BBC pwns Greenpeace director

Now wait. The BBC host was asking about the ice over Greenland, but Greenpeace was talking about sea ice. The article that is referenced makes that distinction clear. The host is quote mining.

Greenpeace could have easily said SEA ICE... no ambiguity. They chose to use a blanket term and were caught. BBC rarely lets you get away with stuff like that.... are you listening, Fox?

I'm not usually one to defend Greenpeace, but I have to agree with Jake. The interviewer was quote-mining, and the director (if we take him at his word) hadn't read that press release, so he couldn't provide the context. Speaking of which, here's the whole text of the section titled "Ice free Artic":

Bad news is coming from other sources as well. A recent NASA study has shown that the ice cap is not only getting smaller, itâs getting thinner and younger. Sea ice has dramatically thinned between 2004 and 2008. Old ice (over 2 years old) takes longer to melt, and is also much harder to replace. As permanent ice decreases, we are looking at ice-free summers in the Arctic as early as 2030.

They say you can't be too thin or too young, but this unfortunately doesn't apply to the Arctic sea ice. Polar bears are the first to suffer from it, but many other species could be affected as well.

I don't know whether the full statement agrees with the scientific consensus, but I think it takes a wilful misreading to think that one sentence refers to something different than all the surrounding ones.

Whoops... the second to last paragraph should also be part of the quote.

It is unfortunate that you were fooled by Sackur's quote mining. There are already two posts here at scienceblogs on this:

Coby Beck: "the fact that the best evidence of Greenpeace lying is this twisted farce of a scandal rather suggests they may not be that bad."

Me: Shoddy journalism from Stephen Sackur.

Greenpeace have hit back, echoing your thoughts. But isn't that missing the point? The video is noteworthy because the director seems to think it's OK to be misleading about issues...

What do you mean he thinks it's OK? In the video above he explicitly says that if the article was referring to Greenland, then that was a mistake and that he did not personally believe that Greenland's ice sheet could vanish by 2030. Without knowledge of the article, or given the courtesy of context by the host, he agreed that it was wrong if it indeed implied what the host said it implied.

@6. jake
Are we watching the same video? He agreed that the Greenland ice sheet probably would not melt by 2030, but first he said:
"That we as a pressure group have to emotionalise issues, we're not ashamed of emotionalising issues".

Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore left the organisation in 1986 specifically because he felt the group were running campaigns based on fear rather than facts. In his words:

We all have a responsibility to be environmental stewards. But that stewardship requires that science, not political agendas, drive our public policy.

@Frank:

The whole point on that video and the response from Greenpeace is that no rational person would assume that they were referring to anything other than the "sea" ice if they read the sentence in the context of the rest of the statement. It has been pointed out repeatedly that the dropping of "sea" in cases where it is strongly implied (often by being stated explicitly nearby) has been used by scientific organizations and even the BBC itself! For the BBC to go on this tangent, when they knew the interviewee didn't have the full quote handy to point out the interviewer's error, is a deliberate quote-mine. The Greenpeace exec pointed out that such an exact phrase would be technically incorrect on its own, but that does nothing to invalidate it in the original context. It's pretty clear that the BBC was engaged in worse sensationalizing than Greenpeace was, and yet you've chosen to pillory only Greenpeace.

As for Patrick Moore's old comment, I would point out that facts and fear are not mutually exclusive. Although I, too, disfavor the tactic, in a society that is increasingly distrusting of scientific authority and evidence, it is not inherently wrong to sensationalize in order to get the attention to your point as long as the data backs it up. It's when you do that because the evidence does not favor you that it is always objectionable, and that is the wall that Global Warming "skeptics" are up against when they spread deliberate falsehoods again and again.

@8 Mystyk

But the very act of "emotionalising" implies that the data doesn't support the fear you're trying to attach to it. It reminds me of the Blair govt's efforts to "sex up" the Iraq dossier to drum up support for war.

Greenpeace have done this time and again - see the Brent Spar case, or their continued anti-GM efforts. I feel that actions such as this simply muddy the waters on what everyone can already see is an apparent problem.

@ Frank:

"I feel that actions such as this simply muddy the waters on what everyone can already see is an apparent problem." (emphasis added)

I'm not trying to beat a dead horse here, but this deserves a few words.

When I was in my high-school days, I remember a teacher who shot down my naivete over the public's understanding of issues with a single sentence: "If common sense was common, everyone would have it."

As I mentioned before, I don't like the tactic. However, you and I have that luxury to pick and choose our opinions on these matters from a position of greater understanding than most people have. The majority of the public never sees the science behind the issue, or at best sees only a minute subset of what would be needed to be considered reasonably informed. Instead, they listen to the rhetoric in the media, which is often very one-sided mis-information from pundits. Sensationalizing, while never perfect, is at least a way to put out some of the real information in the medium most people understand.

Now, I recognize what you're saying about what the act "implies," but if people generally won't listen to anything else, what do you suggest?

(Of course, my biggest problem is that the media has a tendency to either pre-decide which camp they're in or look at the back-and-forth and decide the truth must be somewhere in the middle. Naturally, both methods are fallacious.)

I would say that good writing, charismatic presentation, and strong leadership themselves can inform the public without resorting to sensationalism.

Emotionalising follows a law of diminishing returns; the more you use it, the less effective it is, and moreso it's the weak trick of shouting loud to deliver your point.

You're right that the public is inundated with stuff they don't understand but are supposed to care about, but that's an argument against sensationalism, not for it.

Truth alone (i.e. scientific truth) is by definition politically impotent. Perhaps this is especially the case with climate change. The merely statistical and hypothetical predictions of science make no impression on our pleistocene brains.

Now I am more a friend of truth than of humanity, I am a scientific puritan, an epistemic fundamentalist. I say, as Genghis Khan, that if by pulling off a single hair I could save humanity I wouldn't do it. Science won't pull off a single hair of truth because it is commited to evidence only no matter the moral consequences. Thus I have made my decision:

FIAT VERITAS ET PEREAT MUNDUS

Truth alone (i.e. scientific truth) is by definition politically impotent. Perhaps this is especially the case with climate change. The merely statistical and hypothetical predictions of science make no impression on our pleistocene brains.

That has to be one of the most demonstrably untrue statements I've ever seen in my entire life.

Frank, perhaps this is because you mistook impotence for irrelevance. Scientific truth is politically relevant -it must be unless we are to go back to the cave; but it alone is politically impotent. This is not only true but a tautology.

Whatever you understand by politics, surely you don't think that spliting the atom is itself a political act.

p.s. While I don't see how public awareness of science could be part of science, I do see how politics in the broad sense can be perceived negatively even by those who engage in it like yourself.