Media Mania for a ‘Front-Page Thought’ on Climate

Hurricane(Credit: NASA)

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.”

Comments are no longer being accepted.

See Andrew Cline’s list of structural biases in journalism – the “calamity” bias gets replaced by the “it’s not so bad” bias when things really are bad. Perhaps this partially explains why we’re not seeing more front-page coverage of climate change.

A Q on effectively “talking back” to a news story – suppose a really awful article gets published, that elides critical distinctions and facts, and has the smell of something crafted by the robotic cockroach contingent – what is the most effective way to engage with it? With op-ed columns I’ve tried a few times to ask the columnist questions, but never got a response; would (my) emailing the author of a news article with questions about said article yield the same stonewall? If so (which seems likely; the Qs would be inconvenient, and I am but a lowly, easily-ignored reader) could we perhaps employ you, Mr. Revkin, as our messenger?
(if so – thank you, a million times thank you!)

Roger A. Pielke Jr. — Where have you been all my life?

Letter to the World from the Exxon/Haliburton Administration

To the people of the world, we must apologize for our greedy actions in allowing the status quo to continue. You see, back in the beginning of the 20th Century as the industrialists were beginning to make millions of dollars off of the labor of the working class, they actually had no idea of the problems they were creating for the climate. It was truly an honest mistake, and we will give them that.

Well, now, at this time in history, with the looming problems 9 billion in population by 2050, we don’t feel any compulsion to change our money grubbing ways. We have been trying to think of ways to reduce the human population for decades, but we now see that it is quite simple. We just sit back and let water shortages occur (which will be the first crisis) and then droughts will diminish the food production so that millions will die and most likely begin fighting for resources amongst themselves and reducing the population to levels that we (the super rich) may have a chance to survive against. We get the reduction of population without firing a single shot. It is a gift from heaven for us.

We certainly are not going to spend a dime on trying to slow the climate change that is ahead of the world. Rather, we look forward to it. We should be able to survive with our gigantic bank accounts and if you don’t have one, we feel sorry for you.

We have made soooo much money that even if the dollar collapses, we will still be millionaires on the world market, and we don’t have much to worry about.

Yea, the climate may get a bit nasty for a century or two, but that is something that we can live with as we have luxurious homes all around the world and private jets to get us to where it is livable.

And don’t be too harsh on your Congresspeople as they are all in need of our campaign contributions to stay in office, and they are excellent liars and obfuscators or we wouldn’t have given them the money.

************

That’s the mindset we are up against, and it leads to cannibalism boys and girls…..and your boys and girls, and their boys and girls. It has happened many times in the past and they are going to allow it to happen again because they feel that is the most economical solution.

Andy,

Here’s a comment I sent to Roger as someone who wrote one of the articles.

Let’s start with the fact that the lede was buried in the paper. The news here is that natural variability within certain hurricane basins appears to be much more influential on hurricane activity than global warming. But the way the paper is written the scientists didn’t seem to want to emphasize this too much, perhaps because they didn’t want to be labeled as skeptics. But their findings, if potential intensity is a valid marker for hurricane activity is any measure, are quite clear: hurricane activity isnt going to change much even with 3C warming in the oceans. Only a careful reading of the paper revealed this, however, and Nature’s news release wasn’t very helpful. At first glace the paper was quite confusing. (At least to the lay reader).

I certainly can’t tell whether the paper constitutes a smoking gun. (I asked Kerry Emanuel for his thoughts, and he graciously replied, but his answer was too technical for inclusion in my article, and I didn’t fully understand it). But the new work did seem a lot more scientifically rigorous than most previous arguments against a link between global warming and hurricanes; which simply state we don’t know enough about past hurricane activity to determine whether modern hurricane activity is unprecedented. This went well beyond the-hurricane-record-sucks-so-we-can’t-draw-any-conclusions line of reasoning.

Finally, I thought it would be interesting to see if climate skeptics endorsed the research following my article. For to do so would require embracing climate modeling, upon which the paper is based.

Here’s the story I wrote:

//www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/nation/5374278.html

Eric

Oh no, it can’t be a big deal that some animal will burn up a billion years of fossil carbon deposits in 300 years. No worries. Case closed. Go home.

Daniel Bell, wisereath.org/user/danielbell December 14, 2007 · 2:18 pm

I’m going to make a somewhat outlandish proposal here: that we listen to common sense.

Global warming will increase the surface temperature of the oceans. Warmer waters fuel the strength of hurricanes. So common sense tells us that if we don’t want harsher hurricanes we shouldn’t heat up the oceans.

Ahh, but its never that simply and I suppose it shouldn’t be. I would surely hope we put more rigorous thoughts into our collective actions. But, given how pathetic our response has been to scientific consensus on global warming, I’m not holding out hope.

