Tag Archives: climategate

Salvaging Science Journalism

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Yesterday, I felt depressed about the state of the world – as if we were walking blindly into heavy traffic without bothering to stop or even open our eyes. I think it was this Globe and Mail editorial that put me over the edge. It claimed that the original 2035 Himalayan glacier claim was “reported around the world“, that Rajendra Pachauri “shrugged it off“, and that the 40% Amazon reduction claim was “a mess” (just like Leake, this article doesn’t mention that the statistic itself was correct, it was just cited incorrectly).

And that’s just in the first few paragraphs. I could go on and on about the inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims, especially once it gets going on ClimateGate. If the author had bothered to read the primary sources for the Amazon claim, to read the supposedly-nefarious emails in full context (as well as the results of the first inquiry), or to read the IPCC’s actual response to the Himalayan glacier screw-up, her proclamation of “scientific scandals” would have fallen apart.

We see this all the time, everywhere, and it’s doubtlessly gotten worse in the past few months. The line of attack has switched from the science to the scientists. It’s just as unsubstantiated as the claim that global warming stopped in 1998, but that doesn’t matter. Science journalism, as it pertains to climate change, doesn’t seem to care about the facts any more. Fox News is one thing, but really – the Globe and Mail?

So what do we do to fix it? I can’t just sit around anymore and wait for it to pass. Many of us reading this blog have largely given up on the mass media as a source for climate change information, passing it off as a lost cause. But most of the public doesn’t know that it’s a lost cause. I think fixing it is better than ignoring it.

I have a few preliminary ideas that I’d like to open up for discussion:

1) Good old letter writing campaigns. Once a week, say, we could choose an article that’s particularly devoid of accuracy and citations, but written by a generally responsible journalist (eg not Glenn Beck). We could each write a unique letter to the author/the paper/the editor of the paper expressing the problems with the article. We can rant a bit about the media’s responsibility to provide people with accurate journalism.

2) Lobby for a citation policy. I got some great responses from my last post about the importance of a comment policy to promote better discussion that doesn’t turn into a food fight. What if we pushed to enact a similar policy in mainstream media outlets? The policy would be different for each outlet, obviously, but the basic rule would be that all articles/letters to the editor that dealt with science had to include peer-reviewed citations when appropriate. Let’s stop treating science like opinion, and start getting people to back up their arguments before we give them space.

3) Volunteer ourselves as research tools. By the time most of us read articles about climate change in the mainstream media, we’ll have heard about the particular issue in question for several days, and we’ll be able to point to two or three credible sources pertaining to it. We could help journalists and newspapers do their research more quickly and accurately.

4) Become a part of the mass media. I know a lot of great science journalists, but none of them are regulars in the mainstream media. I know Michael Tobis, and Tim Lambert, and Coby Beck, and James Hrynyshyn. (Tamino and the RC folks are great too, but geared toward a more technical audience.) These guys back up every statement they make, provide citations, correct their mistakes, and follow the “means justify the ends” approach. As part of our outreach for accurate journalism, why don’t some of us try to get columns in the mainstream media outlets?

Let me know what you think.

DeSmogBlog on the Road

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Richard Littlemore, a regular writer for DeSmogBlog and contributor to the excellent book Climate Cover-Up, is touring across the Prairies – and I was able to attend one of his presentations!

If you have a chance to hear anyone from DeSmogBlog speak – I’m told that Jim Hoggan has a very similar presentation – you should definitely go. The presentation was very well put together, had some great opportunities for audience involvement (including a “pop quiz” on quotes from surprising people) and addressed many of the current attempts to discredit scientists. Richard was a great communicator, very relaxed and honest, who answered all of our questions and made all of us laugh.

If you’ve read Climate Cover-Up and follow DeSmogBlog, however, don’t expect anything new. The content of the presentation was a mix of the main narratives from Climate Cover-Up (like TASSC, ICE, and Frank Luntz) and recent significant posts on DeSmogBlog. That’s to be expected, though, for a public presentation.

During the question period, someone asked Richard how he thought we should address climate change politically. He described himself as a “die-hard capitalist” and proceeded to give the best quote of the night, which was, “If you don’t find a way for people to make money saving the world, the world’s not going to get saved.” I totally agreed with him, and it helped me better understand my own political leanings. I’ll save that for an upcoming post before I get too far off topic.

I chatted briefly with Richard after the presentation, which was nice. He apologized, on behalf of his generation, for leaving this massive problem to my generation. I really didn’t know what to say to that.

Mistakes

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I have watched with interest the coverage of the IPCC’s screw-up over the Himalayan glaciers.

“Screw-up” is really the best way to describe it. It really shouldn’t have happened. WG2 cited a secondary source that cited something else that cited something else that turned out to be an erroneous New Scientist article. The reviewers of WG2 did realize that something was wrong with the citation, but the editor didn’t bother to take the statement out while they investigated it, and then their deadline passed. Long story short, the Himalayan glaciers are definitely not going to disappear by 2035.

However, what the mainstream media considers “the IPCC report” is generally only WG1, and more specifically the WG1 Summary for Policymakers. This Himalayan glacier claim was in the lower-profile WG2, and it didn’t even make it into any of the WG2 summaries. If it had, the chances of it slipping through would have decreased dramatically. As it was, the mistake was present in one paragraph of the 938-page WG2 which is one of three sections of the fourth edition of the IPCC report. Not very high-profile, as these things go.

