Blaming the Media, Wrongly in this Case
September 5th, 2008Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
Earlier this week I claimed that scientists should take some responsibility for media misinterpretations of their work. Here is an example where scientists are wrongly blaming the media.
Today Science magazine published a paper on sea level rise by Tad Pfeffer (of the University of Colorado) and colleagues. the paper claims to have ruled out a sea level rise of more than 2 meters by 2100. The guys over at Real Climate have taken issue with the suggestion that 2 meters of sea level rise represents a step back from claims of higher potential increases. They write (emphasis added):
. . .we’ve just seen the initial media coverage where this result is being spun as a downgrading of predictions! (exemplified by this Reuters piece, drawing mainly from the U. Colorado press release). This is completely backwards. We stress that no-one (and we mean no-one) has published an informed estimate of more than 2 meters of sea level rise by 2100. Tellingly, the statement in the paper that suggests otherwise has no reference.
There have certainly been incorrect assertions and headlines implying that 20 ft of sea level by 2100 was expected, but they are mostly based on a confusion of a transient rise with the eventual sea level rise which might take hundreds to thousands of years. And before someone gets up to say Al Gore, we’ll point out preemptively that he made no prediction for 2100 or any other timescale.
Real Climate helpfully points to a paper by Jim Hansen that they claim says nothing about a sea level rise greater than 2 meters:
The nearest thing I can find is Jim Hansen who states that “it [is] almost inconceivable that BAU climate change would not yield a sea level change of the order of meters on the century timescale”. But that is neither a specific prediction for 2100, nor necessarily one that is out of line with the Pfeffer et al’s bounds.
Real Climate concludes with an admonition of those ignorant reporters:
Headlines like that in the Reuters piece (or National Geographic) are therefore doing a fundamental disservice to the public understanding of the problem.
Tsk. Tsk. Bad media.
However, a close look at the Hansen article linked by Real Climate suggests that they aren’t really telling the whole story. Here is what Hansen writes (emphasis added):
As a quantitative example, let us say that the ice sheet contribution is 1 cm for the decade 2005–15 and that it doubles each decade until the West Antarctic ice sheet is largely depleted. That time constant yields a sea level rise of the order of 5 m this century. Of course I cannot prove that my choice of a ten-year doubling time for nonlinear response is accurate, but I am confident that it provides a far better estimate than a linear response for the ice sheet component of sea level rise under BAU forcing.
This paper led Joe Romm to write the following at Grist:
Sea level rise of 5 meters in one century? Even if most scientists will not say so publicly, that catastrophe is a real possibility, according to the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute Of Space Studies.
So at least Joe Romm interpreted Hansen’s paper to mean that sea level could conceivably rise by 5 meters by 2100. Real Climate’s claim that “no-one (and we mean no-one) has published an informed estimate of more than 2 meters of sea level rise by 2100″ is not just incorrect, but extremely misleading.
Not only is the head guy at Real Climate employed by Jim Hansen, one of the most prominent climate scientists around, but Real Climate goes so far as to point in very misleading fashion to the very paper in which Hansen suggests that a prediction of 5 meters by 2100 is far more accurate than predictions of less than about a meter and a half. So while it is indeed frustrating that some in the media get things wrong, the best in the media pretty much always get things right. And on sea level rise, it looks like they’ve gotten things right. One thing members of the media won’t like much is being treated like fools.
Popularity: 3% [?]
September 5th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
Here is another example:
“Sea-level rise from melting of polar ice sheets is one of the largest potential threats of future climate change. Polar warming by the year 2100 may reach levels similar to those of 130,000 to 127,000 years ago that were associated with sea levels several meters above modern levels; both the Greenland Ice Sheet and portions of the Antarctic Ice Sheet may be vulnerable. . . Corals on tectonically stable coasts from the last interglaciation period (LIG) provided strong evidence that sea level was 4 to >6 m above present levels during a sea-level high stand that likely lasted from 129,000 ± 1000 years ago to at least 118,000 years ago.”
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/311/5768/1747
From the NCAR press release:
“Ice sheets across both the Arctic and Antarctic could melt more quickly than expected this century, according to two studies that blend computer modeling with paleoclimate records. The studies, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Arizona, show that Arctic summers by 2100 may be as warm as they were nearly 130,000 years ago, when sea levels eventually rose up to 20 feet (6 meters) higher than today.”
http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2006/melting.shtml
September 5th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Roger Pielke, Jr., quotes the press release: “Arctic summers by 2100 may be as warm as they were nearly 130,000 years ago, when sea levels eventually rose up to 20 feet (6 meters) higher than today.”
