3. “Allergy season expands with climate change”
No mention of the anthropogenic nature of the warming and changing climate. Granted, the study itself didn’t explicitly address that, but is it too much to ask journalists to provide the relevant context that we’re heating the climate up and this is but one of many phenological changes we’re observing?
4. “New House Energy Chair: Global Warming Not Man-Made”
Not even a He Said, She Said. No mention of the reality of the anthropogenic nature of climate. It’s not a reality- it’s merely an “argument that climate change is caused by humans”.
[Note, there’s some sort of embedded video that’s not playing for me, if that substantively changes the context of the written article, please let me know.]
5. “House votes to block EPA’s global warming power”
This one is more reasonable: “greenhouse gases that scientists say cause global warming”.
So, those were the top 5 most relevant stories on “climate change” or “global warming” in Google News for 2007-2011. They were all written within the last year (I’m assuming that Google ranked them by date as well as “relevance”).
Obviously, this wasn’t a systematic analysis, but let’s just say that I find Borenstein’s claim to be even less convincing after this exercise than I did prior to undertaking it.
Hmm, a rigorous exercise, indeed. And as convincing as if you pulled up five random articles that were all deeply researched and reported to your satisfaction.
But with the sarcasm, because nonetheless, this is enough to splash cold water on Borenstein’s claim that he-said, she-said is not predominant anymore.
And you want me to take you seriously?
@181 kkloor:
Hmm, a rigorous exercise, indeed.
Um, I think I was pretty clear that it wasn’t rigorous.
nonetheless, this is enough to splash cold water on Borenstein’s claim that he-said, she-said is not predominant anymore.
Not what I said. I initially assumed Borenstein’s claim to be more or less correct (I clearly found the “ten year” time frame a bit implausible) on its own narrow terms. I’m a quite a bit less confident in the assertion now, even spotting him a few years.
And you want me to take you seriously?
I don’t particularly care if you “take me seriously”, although I hope that the people reading the comments do.
I do think your utter failure to meaningfully engage with the main points that people like Robert Grumbine or myself are making speaks volumes about who is taking what seriously.
Here’s a more recent Boykoff paper, which Nature, in its story coverage, titled “Media reporters get it right.”
The paper itself says “accurate reporting on projections for sea level rise by 2100 demonstrates a bright spot at the interface of climate science and mass media.” Does “bright spot” suggest that accurate reporting is common, or more a “man bites dog” kind of story?
@182
It should speak volumes, because I’m of the opinion that nothing much of what I say in this thread matters (though it was nice to see Robert finally give some ground in his last comment).
And that begs the question: why are you bothering to come here? i really wonder why some of you bother reading this blog. It’s obvious we’re on completely different wavelengths.
I’ve been quite clear that I think a bunch of you are NOT understanding of journalism’s function. We call newspapers that for a reason, because they report the news. Plain and simple. Whatever stories you read out of the recent AAAS conference were based on supposedly newsworthy research or announcements.
The day-to-day, minute to minute journalism ecosystem is premised on news. When Michael picks up his paper tomorrow morning, it’ll mostly be about what happened in the world yesterday. Not about what people should do about climate change or why it threatens Hell and High Water. If the daily papers did that, there would be no need for Romm’s blog.
So I’m still waiting for the ideal reportage model that illustrates how journalists can stop failing so miserably on what is billed as the story of the century.
And remember the old adage: show don’t tell. Perhaps some of you who feel so strongly should stop coming around here and start doing actual reporting/writing, a la citizen journalism. I’m serious. It might make you feel less frustrated about the state of affairs and you can also show the rest of us sorry saps the way it should be done.
thingsbreak, if you want people to take you seriously, do a bit of work.
Set a time frame. Do an exhaustive search of 100 articles. Read them. Report on the results. When you do, tell us what search term(s) you used and the times. Give us links to the results.
Let’s introduce some facts into this. You guys are agonizing over a phenomenon that we don’t even know exists.