Slightly off topic, I once argued using this common sense approach to try to spoon feed some critical thought to deniers. We put out tons of C02. Temperature has followed C02 directly for 650 thousand years. Therefore the C02 we put out is warming our planet. Interestingly, the response from my colleagues was that this would insult the intelligence of deniers by making them sound stupid. Maybe it should, was my response.

Its possible that there would be an upper limit on hurricane intensity. From my reading it seemed possible that some hurricanes would be dampened and some would be intensified worldwide, with a similar average. I wouldn’t want to trade 10 normal hurricanes for 5 babies and 5 giants. But I understand that the authors here were arguing towards and effective upper limit on hurricane strength.

But, if global warming solves this hurricane problem for us, then we can sit back and be happy with our increased floods, droughts, wildfires, and famine.

ohgreen.com

Does a temperature like 41 degrees in Murmansk, Russia, warrant any attention these days or has it become passé?

> “Here’s a comment I sent to Roger as someone who wrote one of the articles. …

I just want to say thanks to Eric Berger for coming over here and weighing in.
(nice blog too – this post (& comments) discusses the hurricane story)

Steve,

Please consider adding some new material into your random thoughts generator. I think we’re encountering a loop.

Well, it is what is, this along with evidence “proving” global warming or Al Gore’s unproven film point out the reason people are skeptical or hostile to global warming policies. In defense of those who believe in global warming the media does have a lemming complex/storyline they often follow. Prior to 9/11 it was the “Summer of the Shark”, although later studies showed the amount of attacks had actualy decreased that summer. Using Katrina as the basis for social transformation, and pretending the benefit of the change outweighs the possible danger of false connection was always questionable. If this report is true, should Al Gore return his various awards, or does the social justice aspect repair the falsehoods he may have preached?

I thought the NY Times still had some invest9gative reporters left. Pielke is a libertarian at best and he has his own political interests at heart. Stop listening to these doubters, they are only there to create doubt for us so the industries can keep on doing hat they are doing.

//www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Roger_Pielke_Jr.

He wants to change the name of the game in Washington from “Energy policy” to “Climate Policy”. And he says that any energy policy now will have little effect! That takes the pressure of the oil companies, yes?

see //epw.senate.gov/107th/Pielke_031302.htm

But anyway, the Nature article does not say that global warming is not effecting hurricane strength. But it does say; “Natural climate variations, which tend to involve localized changes in sea surface temperature, may have a larger effect on hurricane activity than the more uniform patterns of global warming…”

BOTH HAVE AN EFFECT.

Hurricanes are related with climate change. This is because the sea temperature becomes higher causing hurricanes. Typhoon is one kind of Hurricane, Generally, Typhoon come to Japan on autum over long long time, but recently years Typhoon come to Japan even at spring. If it is not related with climate change, how can you explain this phonamena? Recently hurricanes become stronger and stronger and even at Dec comes, if it is not related climate change, how can you explain it? At all the words “climate change” mean “climate” is changing, hurricanes is cliamte phonamena, it’s pattens are changed not like before, This mean “change”.

Daniel Bell, wisereath.org/user/danielbell December 14, 2007 · 6:22 pm

If the link above for Times Topics: Hurricanes and Tropical Storms doesn’t work then try this:

//topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/hurricanes_and_tropical_storms/index.html

Christopher J. Schuberth December 14, 2007 · 9:07 pm

Steve Bolger (#5) herein, as well as in other blogs elsewhere in this series, keeps referencing “. . . that some animal will burn up a billion years of fossil carbon deposits in 300 years.” I’m really not sure what is said with these words since the fossil carbon deposits (coal, I guess) did not require a billion years to form (or would take a billion years to burn up). I mean, Planet Earth is only about 4,5 billion years old, unless if one is a Young Earther advocating a 6000-year-old Earth). The deposits formed in about 30 – 50 million years or so. And referencing the number “300 years,” I can say that these deposits did, indeed, form late in the Pennsylvanian Period, not 300 years ago, but 300 million years ago. So, perhaps, there are some displaced and misplaced numbers in this numerical referencing.
Alternatively, at the present rate of coal consumption, U.S. reserves are about 300 – 400 years. In that regard, there is no question that the U.S. is the “mother lode” of global coal, for good or for bad.