And quotes the paper: “Polar warming by the year 2100 may reach levels similar to those of 130,000 to 127,000 years ago that were associated with sea levels several meters above modern levels.”
In each case, the authors clearly say that by 2100 temperatures may reach levels such that, if these temperatures are sustained for an unspecified time, sea levels would eventually reach 6 meters above present.
Neither the paper nor the press release says anything about the timing of the sea level rise. Both only specify timing of the temperature rise.
September 5th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Jonathan-
With such clear writing, it is indeed hard to believe that anyone thought that the paper and press release referred to 2100
I especially like the “associated with” phrase in the second sentence. Perfectly obscure.
Care to point me to any corrections or clarifications issued by Overpeck, Real Climate, or anyone else to the timing issue of warming/rising at the time the misinterpretations were made?
September 5th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
NPR did a piece this afternoon on the Pfeffer and others paper. Along with comments from Tad Pfeffer about the findings, NPR spoke with Ian Joughin of the University of Washington who also mentioned the high sea level rise numbers being thrown out there. Personally, I have seen interviews of prominent ice sheet scientists on the nightly news saying we could see a couple of meters of sea level rise in this century just from Greenland and have also been to meetings where high sea level contributions from Greenland in this century are given.
I would hazard a guess that the public gets much of their information about sea level rise from the media, rather than by reading scientific papers, so we scientists need to be cautious about the estimates we put out there. This gets back to the “whiplash effect” from Andy Revkin’s NYT article in late July.
September 5th, 2008 at 9:46 pm
Oh, good grief!
Here’s James Hansen’s presentation on the 20th anniversary of his 1988 testimony to Congress:
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TwentyYearsLater_20080623.pdf
“Debate among scientists is only about how much sea level would rise by a given date. In my opinion, if emissions follow a business-as-usual scenario, sea level rise of at least two meters is likely this century.”
The coverage of his 20th anniversary hysterics (e.g. the “high crimes against humanity and nature” nonsense) was extensive. Doesn’t Gavin Schmidt read what his boss writes?
“We stress that no-one (and we mean no-one) has published an informed estimate of more than 2 meters of sea level rise by 2100.”
What a bald-faced lie!
September 5th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
Mark notice that Gavin says an “informed estimate”, maybe he consider that Hansen wasn’t informed.
September 6th, 2008 at 6:59 am
At last year’s Climate Camp in the UK, George Monbiot said that James Hansen had recently predicted a 25-metre sea-level rise this century. Does RealClimate reckon that Monbiot is informed? They link to him on their blog-roll. (Monbiot had misread “Climate change and trace gases”, Hansen et al., 2007, which said – in a very round about way – that a rise of 2 to 5 metres was entirely possible.)
September 6th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
In the mean time, the Dutch parliament was advised by a committee that used SRES A1FI and a very pessimistic Antarctic ice model (Ramsdorf). That yields 2 to 4 meter sea level rise by 2200. Probably extended one century because 2100 only yielded 0.6-1.30 m. Dutch Glaciologist Oerlemans was not consulted.
http://home.casema.nl/errenwijlens/co2/deltacommissie2008.gif
more (in dutch) here:
http://www.volkskrantblog.nl/blog/6752
September 7th, 2008 at 6:30 am
Hello Mr Pielke,
It is not so easy for me to express myself in English. That’s why I don’t post very often on american blogs.
But today my answer to the realclimate post about the new sea level paper was not published by realclimate. I just wanted to explain that in my opinion this thread on real climate has nothing to do with what one might usually call “science”. After the last IPCC report, people posting on blogs in Germany have been treated in a similar way than You on realclimate, just because they repeated what was written in the IPCC report. This even happened to well known journalists in tv shows.
They told us, that the IPCC report was already history an that the new paper by Mr Rahmstorf was telling the truth about sea level rise. I noticed that Mr Hansen even spoke about much more than the 1.5 meters se level rise of Mr Rahmstorf. Mr Rahmstorf himself has a blog in german, where you unfortunately don’t get better answers than on real climate.
http://www.wissenslogs.de/wblogs/blog/klimalounge/
This kind of treating people who want to learn more about climate science makes me a bit angry. I just wanted to say on real climate that people like Mr Pielke, or Mr Erren, still make me believe that science ist not just a joke, especially climate science.
I want to thank You for that. The censorship on real climate makes me feel sick. At least I was never censored on Mr Rahmstorfs climate lounge, but the answers I got there didn’t satisfy me at all.