121 Since we’re talking Tierney, it’s far from clear he’s ‘not a journalist’, despite what KK holds.
For example. today he’s got an article below the fold on the front page of the Science section of the NYTimes that is differs little stylistically or rhetorically from the other main articles in the section — straight reporting with a bit of color tossed in (on page 2 there’s an article by another journalist who describes RNA as ‘Robin to DNA’s Batman’. How cute.)
So it’s not a ‘TierneyLab’ article, it’s a ‘Findings’ article. What makes his article classicly ‘Tierneyesque’ though is that it’s about a finding that supports biologically ‘determined’ human sexual behavior and evolutionary psychology, generally speaking, and specifically ovulation as regulator of infidelity. From what I’ve seen of his work that’s a narrative Tierney find irresistible, as a journalist OR an opinion writer, so full speed ahead past the uncertainties or countervailing evidence, because he’s, well, let’s just say a ‘professional journalistic provocateur’ tilting against the liberal orthodoxies of the Times’ demographic (but I really just mean he’s an ‘obnoxious libertarian d**chebag’).
Link to Tierney’s opus today
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/science/22tier.html?src=dayp
Possibly the earliest out of the gate of the inevitable critiques:
http://scribe.doublex.com/blog/xxfactor/ovulation-nation
Well, Keith, sorry to break this to you, but it’s not your good looks or devilish charm, either. They’re here to see if you pick up on their memes and to scotch any treacherous memes that may spring up unmonitored.
And before you chastise me, KK, I know you didn’t literally write ‘Tierney’s not a journalist’; you wrote that he’s an opinion-writer. But I don’t think it’s that clear in his case. And certainly not clear that he should therefore be held to a different standard than a science reporter.
Hmmm, Fuller #188, you mean like the meme ‘the science is settled’? The “Tribe’ has been exerting its utmost to ‘scotch’ any outbreak of that one for years. Since of course some of it is *settled* for scientific purposes, I kinda wish climate scientists would use the phrase more, if only to drive the Tribe to utter stomping distraction. Better still, climate scientists should have Al Gore next to them holding a hockey stick, when they say it. Three memes in one.
And gosh, if that seems petty or vindictive of me, well, don’t Mosh and yourself have your own Dr. Evil and Mini-Me act going on these days? (‘yessss….it’s all working out perfectly….let them destroy themselves in nixonian attacks on journalists, the fools…’)
Hmm, Sullivan. Tribe? Not sure to whom you refer… Think the people you despise individually would form an aggregation, not a horde. Be kind of like herding cats. As for Mosh and (Mini) Me, that’s just great minds thinking alike. Can’t decide whether the image I get for (mini) me is the car (I like) or the driver (Minnie–whom I really like).
Guess you get to choose, Sully. Oooh. Sully… Should I call you Jake?
And that begs the question: why are you bothering to come here? i really wonder why some of you bother reading this blog. It’s obvious we’re on completely different wavelengths.
Right, Keith. Why should anyone ever bother exposing themselves to ideas they might disagree with or attempt to discuss anything with people who have different opinions? Do you even think before you write this kind of nonsense?
Also: look up “begging the question.” kthxbai
It doesn’t take much to poison a well. It’s not required that *every* or even *most* stories suffer from false equivalence on scientific matters, for that fallacy to have its effect. The fallacious reporting merely has to percolate to an effective distribution nexus — say, Fox or the New York Times (both of which *certainly* have committed the he said/she said fallacy in their climate science reportage in recent memory). And subsequent ‘correction’ may not matter much: the poison has already spread.
So, like I asked earlier, how many lazy or malign journalists (and no, it doesn’t matter that the journalist was only ‘following orders’) does it take to effectively disinform the public? How many articles? Not many, I suspect, given the, um, ‘right’ outlet.
