In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the frameworks of the folks who participate in this are far less pliable than those of your readers — that in fact, it is easier to influence the way those readers think than it is to influence many readers of this blog.

I think the polling data shows that Americans are taking global warming more seriously than they have in the past. But I keep hearing the same arguments repeated endlessly by certain writers on this blog. One prominent science writing colleague who read it all yesterday said it gave him a headache, because some participants clearly will not be influenced by anything I or anyone else writes that does not fit into their framework.

Uh oh, here’s another fine mess I’ve gotten myself into…

So, filtered through my own framework, here’s where I think we’re at: We’ve got a significant majority of scientists working in the field saying the evidence clearly shows humans are causing significant warming, and we should be concerned about the future. And a small minority is saying that while warming may indeed be occurring, we cannot reliably attribute it to human activity, and that while the future may bring additional warming, there is no reason now to be terribly concerned.

Also, the work of some of the scientists in the minority is tarnished by politicization. Whereas other scientists are doing strong, credible science that absolutely deserves to be reported (and may at this point be under-reported). Meanwhile, the same can be said of the scientists in the majority — some have become politicized, but most are doing credible work.

But some of the readers of this weblog argue that reporting the credible science, whatever it may show, is not good enough. We have to fit our reporting to their framework by writing that there is no general agreement among the majority about the broad global warming question. Some would even have us say that consensus is never a part of science. Well, If that’s true, I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me why the many dozens of cosmologists and astronomers I’ve interviewed over the years just SEEM to agree that the big bang really happened.

Such a person lives in an air-tight, hurricane-proof structure. You can forget about reaching them with your stories. But I honestly do believe that over time, well-reported and skillfully written stories can have a cummulative impact on many of your readers, because most are probably not true believers of one cause or another.

I would agree that it’s a copout for reporters to simply say (as I myself have said many times) that “It is simply our job to report the news and let the chips fall where they may.” It reflects a mistake that is implicit in a lot of the discussion above, as well – treating the story itself as the unit of measure and analysis, rather than the reader’s resulting knowledge. It’s interesting that we journalists make that mistake, because it contradicts our basic drive to write stories that are not confusing or incomprehensible.

Lab Lemming – I agree that the sort of story you’re describing is one way of approaching the issue. In fact, Broad and his colleagues at the New York Times do a lot of that kind of reporting. (There was a delightful story Tuesday, for example, about packrat middens as a paleoclimate tool.) But it’s only one tool in the kit, and is totally inadequate for addressing the kind of story Broad is writing about here. It’s useful for drilling down to a explain how a single researcher got to where they are, but has the potential to, as a result, be terribly misleading in explaining a broad field where many different researchers are piecing together many different bits of the puzzle. It has, to borrow your phrase, “a high chance of causing confusion or misunderstanding.”

The underlying problem here is that every single reader already has a framework for understanding the subject, and absorbs the information into that framework. My purely anecdotal experience (though it seems to be supported by some actual media studies research, I just don’t know the literature well enough to argue this very empirically) is that the frameworks through which the Raypierre’s and Roger Pielke Sr.’s and Benny Peiser’s Lab Lemmings view the story are so far removed from the framework through which the general reader views that the discussion above, while not completely useless, falls far short of the help journalists need to figure out how to do this right. The discussants above want the story to map to their framework. That’s the wrong goal.

P.S. to LL – the site isn’t members only. Non-subscribers can watch an ad and then read the story for free. It’s less than optimal for the free flow of information, I realize, but it’s my employer’s way of ginning up the revenue to pay me. I like getting paid.

As far as science journalism is concerned, I recently wrote a mini-rant here:
http://lablemminglounge.blogspot.com/2006/11/eye-of-newt-and-blur-of-science.html

In my bombastic opinion, science journalism should show how a scientific approach can and does produce results that are difficult to achieve by other means. As such, an illustration of the how and the why is more important than the what, where, or when.

As far as false balance and misreporting go, by concentrating on the process of science instead of the result, you can show how some ideas survive scrutiny, how some get refuted, and on how approaching a problem from different angles can yield to different working hypotheses that may be easy or hard to reconcile.

