James Hrynyshyn is a freelance science journalist based in western North Carolina, where he tries to put degrees in marine biology and journalism to good use.
Andy Revkin demonstrates once again why he's among the best science journalists around in his latest exploration of the challenges facing climatologists frustrated with the way their science is portrayed in the popular media. No real answer emerges from his analysis, but if every researcher and reporter involved in the subject read this piece, maybe we'd be closer to one.
The problem, in short:
Discordant findings have come in quick succession. How fast is Greenland shedding ice? Did human-caused warming wipe out frogs in the American tropics? Has warming strengthened hurricanes? Have the oceans stopped warming? These questions endure even as the basic theory of a rising human influence on climate has steadily solidified: accumulating greenhouse gases will warm the world, erode ice sheets, raise seas and have big impacts on biology and human affairs.Among the usual suspects rounded up to explain how a field that has produced an unusually strong consensus on the nature of global warming is cast as bedeviled by uncertainty are ... reporters and editors. According to one Harvard observer:
...after scientists learn that accurate, but nuanced, statements are often left out of news accounts, they may pre-emptively oversimplify their description of some complex finding.Obviously, there's a lot more going on than just out-of-touch journalists and editors underestimating the intelligence of the audience and oversimplifying the details. I can't speak to the quality of my reporting peers, But many of the editors I've had to deal with, including one just last week, aren't up to the task of handling a story that deals with climate science. Too often they prefer to see hackneyed, old-fashioned, us-vs-them, dueling-quote architecture. Many simply don't get that we've long since left behind the notion that anthropogenic global warming is subject to scientific debate.
It's difficult for those who work with the subject every day to understand how that can be, especially after all the attention drawn to the media-climatology disparity exposed by the Oreskes paper several years ago. But then, the editors haven't heard of the Oreskes paper, I guess. The really frustrating thing is, we don't have time to wait for the current crop of editors to retire and more informed journalists take their place.
At least those editing Revkin's copy at the NY Times aren't so distanced from reality. We need more of whoever they are.
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Comments
There's a lot of mileage being made lately by the global warming denialists about the "last decade" showing a cooling trend (and therefore this "disproves" global warming, etc., etc., blah blah blah). What comments do you have on that?
Posted by: Ian | July 29, 2008 10:55 AM
First of all, 2005 was either the warmest on record or tied for the record. So there is no cooling "trend."
Second, short-term cooling (or flat-lining) of global temperatures is entirely explainable by short-term oscillations in solar cycles and ENSO (El Nino) effects. In fact, we expect to see at least a moderation in the warming trend right about now.
Most importantly, even if there is a 10-year trend, that wouldn't be long enough to attract the attention of climate modelers, who are interested in much longer time frames.
Posted by: James Hrynyshyn | July 29, 2008 11:08 AM