Since we’re engaging in ‘top ten google results’, here’s a pertinent one that came up in the top ten in my search for ‘global warming’ just now
http://scienceblog.com/42992/climategate-undermined-belief-in-global-warming-among-many-tv-meteorologists-study-shows/
“˜Climategate’ undermined belief in global warming among many TV meteorologists, study shows
“Our study shows that TV weathercasters “” like most people “” are motivated consumers of information in that their beliefs influence what information they choose to see, how they evaluate information, and the conclusions they draw from it,” says Ed Maibach, one of the researchers. “Although subsequent investigations showed that the climate scientists had done nothing wrong, the allegation of wrongdoing undermined many weathercasters’ confidence in the conclusions of climate science, at least temporarily.”
Keith:
And remember the old adage: show don’t tell. Perhaps some of you who feel so strongly should stop coming around here and start doing actual reporting/writing, a la citizen journalism. I’m serious. It might make you feel less frustrated about the state of affairs and you can also show the rest of us sorry saps the way it should be done.
I entirely agree and have in fact been planning to do something of the sort soon. I would like to hear from others with similar interests.
Sully, still waiting for examples. Or are you offering the story about meteorologists losing ‘faith’ in global warming because of Climategate as an example?
Returning to the post, Is Climate Communication A Total Botch?
Correct answer: This is not a well-posed question. It is capable of too many plausibly correct responses.
On the one hand, Gavin and the rest of the warmers certainly have no problem in getting their story out. No one’s banned RealClimate from the Internet and many journalists insist that they give the warmers fair and adequate coverage.
On the other hand, it appears that the general public has an understanding of the key issues that has been strongly affected by the views of a tiny dissenting minority of competent scientists and of those who have no scientific background but end up in the press anyway.
So largely this thread has been people talking right past each other. Some want to focus on the access that the consensus team has to the press; others want to focus on the apparent inability of the general public to understand what the consensus team is saying.
Who’s to blame? Largely biology, not the press. As a species, we have very little demonstrated ability to focus on long-term issues until crisis hits. And given the extraordinary financial and economic commitment that has been made to the existing manner of generating and consuming energy, we’re even less likely to be able to hear the message that we need to make big changes.
Can the press do a better job? Unlikely. A. People don’t want to hear the truth. B. Major factions within the press system will continue to tell the public that everything is going to be ok.
Is there any plausible future in which China and the US agree to leave large amounts of coal and oil in the ground? What stories could the press possibly publish that would create the economic and political will to do so?
In the story about meteorologists re Climategate, there is absolutely no ‘he said, she said’ reporting. So I don’t know why it is offered as an example here.
Unless you folks are not really objecting to ‘he said, she said’ reporting at all, but are instead opposed to any reporting whatsoever about facts and events that are less than a bulwark to your philosophical edifice.
“And that begs the question: why are you bothering to come here? i really wonder why some of you bother reading this blog. It’s obvious we’re on completely different wavelengths.”
Good point.
@Stu #170
> You seem to be arguing towards a position where any kind of sceptical presence within the mainstream is to be percieved as intolerable.
Absolutely not, but nice projection.
I am arguing:
a) Tom Fuller is flat wrong to say the mainstream media is “100% consensus”.
b) Expecting clear reporting of facts to change popular opinion in any meaningful way is to misunderstand the way people respond to information that conflicts with preconceptions.
Dave H, depending on your definition of mainstream, I might be willing to go lower than 100%.
What do you believe the percentage to be, and how do you define consensus?
Scientific American has an article up today on the issues discussed in this post. In fact, the writer seems to have attended the same two AAAS sessions that I covered in my two related posts, although the SciAm piece doesn’t distinguish between the separate sessions.
“b) Expecting clear reporting of facts to change popular opinion in any meaningful way is to misunderstand the way people respond to information that conflicts with preconceptions.”
I don’t think anyone expects that. But it’s also clear that people won’t ever change their incorrect preconceptions if half of what they hear confirms them. Good information is not sufficient for a sound opinion, but it is necessary. Is that so complicated?
All about the messenger, nought about the message. Oh, well. Maybe by next century…
Over at Dot Earth, you can read Andy Revkin’s dispatch.
@Michael Tobis #202
> I don’t think anyone expects that.
My initial post making this point was specifically in response to Dr Curry, who seemed to be suggesting precisely that.
