Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
help to explain many of the now-better-established features of the medieval climate anomaly. 29 For
example, the La Niña-like temperature pattern in the tropical Pacific we have discerned for the MCA,
when solar output was high and volcanic eruptions were few, seems to be consistent with the tropical
Pacific thermostat mechanism.
The implications of this seemingly innocuous finding are not trivial. It suggests the possibility
that heating by increased greenhouse gas concentrations could lead to a more La Niña-like state of the
climate, associated, for example, with intensified drought in the desert Southwest and increased
Atlantic hurricane activity. If the minority of climate models that produce that response are correct,
we might see a greater exacerbation of these effects than the IPCC currently projects. We have then a
genuine area of uncertainty in the science with significant potential societal implications, one where a
healthy dose of skepticism is warranted in interpreting the predictions of state-of-the-art models.
Climate scientists continue to seek more data and make further refinements in the models as they
strive to resolve this issue. Here we are very much in the midst of science's erratic path forward.
Science and the Media Collide
There is a basic inconsistency between the here-and-now incentive that drives our popular media,
and the slower, more deliberate manner in which science advances. While dramatic (and,
unfortunately, many times misleading) headlines may help sell newspapers and get us to view evening
news and commentary shows, they are not faithful to the way scientific progress generally occurs—or
indeed to how any complex situation unfolds. Individual scientific studies, as discussed earlier, rarely
change our basic scientific understanding. Rather, the accumulation of evidence from many studies
and the process by which some findings are reinforced and validated, while others fall to the
wayside, typically lead to slow but steady scientific advancement.
Newspaper articles and television or radio broadcast news segments (sometimes aided by
carelessly written press releases) tend to play up controversy and minimize uncertainties and caveats.
Yet it is those caveats—the “error bars,” the conditional and tentative assertions, the qualifications—
that scientists often emphasize (frequently to a fault) in their efforts to prevent their findings from
being misinterpreted, overinterpreted, or generalized beyond their range of applicability. Evidently,
scientists and journalists (or at least their editors), in this respect, tend to work at cross-purposes.
Who can blame press officers, journalists, and their editors for emphasizing that which appears
most novel, unusual, or surprising about a breaking science story? They must find a “hook” to sell
their story if it is to compete effectively with the numerous other stories seeking a place in the ever
shrinking “news hole.” Incremental refinements may seem dull and uninspiring to the lay public, but
controversy sells, and conflict, if a reporter can find it in a story—well, that's the mother lode.
As a result of this dynamic, the public is subjected to extreme viewpoints, alarmist headlines,
and a barrage of seemingly contradictory findings—the “whiplash” effect that has been noted by the
long-time New York Times science writer Andrew Revkin. 30 The effect is, of course, worsened by the
existence today of agenda-driven news outlets that seek to actively discredit scientific findings that
conflict with their ideological views. It is not difficult to see why confused observers attempting to
follow scientific developments would throw up their hands, resigned to the notion that all we can
safely conclude is that “the scientists don't agree.”
 
 
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