Roger A. Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado, has a question about media coverage of research linking hurricanes and global warming, and I have a possible answer. Here’s his question, posted today on his blog, Prometheus:
Nature magazine, arguably the leading scientific journal in the world, published a paper this week by two widely-respected scholars — Gabriel Vecchi and Brian Soden — suggesting that global warming may have a minimal effect on hurricanes. Over two days the media — as measured by Google News — published a grand total of 3 news stories on this paper. Now contrast this with a paper published in July in a fairly obscure journal by two other respected scholars — Peter Webster and Greg Holland — suggesting that global warming has a huge effect on hurricanes. That paper resulted in 79 news stories stories over two days.
What accounts for the 26 to 1 ratio in news stories?
There are a variety of reasons that the media tend to pay outsize attention to research developments that support a “hot” conclusion (like the theory that hurricanes have already been intensified by human-caused global warming) and glaze over on research of equivalent quality that does not.
The main one, to my mind, is an institutional eagerness to sift for and amplify what editors here at The Times sometimes call “the front-page thought.” This is only natural, but in coverage of science it can skew what you read toward the more calamitous side of things. It’s usually not agenda-driven, as some conservative commentators charge. It’s just a deeply ingrained habit.
When a batch of climate scientists on all sides of the hurricane-climate question issued a letter warning that the main issue related to hurricanes is coastal vulnerability, not climate change, I wrote about it, but hardly anyone else did. Why? The media, besides craving the front-page thought, also crave conflict. This letter was about agreement. A snooze.
As I’ve said many times, in a couple of book chapters and talks, one danger in this kind of coverage — not accounting for the full range of uncertainty or understanding in dealing with very important environmental questions — is that it ends up providing ammunition to critics charging the media with an alarmist bias. And once the coverage corrects, it results in what I call “whiplash journalism” (coffee causes cancer; coffee helps your sex life…) that could disengage readers entirely from the value of journalism.
This same dynamic has played out in climate coverage of Kilimanjaro’s melting snows, whether the Atlantic Ocean warm circulation is shutting down, whether Greenland is in a one-way meltdown and on and on.
There was another useful analysis of the media-hurricane-climate issue by Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney in Skeptical Inquirer not long ago.
I’ll be writing a print story in the coming months examining this phenomenon in more depth. But I’m happy to get your thoughts here in the meantime.
By the way, you may have noticed that The Times did not cover the Nature paper. I was planning to blog on it, but got caught up in writing a print story (I still do that too!) on the Bali climate talks and, well, it wasn’t front-page news….
Seriously, though, we have covered the unresolved questions about hurricanes and warming carefully (an archive of articles is on our Times Topics page) and, I think, have already effectively conveyed the state of the science. I’m trying to keep our coverage a “no-whiplash zone.”
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