> What do you believe the percentage to be, and how do you define consensus?
I don’t think it is as simple as that. Given the fairly clear (broadly) left/right divide on climate change as an issue generally, where a media outlet has a particular political bias the reportage on climate change follows that pretty naturally. Again, all the examples I cited err far more on the side of anti-AGW not from any genuine scientific skepticism, but from a reactionary political standpoint. Similarly (and in response to your earlier post), when looking for examples of outlets that take an anti-AGW stance of *course* I didn’t mention the Guardian, who tend towards the left and so tend to take the opposite view.
But I don’t think that the majority of the “mainstream” media are pushing a consensus or a skeptical view at all. What they are reporting are stories, and while they may editorialise or “spin” according to bias in some cases, it is news that they need. I looked at your 10 links before – I could find very little that was “pro-consensus” there (and some that was tacitly anti-consensus). What I saw was eg. a science press release, condensed and put out there for their readership. News, bluntly. “Scientists have found this, we’re not in any position to evaluate it, so we’ll take it at face value and repeat it”. The Mail is infamous for this kind of thing, with its reactionary quest to categorise the world into things which cause or cure cancer:
http://kill-or-cure.heroku.com/
You seem to regard scientists treating climate change as background fact to some new finding as “pushing the consensus”. But tomorrow, something else will be news. Last winter, it was the stolen emails.
There is no quashing of the “skeptical” science in the mainstream media. There just isn’t anything interesting to report on, of the level that sells papers. That Owl story could have been some researchers showing how owl plumage proved there was no climate change and it would have got reported in just the same tone. You can be sure, if a new paper claims that cosmic rays are to blame, it’ll get a mention. Then next week it’ll be CO2 for sure. Don’t worry though, that just means more confusion and disinterest, so the number of those concerned about global warming will continue to drop.
So why is this? Because there are thousands of scientists who accept the reality of AGW and just get on with it, producing more and more corroborating findings, and on the other you have a handful of qualified contrarians and their self-appointed army of cheerleaders, convincing themselves they are a growing grassroots movement. Where’s the news angle? Get some more emails, then you’ll have a story.
Globe still warming at the same rate? Yawn.
Climate talks in jeopardy? Story!
Antarctic warming at a terrifying rate? Story!
Antarctic warming at a slightly different rate, still almost as fast, spread around a bit differently, warmer in some places than others, arrived at conclusions with slightly better methodology than previously, maybe? Yawn…
Subset of tree-ring proxies show divergence post 1960? Oh, my eyelids…
Scientists hiding the decline in temperatures? Stop the press!
Anyway. What I think is: expecting the popular press to in any way educate the general public and create a groundswell of opinion in any one direction is just pie-in-the-sky.
The problem is not down to the communication skills of the scientists or the clarity of the message – changing those acheives nothing.
The problem is that the issue has become polarised politically. Until the scientific reality is successfully separated from the politicisation of the solutions, no real progress can be made, especially with reportage filtered through media outlets that *are* politically biased.
(As an aside, this is very similar to Gavin Schmidt’s point about not attending that “reconciliation” thing the other week – if you’re not willing to address the political issues you’re not really addressing the reason that the “debate” is so acrimonious)
DaveH, you write, “You seem to regard scientists treating climate change as background fact to some new finding as “pushing the consensus”. But tomorrow, something else will be news. Last winter, it was the stolen emails. There is no quashing of the “skeptical” science in the mainstream media.”
But it’s your side that’s complaining about balance of news coverage, not the skeptics, and not the lukewarmers.
As for addressing the politics, that’s why I try and do. Politics and policy. But as I mentioned in another context a few weeks ago, when I try and talk politics or policy Gavin wants to talk science. When I want to talk about the science, even from a layman’s perspective, Gavin wants to talk about politics.
Well, I’m calling b.s. on this phony story of false balance. No examples, no research, no analysis. Just whining.
Next pain point for the losing alarmist side?
If anyone want to listen to a good example of science reporting try this
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2011/02/science-as-she-should-be-reported.html