Science and the media: 8 - 14 January

JAN 14, 2011

Charles Day

Steve Corneliussen’s topics this week:

An Orlando Sentinel commentary charging that “doomsday scenarios” are environmentalists’ “marketing plan of choice”
A Science magazine commentary about the National Academies’ report Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation
An analysis of three newspapers’ coverage of news that 2010 and 2005 were the hottest years on record
Coverage of a sports event with seismographic implications
A Columbia Journalism Review article on the press and the climate

Orlando Sentinel commentary on alarmism in science news

Breathless newspaper stories about Earth-threatening asteroids, black hole producing particle accelerators, and other supposed menaces provoke the alarm of the public and the indignation of scientists. Along those lines, a commentary from the 13 January Orlando Sentinel might be worth discussing.

I should note that I got the commentary from two old friends. One, a lawyer, is an outright denier of human-caused climate disruption who has long since stopped listening very closely to my questions about his certitude. The other, an anesthesiologist, is a milder skeptic, but not mild in his condemnations of what he sees as unwarranted alarmism.

The Sentinel‘s Mike Thomas begins the commentary “Exaggerated Predictions About Global Warming Hurt the Cause” with a bit of sarcasm:

Federal scientists reported Wednesday that 2010 tied with 2005 as the hottest year on record, unless of course you were in Florida last month, in which case it was one of the coldest Decembers on record.

It’s not easy scraping windshield ice with a plastic spatula.

The feds should wait until August to release these how-hot-was-it updates. They might have more impact if people weren’t reading them while socked in at O’Hare for 15 hours.

Thomas himself actually understands that temperature rise globally can cause cold-weather extremes regionally. “But for years,” he charges, “the message from the climate-change community is that we are on an unrelenting march to hell. Some scientists have made very specific predictions of doom based on models that have nowhere near that kind of accuracy. And now they are looking pretty silly.”

His first example: “James Hansen, a climatologist and activist at NASA, predicted in 1986 that 2001 would be the hottest year in 100,000 years.” (I wonder how Hansen would respond.)

Then: “Another leading climate scientist, Michael Oppenheimer, wrote in 1990 that America’s heartland would be ravaged in drought, leading to food riots.”

Then: “English scientist David Viner said in 2000 that winter snow would be a ‘very rare and exciting event’ and that, ‘Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.’”

Further along:

The media loves this stuff. In 2000, the Chicago Tribune reported: “The four horsemen of this global Apocalypse are Thaw, Drought, Storms and Floods, carrying in their wake hunger, disease, devastation and death.”

Oh my!

Doomsday scenarios are the marketing plan of choice when it comes to environmental issues.

Thomas goes on to charge that concerning the Gulf oil spill, scientists “replaced peer-reviewed research with whatever speculation would get them attention.” He declares: “Crying wolf draws attention to an issue in the short term. But credibility wears thin over time.” And he cites a Gallup poll that he says showed that “almost half of Americans now believe the danger of global warming has been exaggerated, up from 31% in 1997 when the question was first asked.” People “do not see the world going up in flames,” he asserts.

Thomas’s conclusion requires quoting verbatim:

Of course, the climate-change community can’t accept the responsibility for this. So it blames the lies and distortions of the dreaded deniers. I disagree because this issue was theirs to lose. They overreacted to critics, they didn’t tolerate dissent and instead of trying to educate the public on the nuances of weather, they turned climate science into a modern-day Book of Revelation.

I don’t doubt that having billions of people burning fossil fuel impacts the climate. I question how that impact is being quantified into specific predictions and, more important, how it then is being marketed. It’s time for a change in strategy.

Boosting Minorities in Science

In this week’s invited editorial in Science, Freeman A. Hrabowski III uses a wealth of statistical data in a call for “Boosting Minorities in Science.” Hrabowski is president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He chaired the committee that wrote the National Academies report Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation: America’s Science and Technology Talent at the Crossroads. Three key excerpts from his editorial:

In 2006, underrepresented minorities, including African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans, constituted only 9% of the nation’s science and engineering labor force, while accounting for nearly 30% of the population.
The United States will need to quadruple the number of underrepresented minorities with undergraduate degrees in [STEM] disciplines. A good place to start is retaining those minority undergraduate students who begin their studies in pursuit of degrees in STEM fields. . . . An urgent task for colleges and universities is to redesign first-year STEM classes to encourage active learning and collaboration.
Just as important for minority students are social support and mentoring. Some are the first in their families to go to college; others simply feel isolated. . . . Best practices include precollege summer programs, substantive early research experiences, academic support, social integration, and faculty involvement.

Hot 2010: Wall Street Journal spin diverges

In a line graph sourced to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, the 13 January New York Times illustrates the news that’s told in prose in the Times article “Figures on Global Climate Show 2010 Tied 2005 as the Hottest Year on Record.” The graph covers the years 1880 to 2010, showing a steady upward trend in average global temperature from below 57°F to a high of just over 58°F, reached in 2005 and again last year.

Quite similar articles appear in the Washington Post and, online, in the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ piece, however, incorporates what scientists at RealClimate have condemned as “the false objectivity of balance.”

This excerpt from the Times captures the main content of all three articles:

Two agencies, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, reported Wednesday that the global average surface temperature for 2010 had tied the record set in 2005. The analyses differ slightly; in the NOAA version, the 2010 temperature was 1.12 degrees Fahrenheit above the average for the 20th century, which is 57 degrees.