It’s strange, though, to watch the media coverage of this screw-up. It ended up in my BBC News feed, and according to one of my teachers, in the Globe and Mail as well as the local newspaper I just gave up on. That’s fine, as I didn’t see the kind of blatant misquotes and jumps in logic as during the CRU reporting. However, it makes me wonder – why weren’t all the other IPCC mistakes reported?

The IPCC tries to be centrist, and to report the median opinion of the climate science community. The more extreme claims on either end of the spectrum are given minimal attention. Therefore, the IPCC is bound to make some mistakes. However, with the exception of this screw-up, virtually all the mistakes have been on the side of “oops, it’s going to be worse than we thought”.

Take the Copenhagen Diagnosis, a 2009 report written by a dozen or so top climate scientists around the world. Its purpose was to update policymakers, in time for Copenhagen, on what had been learned since the AR4. Here are the major discrepancies they found:

  • From 2007-2009, there was about 40% less Arctic summer sea ice than the IPCC predicted, far exceeding its worst-case scenarios.
  • Recent global average sea-level rise is about 80% more than the IPCC predicted.
  • By 2100, global sea level is expected to rise at least twice as much as the IPCC predicted.
  • Global CO2 emissions are around the highest scenarios considered by the IPCC.

Hmmm, these areas of discrepancy – emissions, Arctic ice, sea level rise – are a lot higher-profile than one paragraph about the Himalayan glaciers in WG2. But I don’t remember reading about the Copenhagen Diagnosis anywhere other than the climate science blogs I follow. None of the mainstream media outlets I follow covered it. Did anyone else see it somewhere?

I encourage the reporting of scientific mistakes, as long as the journalism is accurate. Doesn’t it seem strange, though, that the findings of the Copenhagen Diagnosis went virtually unnoticed – while the Himalayan glacier screw-up was covered in every major newspaper in the world? Who is choosing to frame the IPCC as alarmist – rather than its true centrist position – and why?

On Media

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I have given up on my local newspaper.

It’s been a long time coming. I’m tired of letters to the editor that talk about how carbon dioxide is good for the environment because it makes plants grow. I’m tired of editorials that conclude with, “So-and-so is a senior fellow at (insert name of suspiciously-funded conservative lobby group here).” I’m tired of the skeptical editor who gets an entire page on Saturdays and one or two columns during the week, often to talk about “Al Gore’s eco-horror film” and “scientists who have exaggerated data and silenced critics”. And I’m tired of the paper’s notion that any story even remotely related to global warming has to include a picture of a polar bear. If there’s one thing that the public needs to know about climate change, it’s that it’s not just a problem for the polar bears.

I’ve been reading my local newspaper every day for years, but now I have decided two things. Firstly, this isn’t a paper that I want to support. But more importantly, when the paper is making such a muddle out of their climate change reporting, it’s not a source that I trust to inform me accurately on other issues.

In terms of alternatives, I’ve subscribed to RSS feeds from the CBC for national and world politics, and the BBC for science and technology. I’ll read the Globe and Mail when I can get my hands on it, as it’s a very good paper that does a good job (at least comparatively) of climate change reporting.

I can always use my local paper, or any paper in the world for that matter (yay Internet) as a case study for how the media reports climate change. However, I’d like to rely on something else for my personal knowledge about the world. And it’s very nice not to feel that sense of doom as I turn to the editorial page.

Michael Tobis Takes Part 3

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I was going to write a Science and Communication, Part 3 post that examined what ClimateGate actually tells us vs what the popular press says about it, and why this chasm between the two exists.

Then Michael Tobis wrote a brilliant post discussing that very topic:

What Was Actually Revealed

  • a rehash of a well-known controversy about how to present tree-ring data
  • frustration about too much attention to substandard scientific papers slipped into the literature by marginally qualified people with nonscientific agendas, and discussions about how to handle that
  • frustration about opposition by filibuster via freedom of information requests
  • a single suggestion about “deleting emails”, without any context, which plausibly does not refer to deleting emails from a server (scientists are probably aware that end users cannot really do this) but rather to deleting them from a response to one of many FOIA requests
  • some sloppy code and a pretty sad but perfectly typical lack of understanding of the advantages of dynamic programming languages
  • a couple of fudge factors explicitly labeled as such probably used in testing, commented out
  • some older data for which CRU is not the originator or primary repository is not in any known dataset at CRU
  • about 985 emails and 1995 other files of no apparent interest to anyone

In other words, (withe the possible exception of the email deletion incident, which I imagine the lawyers are fretting about) the only things remotely unusual here are a direct consequence of the existence of a politically rather than scientifically motivated opposition.

Read the whole post here.

A ClimateGate Video

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Potholer54 just posted a video investigating whether or not the CRU emails actually show faked data/deliberate manipulation/a socialist conspiracy. Enjoy.

If you’re interested in an explanation of all the papers and theories the CRU emails are discussing, RealClimate does a great job.

I hear Peter Sinclair is also working on a CRU video – I’ll embed it here as soon as it’s posted.