One of the best ways to demonstrate the quality of a scientific argument is to observe how frequently and thoroughly its proponents test each step, before proceeding on to the next. Demonstrating the difference between this self critical approach and a laweristic self-promoting cherry pick will allow your readers to discern between good science and bad science in whatever field they find themselves in.

BTW, your second link is to a members only site.

I think you are right about the Boykoff study, and in fact I made a similar point to my science writing class this week. While there may be a consensus within the mainstream climate science community about global warming, there is much less agreement within the political community. So covering the politics of this issue must frequently entail speaking with people who oppose vigourous action on, say, reducing GHG emissions.

Still, I think it’s fair to say that up until a year or so ago, many science stories on climate change were pretty much binary affairs, with one scientists saying “global warming?: YES!” and another scientist (or sometimes a person from the political realm — I saw that a lot) saying “NO!!” That binary approach seems to have faded considerably.

Whether it is being replaced by more sophisticated coverage, in which journalists really dig into the most meaningful questions — the ones about particular climate impacts, what we should do about them, making ourselves less vulnerable to all manner of natural hazards, etc. — is another story. In fact, as I mentioned in my earlier post, we seem to have gone from “global warming: yes or no?” to “global warming and hurricanes?: YES!!,” despite the fact that this is an area of significant scientific debate. And I have yet to see a story point out that even if the answer is “yes,” mitigating global warming may not be our best strategy for reducing damage and suffering. Let alone stories about adapting to climate change, whether human-caused or natural.

Concerning your argument that we journalists “have naive ideas about what readers get out of what we write,” I know that most reporters would say, “So what? It’s not our job to think too much about how our readers receive the news. It is simply our job to report the news and let the chips fall where they may. I would say that’s a cop out. (But of course I would, because I’m a magazine person, and magazine editors are always thinking about how readers are receiving stories.)

The logic of your argument goes like this: If news media are guilty of false balance, and if our stories have an impact on readers, they should think that the jury on global warming is still out. But polls have consistently shown otherwise. So either our stories are having no impact, or there hasn’t been false balance.

I’m actually not a media studies scholar, so I tread on thin ice when I try to address issues like this. But I think news media have a major impact by helping to put climate change on the agenda for public consideration. No matter how the issue is covered, if it is being covered a lot, readers and viewers get the message that this is an important issue they might want to pay attention to. Moreover, I don’t think it’s coincidence that in a Pew poll last August, nearly 70 percent of respondents said the government should take “immediate action” on climate change. Before this summer, people might say they were concerned about global warming, and that it was a real problem, but the concern was a mile wide and an inch deep. This poll suggests that concern has deepend considerably.

As one person pointed out on Realclimate the other day, Al Gore’s movie certainly played a role. But did more than two thirds of adult Americans see Al Gore’s movie? I don’t think so. But many did see the media coverage sparked by the movie (not to mention Katrina last year). How readers responded to individual stories, I don’t know. But with such a large upsurge in coverage, people got the message that it was an issue they really should be concerned about.

Of course the coverage lately has tended to focus on some of the more dire predictions. And there’s nothing like the prospect a climate catastrophe, whether one is in the offing or not, to get readers’ attention.

As for black carbon and methane, do you have a suggested policy approach, other than simply to allow reductions to happen naturally, as driven by existing incentives? Doesn’t Kyoto already address methane, by allowing offsets for investment in methane capture through the CDM? Are you suggesting that black carbon get similar treatment?

And what about albedo and adaptation/development/vulnerability reduction issues – wouldn’t measures specifically related to these be even more difficult to negotiate, as they are even more intrusive on domestic policy prerogatives and more susceptible to problems of implementation/corruption, and to the general unwillingness of Western countries to poor development money into the third world? (Rather, it seems clear that we prefer to pour money down holes that benefit particular special interests groups in our own countries, such as expensive wars abroad.)

Kyoto and the UNFCCC are useful infrastructure and should not be abandoned. Rather, we should be considering how to maximize the efficacy of this infrastructure.

Thanks for a provocative post that has triggered quite a useful discussion.

There are a number of points worth making. First, I’d be very skeptical of the Boykoff and Boykoff analysis if I were you. I’ve written about this in more detail elsewhere (http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/?p=1201), but in brief the Boykoffs seem to have conflated the science with the policy response. As such, they appear to have scored stories as exhibiting “false balance” when they quote both sides of the political/policy debate. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t/isn’t a false balance problem in journalists’ description of the science, but it does suggest their methodology is almost certain to overstate its prevalance.