But since we’re talking about carbon forming late in the Carboniferous Period (good choice of a technical word, isn’t it?), it should be mentioned that proxy data suggests that average global temperatures in the Early Carboniferous were about 68 deg. F. (compared to about 59 deg. F. today) and CO2 levels at about 1500 ppm (compared to about 380 ppm today). By later in the Carboniferous, CO2 levels had declined to about 350 ppm, a little less than present CO2 concentrations. In the last 600 million years, since the start of the Cambrian Period, only the Carboniferous Period and our present Quaternary P{eriod have seen CO2 levels less than 400 ppm. Interestingly, only during the Late Cambrian/Early Ordovician and Late Carboniferous were global temperatures as LOW as they are today . . . and with atmospheric CO2 concentrations in the Cambrian-Ordovician as high as 4400 ppm. These also were times of drastic Icehouse conditions, with two major continent-wide ice ages, the Carboniferous Ice Age and the Cambrian Ice Age. Clearly, (then again perhaps not clearly) other factors beside atmosphere carbon influence Earth temperatures, other factors that are instrumental in bringing about Icehouse conditions at one time followed by Greenhouse conditions at other times.

In all the wordage herein in all these blogs, from the extinction of species and the threat of extinction to the profound changes in Earth’s climate regimes, there is a systemic failure to accept that the physical and chemical processes that govern such changes are calibrated on Deep Time and not Human Time, and that our sojourn on this Planet cannot be considered more than a nanosecond in the overall schema.

Christopher J. Schuberth

I had two interesting experiences this week with being quoted in reaction to certain AGU discussions. In both cases I provided a brief analysis of the issue that expanded the regional scope and highlighted some key comments the journalist had missed. At the end of both, I noted as a PS, that either the journalist had managed to exaggerate the impact of an aspect of a talk. Whether the researcher had also exaggerated I cannot say, as I was not prsent. The point is that the only thing quoted was my minor aside at the end warning about overblowing an issue. Clearly the journalist or editor was interested not as much in clarifying the main message, as in finding a bit of controversy. I did manage to get one of quotes altered a bit to be more balanced.

to 11,
attack the messanger, great tactic. On this very blog we had a member of the intrergovernmental panel say the connections between ghg and huricanes is unproven. Is he a doubter to?

Yes, 300 years is the blink of the geological eye.
And with China and India racing to catch up with the American burn rate, the burn rate is leaping by an order of magnitude, and the annual rise of CO2 concentration in air to rise from 2 ppm to 20 ppm.

You can escape energy indenture with solar energy. I think that’s the real rub for the drivers of the present economic ratrace. Your dependence on them.

I agree with your assessment, Andy, about the ‘front page thought’, among other factors within journalism driving coverage. Beyond considering how the features of the story themselves get picked up – things such as sexiness, drama, levels of (personalized) conflict, etc. – the timing of each of these published articles is certainly a relevant piece.

These science/environment stories compete for attention with stories not just in science but across other political and social issues: the Holland/Webster study came out at comparatively less crowded time for climate issues than the Vecchi/Soden study. Irrespective of the valid comments about what characteristics of stories (sub)optimally become news, Pielke’s count surely is influenced by the fact that many are focused on the UN climate talks in Bali and at AGU in SF.

That is not offering an excuse of course, as the GRL Artic ice melt study-come-big story surely captured attention and offered negotiating pressure in Bali, but helps to explain this disparity pointed out by Pielke. So these patterns of coverage/what might get picked up are shaped by internal (story characteristics) as well as external (other things happening) factors.

Surely, ‘other things happening’ is not the only external factor, and therein lies much debate around (the strength/presence of) other external factors on many scales, from political economics to ideology and so on…

Hi Max!

I’m not sure I fully buy the “other things happening” explanation. If Holland/Webster had been released this past week, it surely would have received more than 3 media mentions, wouldn’t it?

Political context matters a great deal, of course, and the Bali backdrop last week is important to consider. But are you suggesting a political bias in the media? Why would “the media” (whatever that is) favor stories that, as you say, “offer negotiating pressure” in Bali?

On your first point, by ‘fully’ i suspect you’d concede that it is a contributing factor yet it’s not a complete explanation. Is that true? As for me, I don’t mean to ‘fully’ explain the disparity through ‘other things happening’, as I mentioned before. Andy’s point about the ‘front page thought’, as well as other things, play in here. I suspect with those aggregate factors, it might receive more than three mentions, but that doesn’t necessarily point to ‘political bias’ (your second question) if you mean ideology, though that depends on your def there too. Its my view that definitive answers regarding allegations of ideological bias here or there in various journalists/editors/organization are unattainable and somewhat distracting at times.

So I am not suggesting ‘political bias’ with my prior comment, but rather ruling in how the politicized ‘climate’ matters. Mass media are as varied as the community of scientists you’ve written about in your recent book. I’d mirror your argument by saying that the ‘pure journalist’ is a fictitious one…politics, social context, space, time etc all matter. Similarly, across this heterogeneuous group, there could be mass media actors characterized as ‘issue advocates’ and ‘honest brokers’ of information. Would you agree?