Best regards
Edouard
September 7th, 2008 at 7:25 am
typo: Ramsdorf should be Rahmstorf
September 7th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Just for the record, copy of a reply submitted at RC:
——————————–
Guy (#122)-
Thanks, the reason for my calling Rahmstorf et al. “spin” was this following statement that they made in their paper:
“Previous projections, as summarized by IPCC, have not exaggerated but may in some respects even have underestimated the change, in particular for sea level.”
This is untrue. The 1990 IPCC certainly made “projections” that have “exaggerated” sea level rise to date (I would use a different phrase that that used by Rahmstorf et al., probably “overstated to date”). To ignore the 1990 IPCC sea level rise projections (even if to explain them away as now irrelevant) when discussing “previous projections” is misleading at best.
Mark (#126)- Stefan is the one who is worried about incomplete models, so your question is best put to him. My work simply compared “best estimates” with observations. All models are of course incomplete.
dhogaza (#127)- You are reading in too much — there is no pejorative intent. The IPCC’s 1990 “best estimates” are the IPCC’s “best estimates” from that time, and thus the basis for comparing with experience. All we can do is see how things have turned out. I am sure that 20 years from now we’ll look back on the AR4 as similarly simplistic. That is how science works.
Comment by Roger Pielke, Jr. — 7 September 2008 @ 12:07 PM
September 7th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
More from Hansen:
“As an example, let us say that ice sheet melting adds 1 centimetre to sea level for the decade 2005 to 2015, and that this doubles each decade until the West Antarctic ice sheet is largely depleted. This would yield a rise in sea level of more than 5 metres by 2095.
Of course, I cannot prove that my choice of a 10-year doubling time is accurate but I’d bet $1000 to a doughnut that it provides a far better estimate of the ice sheet’s contribution to sea level rise than a linear response. In my opinion, if the world warms by 2 °C to 3 °C, such massive sea level rise is inevitable, and a substantial fraction of the rise would occur within a century.”
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19526141.600-huge-sea-level-rises-are-coming–unless-we-act-now.html
September 8th, 2008 at 3:02 am
Roger, Jim Hansen is not only NOT the IPCC, he’s been the one who’s been out on a limb arguing that sea level rises within the century may very well be much higher than summarized the latest IPCC report.
I find it rather odd that now that Pfeffer et al. have looked at the ice dynamics and find that they allow a rise of 2m this century – an increase much larger than those produced by the models reported by the IPCC – that instead of agreeing with Real Climate that the press have spun the story in a way that downplays risks instead of raising concerns and supporting if not vindicating Hansen, you prefer to use Hansen’s warnings to argue with RC that Jim Hansen’s lone message makes the media coverage right.
Are you sure you’re focussing on the real story regarding Pfeffer et al.?
September 8th, 2008 at 7:00 am
Tom-
Pleas re-read my post. The issue I raise with RC is their statement that:
“We stress that no-one (and we mean no-one) has published an informed estimate of more than 2 meters of sea level rise by 2100.”
Now they may be suggesting that Hansen is uninformed, but I kind of doubt it. Hansen has been going around suggesting a rise of up to 25 meters (!!) by 2100. So RC is being extremely misleading.
In this context their blaming the media for not reporting the Pfeffer et al. paper as highly worrisome is just silly.
September 8th, 2008 at 9:26 am
#14, correction: meters should be feet, or 25 should be 5 — sorry, pre-coffee;-)
September 8th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
In other words, Roger, you’re just quibbling.
The Pfeffer paper essentially moves the bounds of possible melting this century significantly upwards from IPCC 4AR towards what Hansen has been saying, but you choose to argue that the press was right to paint the Pfeffer paper as lessening our need to worry about sea-level rises this century (essentially taking the position that Hansen’s loud but informal outlying position was the center)?
September 9th, 2008 at 7:44 am
Tom-
Where did I say anything about “worry”?
September 9th, 2008 at 10:06 am
“In other words, Roger, you’re just quibbling.”
It’s not “quibbling” to point out that Real Climate’s statement:
“We stress that no-one (and we mean no-one) has published an informed estimate of more than 2 meters of sea level rise by 2100″
…is blatantly untrue. James Hansen has repeatedly given public estimates of more than 2 meters of sea level rise by 2100. And James Hansen is Gavin Schmidt’s *boss*! So there’s absolutely no way Gavin Schmidt and the other authors at Real Climate could not know of James Hansen’s position.
Why in the world did they even make that statement? Why not write, “We know of no one besides James Hansen who has published an estimate of more than 2 meters of sea level rise by 2100″?
This is not a rhetorical question. Why do you think Real Climate made that statement, given that Gavin Schmidt works for James Hansen?
Or do you think their statement was accurate?