Second, and more importantly, there’s an unexamined premise that I’d love to hear you and the other academics in this discussion address: what is the actual effect of journalism of the type we’re discussing here on the public’s understanding and on the political/policy discussions and outcomes? If the Boykoff hypothesis is correct, and if media coverage matters, then you ought to be able to detect the results in polling data. But this seems not to be the case. The public, as Roger Jr. has ably argued here in the past, is quite comfortable with the scientific consensus on climate change. So whatever “false balance” there is in news media coverage doesn’t seem to be fooling the readers. They’re obviously wise to our tricks.

The problem is that everyone involved in this discussion – Raypierre over at RealClimate, Roger Sr. above, you – all have some idea of what it is journalists *ought* to be doing (and what the gifted and intelligent Bill Broad ought to have done), but the discussion isn’t premised on any actual evidence about what happens in the minds of the actual readers consuming this. In the absence of any such evidence, all the discussants are mapping their own views of the debate onto Broad’s piece, which becomes something of a Rorschach test.

I had a particularly interesting experience recently in this regard involving a story of my own. (http://www.abqjournal.com/news/state/478196nm07-23-06.htm)

It was based on a climate science meeting that featured Roger Sr. and an unusually large proportion of those out on the fringes of the scientific mainstream on these issues. It quoted these scientists at some length, while also repeatedly explaining where the mainstream consensus lies and showing how they fit into the normal sort of scientific discourse that goes on in pretty much any field between the mainstream and outliers. I was criticized by both sides of those tangled up in the “yes/no” debate: by supporters of climate change action for sowing doubt by quoting skeptics, and by political skeptics for my repeated invocation of the consensus as a framinng device.

The experience suggested to me that we journalists (well, me, anyway, though the way this discussion comes up over and over again suggests the viewpoint is far more widespread) have some pretty naive ideas about what readers get out of what we write. And before we go much further in the discussion of what journalists ought to be doing, we need a much clearer idea of what readers are actually getting out of what we write.

“GHG emissions are the biggest and most tractable aspect of AGW,…”

Roger Pielke Jr. questioned whether CO2 represented more than 50% of the global warming forcing. I second his questioning in that regard.

But I also question whether CO2 is the most “tractable” aspect of AGW. I think the proper word for CO2 is the most INtractable.

Take black carbon emissions: black carbon may be more significant in global warming than the IPCC TAR has represented, as RP Sr. pointed out. But reducing black carbon emissions are a far more tractable measure than reducing CO2 emissions. Major sources of black carbon include: diesel engines, very poorly controlled coke ovens in China, and poorly controlled cooking/heating ovens in China, India, and the rest of the developing world.

These emissions represent direct and unquestionable human health problems. The State of California has estimated that fully 70 percent of the air pollution cancer risk in that state comes from particulate from diesel engines:

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_vehicles/big_rig_cleanup/california-diesel-risk-reduction-plan.html

Likewise, poorly controlled coke ovens in China are a human health nightmare. A poorly controlled coke oven is essentially like smoking tens or even hundreds of millions of “coke cigarettes” continuously.

Because black carbon emissions are a direct and unquestionable threat to human health, they are a much more tractable target for reductions. This can be seen by the essentially worldwide movement to reduce emissions from diesel vehicles.

In one estimate (which I think is “conservative,” in that it likely underestimates the black carbon emission reductions that will actually occur), emissions of black carbon are projected to decrease from 8.0 Tg in 1996 to 5.3–7.3 Tg by 2030 and to 4.3–6.1 Tg by 2050.

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2004/2004JD004902.shtml

So black carbon emissions are projected to decrease significantly from 1996 to 2030 and 2050. In contrast, virtually everyone agrees that carbon dioxide emissions will increase from 1996 to 2030 and 2050.

And that is *without* any special effort to reduce black carbon emissions in order to reduce AGW.

Similarly, look at methane emissions: methane is the second-most important GHG, next to CO2. But capturing and burning methane has a potentially HUGE economic benefit, whereas capturing and sequestering CO2 has only a cost.