On your third point, I think you just misunderstood what i wrote above. I did not mean to imply intent by favoring anything, but once journalists/editors put stories into the public arena, they’re subject to multiple uses (e.g. negotiating pressure) and interpretations beyond their control…

Thanks for inspiring a productive discussion. signing off…

I really don’t understand what kind of point Roger Pielke Jr. was trying to make, but it appears to be a subtle attempt to slander coverage of climate change. This is a pretty common theme on his blog.

It doesn’t take a genius of journalism to understand that when Nature releases a study on climate change during international talks in Bali, that most of the reporting, and most of the reporters will be…in Bali!

Is that really so hard to understand?

Hi Max-

Yes, I agree with these points. And I do think that the framework that I present in The Honest Broker can be applied to the media as well, since, like scientists in policy/politics, journalists are also trying to bring information to the attention to decision makers. I think there are about as many “pure journalists” as there are “pure scientists”;-) I have to give some more thought to this but it seems that the “balance as bias” argument is asking journalists to move away from the “honest broker” who reflects the range of views to become “issue advocates” who choose one view over another. Of course these categories are ideal types, but as I argue in the book, reflective in some ways of how we make decisions about information.

I’ll post up a summary of comments I’ve received on our blog soon, but I have heard back thoughtful comments from about a dozen reporters and scholars who study the media, and there are many thoughtful explanations for why we see the coverage that we do on the Vecchi/Soden paper specifically, and climate change more generally (and some responses broader than that). What is interesting to me is that these explanations are not all consistent with one another, which suggests to me that there might be some interesting research to do here.

As I started this conversation off, I believe that “the media” has overall done a nice job covering the climate issue over 15 years. And by that, I mean that the media has done a nice job reflecting to its consumers the scientific and political dimensions of the issue as it has evolved. Is this changing? I don’t know yet, but a number of people who responded to me think that it has.

I’ll post up more soon on our blog . . . Thanks!

26 to 1 may approximate the ratio of advertising agency VP’s volunteering their expensive services to promote UNEP, and hence their own services, in media their cool customers patronize to the relative handful of dunderheads being paid to write copy that plays to The Base.

As some, the Creative Department at Porter Novelli, for example, have been putting a credible face on climate models for 21 years or more, the scientific input may be secondary, for as was remarked even earlier, with the advent of television, advertising has become more important than products.

People would be less hostile to RP Jr. if he spent less time being disingenuous. Usually I just grit my teeth, but in this case I’ll jump in.

He conveniently skipped over a few pretty obvious points since they conflict with his thesis:

1) There has been a raft of hurricane papers since the August/September 2005 “tipping point” (Katrina juxtaposed with the Emanuel and Webster, Holland et al papers). This will tend to reduce attention per paper, *except* that follow-on papers by the principals involved in those seminal papers will tend to get more media coverage.

2) Vecchi and Soden are both younger and relatively new to the hurricane field. Roger is very well aware that they lack the scientific firepower of senior scientists like Webster (Rossby Medal) and Holland (head of the NCAR Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Division).

3) When a new paper appears by authors without a long track record in the field about which they write, what should a science reporter do by way of deciding how important the results are? Well, as Eric described above, call up the appropriate leading scientists in the field and see what they think. In this case, apparently those leading scientists were not willing to say that they thought the paper was definitive in any way and one (Emanuel) even said that the the paper was wrong (in its main conclusion, anyway). Given that, was it appropriate to raise the profile of this particular hurricane paper relative to the many others published over the last couple of years? No.

4) A case in point on recent hurricane science coverage is this important paper published in June in, you guessed it, Nature. I think it’s a fair characterizarion that the field considers this paper to be much more significant than the Soden/Vecchi one (and in addition the results are in conflict). Coverage? Not so much, and it wasn’t a busy week.

5) There’s nothing less prestigious about the journal where the Holland/Webster paper appeared (Proceedings of the Royal Society A). Getting published in Nature isn’t in and of itself a reason to think that a paper is scientifically superior to one published elsewhere.

Have to commend Steve Bloom for his analysis. However, he missed one point. If Roger Pielke Jr. was really interested in understanding science communication, instead of trying to slander by innuendo, he would have posed a more intelligent query.

It is well-known within publishing that editors at journals often hold off publishing papers until they know they can get a nice media hit. Media storms raise the profile of journals. Personally, I think this practice is ethically questionable, but it happens.

In this instance, the intelligent question to ask is, “Why did the editors at Nature release the paper during Bali conference instead of waiting an extra week?” If it were to come out this week, it would have at least gotten coverage by a wire service.