The Island of Doubt

Begin your week with a dose of hilarity at the expense of the editor of the Ely Times, a modest little publication for some of the very few readers in Nevada who don't live in Vegas or Reno. If you have time you can then let the story drag you in a more substantive issue.

In an attempt to make sense of the role of carbon dioxide in climate change -- the somewhat inaccurate but useful metaphor of the greenhouse effect -- editor Kent Harper ends up mired in a war of words with climatologist Michael Mann over just how cold the Earth would be without atmospheric CO₂. Of course, Harper loses, and much merriment is had by those who have even a passing familiarity with the Metric system. You can follow Mann's attempt to set the poor guy straight at Real Climate.

What it boils to is a misunderstanding of the difference between degrees Celcius as a scalar measurement and degrees Celcius on a thermometer. In his Nov. 7 editorial Harper writes:

Without our mantle of atmospheric insulating gases, including carbon dioxide, the earth's average temperature, now about 59 degrees, would be almost 100 degrees colder.

While it is true that the Earth is about 59°F now, Harper fell for the old "double it and add 30" trap that works well enough to convert today's temperature forecast from Celcius (or centigrade) into Fahrenheit, but only because there isn't a common zero point for the two scales. Anyone who remembers Bob and Doug MacKenzie's attempts on Second City TV to convert two pounds of back bacon into 32 kilos can smile knowingly at this point.

What Harper should have done it simply convert how much the CO₂ warms the earth in Celcius (approx 33°) and then multiply by 1.8 to get 59.4, which is substantially less than 100.

It may be a relatively small point in the bigger picture of climate change, but if a lay-person is going to try to demonstrate a superior understanding the subject, then he or she should grasp the basics. When Mann pointed out the error, among other oddities in the confused editorial, Harper shot back in a rebuttal that Mann, despite his expertise in climatology, was wrong, and pointed to, of all things,a Wikipedia entry to support his math. It didn't take long for readers and commenters on the paper's site to draw the editor's attention to the error, which he eventually conceded. Hah, hah. Stupid journalist gets his comeuppance.

Now, that a small-town newspaper editor might make a few mistakes while trying to explain climate forcing is not all that surprising or worrisome. But along the way, Harper manages to wade into an even worse quagmire: that of false equivalency in science journalism. And it's there that his missteps warrant the attention of observers on the Island of Doubt.

In his rebuttal, Harper raised the old red herring that dissident scientists aren't being treated fairly by the media:

No quarter is being given in this debate, and truth and critical thinking don't matter as much as ideology. You must agree wholeheartedly with Mann, [Al] Gore, [Sen. Harry] Reid, et al, or you must be silenced -- even if you agree with the scientific data, but voice concern about what the policy-makers will do with that data.

Mr. Gore, himself, summed it up perfectly Monday morning on NBC's "Today Show" when he was interviewed about global warming.

"When you're reporting on a story like the one you're covering today," Gore told "Today" host Matt Lauer, "you don't search out someone who still believes the Earth is flat and give them equal time."

That's not how good journalism, good science or good government is supposed work. Silencing debate is never warranted.

But it's how global warming is to be treated -- no questions, not from descedent [sic] scientists and especially not from laymen editorial writers.

First, it's hard to see how the so-called dissidents can complain. As Naomi Oreskes demonstrated long ago (Science, Vol. 306. no. 5702, p. 1686), the media long gave far more attention to the tiny minority of scientists who take issue with the consensus on anthropogenic climate change than their numbers would warrant. (Although that appears no longer to be the case, according to a recent media study that found "that 'balanced' reporting on scientific investigations of human-induced climate change in these newspapers is no longer evident.")

But even if they could legitimately complain, for Harper to imply that every side of every debate in science should be given comparable treatment is to completely misconstrue how science, and therefore responsible science journalism, works. Sidelining a few cranks, whose work is consistently discredited, is exactly how "good journalism, good science or good government" is supposed to work.

It's become trite to use the old Flat Earth analogy, but it's true: we don't give equal time to those who refuse to believe a mountain of evidence that the world is round. By giving equal time to climate change pseudoskeptics (thanks to Orac for finally supplying the perfect term), we not only give the false impression that the scientific community is evenly divided about the basics of climate change, but we also tend to ignore the genuine sources of debate.

For example, what is the contribution of cloud cover? How fast are the glaciers and ice caps melting? How quickly will sea levels rise? What are the consequences of geo-engineering mitigation schemes? These are the really important questions that have yet to be settled. That's not to say that anyone's mind should be closed to new and contrary arguments. But given how little time we have to get our act together, we don't have the luxury of wasting any more on what we do know with a high degree of confidence.