It was the 34th year running that global temperatures have been above the 20th-century average; the last below-average year was 1976. The new figures show that 9 of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since the beginning of 2001.

The Times article adds that the “earth has been warming in fits and starts for decades, and a large majority of climatologists say that is because humans are releasing heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.” It quotes David R. Easterling, a National Climatic Data Center scientist: “The climate is continuing to show the influence of greenhouse gases.”

The Post article quotes Daniel J. Weiss, who, as the Post puts it, “directs climate strategy for the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.” Weiss says, “Hopefully, this new data will finally convince congressional climate-science deniers that global warming is real and that action is urgent. . . . To reject this latest evidence is like ignoring strange spots on a chest X-ray and continuing to smoke.”

The WSJ article quotes Easterling and reports as well that these “latest findings were seen by some as further evidence of a link between human activities and global warming.” Note that phrase “by some.” The WSJ adds:

Not all scientists agreed. John Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said natural long-term variability in climate, rather than greenhouse-gas emissions, could play a greater role in warming.

In addition, Dr. Christy said, “If greenhouse gases are causing warming, the climate system is not very sensitive to carbon dioxide because the warming is not very dramatic.”

The Geophysics of Football

Remember those books and articles on the physics of this or that sport? Football fans have been marveling at an especially dramatic touchdown run in a professional playoff game in Seattle against New Orleans. That’s where geophysics comes in. Here’s what the Wall Street Journal reported in a blurb headlined “The Touchdown That Shook the Earth” :

Marshawn Lynch’s 67-yard touchdown run on Saturday can now literally be described as “earth-shaking.” Geophysicists at the University of Washington’s Pacific Northwest Seismic Network say that a seismic reader by Qwest Field picked up activity around 4:43 p.m. PT—just as Mr. Lynch reached the end zone. John Vidale, director of the PNSN, made the connection with the game. “It’s a little bit unusual,” he says, “But it’s pretty clear that this was the fans going wild in the stadium.”

A Seattle sports news website, in a story headlined “Marshawn Lynch’s Playoff Clinching Run Registered a Minor Earthquake,” included a seismograph printout. The ESPN sports site’s article “Ground Shook on Marshawn Lynch TD” focused on the seismic network director:

Vidale said a seismic monitoring station located about 100 yards west of the stadium registered seismic activity during Lynch’s run. The shaking was most intense during a 30-second stretch about the time Lynch broke free from the line of scrimmage, finished off his touchdown and celebrated in the end zone with his teammates. After that, Vidale said, the shaking died down, but it took about a minute for the shaking to completely fade away. This was the first time Vidale has taken a look at the monitoring station near the stadium. He said the station that picked up the tremors is mostly concerned with monitoring the two-level viaduct highway that runs along the Seattle waterfront and the seawall.

Columbia Journalism Review considers state of climate-science reporting

A recent Columbia Journalism Review article reports on and muses about the recent state of popular-press climate-science reporting.

It begins by noting the decline in media coverage following the Copenhagen conference and the Climategate scandal. The world’s English-language output went down by 30% between 2009 and 2010, it says, with 22% fewer reporters involved. In the US a study of the major networks and large newspapers “found similarly precipitous declines.”

The author, Curtis Brainard, observes that some journalists “have grown rightfully piqued by those who blame the media almost exclusively for the public’s poor understanding of climate change"—and also by attacks on their integrity and on their work. Concerning that frustration, Brainard quotes Tom Yulsman, co-director of the University of Colorado’s Center for Environmental Journalism: “If you read any number of partisan climate bloggers who claim to carry the torch of scientific truth, we’re mostly stupid, we’re hopelessly biased, we’re carrying water for warmist scientists, or we’re stenographers who copy down whatever the denialists have to say because we’re too dumb to know what false balance is.”

The article also engages the phenomenon of what it calls “vicious criticism from the left"—for instance from Joe Romm, the physicist and former Energy Department official who became livid in a recent blog post (discussed in an earlier report ) proclaiming that the climate denier George F. Will has no business supporting any science of any kind. Brainard offers as an example of this criticism a Romm blog post headlined “And the 2010 Citizen Kane award for non-excellence in climate journalism goes to.” Brainard declares that “the tenor of [Romm’s] posts and the conversations he inspires frequently verge of the same kind of fantastical accusations that the ‘other side’ made famous.”

Brainard also engages studies that have taken “a closer look at climate coverage in order to determine exactly what is and isn’t a problem.” One study found that IPCC sea-level-rise stories in US and UK newspapers were generally accurate, for example.

The article quotes an important point from Andrew Revkin of the Dot Earth blog at the New York Times:

The core of the climate problem lies in the reality that the world doesn’t have the energy options it needs for a smooth ride toward roughly 9 billion people by mid-century, all seeking decent lives.

So good reporters, those always eager to get to the root causes of a problem (being “radical” in the most precise sense of that word), will still track climate science. But they will devote more time and effort to diving deeper on energy policy, habits and innovations—whether unraveling counterproductive subsidies, pointing out the lack of money for path-breaking research, or revealing examples of social and financial innovations percolating around the world—any one of which could make a big difference if the information gets out and around.

Brainard closes by noting that climate-science reporting “will always displease somebody.”

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for “Science and the Media.” He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.