Not only will methane emissions likely decrease from 1996 to 2030 and 2050, it is quite possible (I’d put the probability at about 50 percent) that even *atmospheric concentrations* of methane will go down from 1996 to 2030 and 2050.

So dealing with black carbon and methane are far more “tractable” than CO2.

Thanks for your response. I had previously seen your slides, and was aware that there are many aspects to AGW other than CO2 emissions. I understand that your perspective is that the media is doing a poor job of explaining the overall picture – perhaps that is so, but my question as to international policy focus remains.

Isn’t it much easier for the international community, and especially the West, to focus on GHG emission reductions and sequestration than it is to reach international agreements that more intrusively address issues such as land use, albedo, tropospheric ozone, black carbon and aerosols, much less the more complex issues of eliminating vulnerability of third world poor to climate change/weather through assisting with development and resolving the institutional failure problems that fuels environmentally destructive practices and hinder development?

Which aspects of AGW and climate vulnerability are most significant and which are most easily addressed through international action, and suffer least from free rider issues?

With respect to your comment,

“GHG emissions are the biggest and most tractable aspect of AGW, and for that reason deserves greater journalistic coverage”,

the media focus has mostly been on carbon dioxide. However, even a back of the envelope calculation shows that carbon dioxide does not cause the majority of the global warming forcing; e.g. see http://blue.atmos.colostate.edu/presentations/PPT-69.pdf

Shouldn’t the media be presenting this perspective?

In terms of what can be done with respect to the human forcing of the climate system, I have written on this topic; e.g. see
http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/2006/04/20/a-win-win-solution-to-environmental-problems/.

Indeed, these actions should be taken regardless if global warming or cooling occurs, as I discuss at
http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/2006/07/27/what-if-global-cooling-ocurrs/

It is clear to many of us in the climate community that the media has been very myopic in its reporting of the human forcing of the climate system.

Tom Yulsman asks me, “Why does the issue of climate change in particular, and the fact that some people are more concerned about it than they are about other issues, bug you so very much?”

Steve Gaalema responds, “I’m not Mark, but my concern is the idea of forcing 1% of world production to be spent on reducing GHG emissions without seriously considering cost/benefit comparisons with other issues.”

My concern is even more fundamental and strong than Steve’s.

To start with, I’m an environmental engineer. Environmental analyses are what I do for a living. So when I see environmental analyses, I want them to be right. But even if they aren’t right, I absolutely demand that they be *honest.*

The IPCC’s analyses of climate change have been not merely incompetent (which would be bad enough); they’ve been fundamentally dishonest. No more blatant example of the IPCC’s dishonesty can be found in their “projection” of warming of 1.4 to 5.8 degrees Celsius from 1990 to 2100.

To start with, they explicitly deny that their “projections” are “predictions or forecasts”…so their projections are absolutely not falsifiable. Falsifiability is absolutely necessary (but not sufficient) for something to be science.

Then, they added the most extreme scenarios (producing the highest temperature projections) AFTER peer review.

The net effect of their blatant dishonesty is that most people think the projected warming of “1.4 to 5.8 deg C” means that the warming will be somewhere towards the middle of that range (i.e. 3.6 deg C). The reality is that there is approximately a 50 percent chance that the warming from 1990 to 2100 will be BELOW the 1.4 deg C MINIMUM given by the IPCC. (How do I know that? Well, the short answer is because I’ve analyzed it myself, and that’s what I do for a living. I know it because it’s my business to know it.)

The Stern Review’s blatant dishonesty is merely flies on the pile of…um, let’s say garbage…already produced by the IPCC.

THAT’S what bugs me so very much. People (i.e., the general public, politicians, and even scientists who do don’t know much about the subject) think global warming will be worse than it will be because the IPCC (and the “climate change community” in general) are lying.

Another thing that bugs me, Tom, is that journalists have by an large not even reported on this blatant fraud, that’s right before their eyes.

What bugs me even more is that “scientific” journals like Nature and Science have ALSO not reported the fraud. That makes me sick (even literally). It is an absolute disgrace that the scientific community has failed to police its own.

I could go on (and on)…but that’s all I have time for right now.

Mark

P.S. Tom, if you have any interest at all in reporting on the IPCC’s fraud, I’d be happy to help you do so. It is literally the environmental science story of the century (so far).