Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
The hoax's author explained the purpose of his actions thus: 'Sometimes fiction
and satire can reach places facts alone can't - in the right context,' he said. 'What
the hoax showed is that there are many people willing to jump on anything that
supports their argument, whether it's true or not. What we wanted to emphasize is
that it's necessary to achieve scientific validity using the peer-review model. Proper
climate science makes every attempt to do this, and is a constantly evolving and self-
refining process, as all science is' (cited by Revkin in
New York Times
, 11 November
hoax/,
accessed 31 July 2012).
17
Revkin worked for the
New York Times
as a journalist 1995-2009 and now writes
the Dot.Earth blog for the 'Opinion' section of the paper (see
http://dotearth.
18
As Boykoff (2011) makes clear in his recent book, American broadsheets have been
more accurately reporting the conclusions of the climate science community since
around 2002. The 'bias of balance' is thus now less of a problem than heretofore.
Indeed, on 7 December 2009, no fewer than 56 major newspapers worldwide co-
published an editorial urging political leaders to act to avert 'dangerous climate
change' at the Copenhagen Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol. It's also
worth noting that a major independent analysis of climate change data was recently
conducted by a research team at the University of California, Berkeley. The Berkeley
Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) Project participants were not associated with the
IPCC and were considered by some to be overtly sceptical of the IPCC scientific con-
sensus. Their findings, based on analysis of 1.6 billion temperature records and using
a sophisticated methodology designed to correct for various possible anomalies, were
issued in October 2011. The findings are highly consonant with those of the IPCC
assessment reports and suggest an increase in land temperature of around 1
◦
Csince
1950. See
http://berkeleyearth.org/
.
19
Interestingly, independent organisations like Climate Central (
http://www.climate-
central.org/
), Greenwire
(http://www.greenwire.org.uk/)
and the Society of Environ-
mental Journalists (
http://www.sej.org/)
have been set up to help reporters avoid
playing the stenographic role that produces nominal (but not actual) balance. There
is also now a large environmental blogosphere that journalists can learn from (see, for
example, the contributions to
Grist
magazine (
http://grist.org/news/)
or Treehugger
(
http://treehugger.com)
), though some skill
is required to navigate between the
myriad of contributors.
20
The history of climate change 'denial' in the United States is recounted by science
historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their book
Merchants of doubt
(2010),
by James Powell in
The inquisition of climate science,
and by Michael Mann (2012) in
The hockey stick and the climate wars.
None of these authors are sympathetic to the con-
trarian cause. Washington and Cook's (2011)
Climate change denial: heads in the sand
examines the different evidence and arguments presented by climate change sceptics
and systematically refutes them, while acknowledging the uncertainties involved in
even the most rigorous climate science. Robert Carter (2010) tries to summarise the
science from a sceptic's viewpoint in
Climate change: the counter-consensus
.
21
Christy, for example, would probably not accept the 'extreme' predictions of future
temperature rises made by Anderson and Bows (2011) reported earlier in this chapter.
22
Sarewitz's point leads one to wonder if the IPCC has not become understandably
defensive in the face of attacks by politically motivated climate change sceptics. By
closing ranks and over-emphasising the (undoubtedly considerable) degree of scien-
tific consensus, the IPCC may be performing
too much
of the 'boundary work' to
which I referred in
Chapter 3
, following Tom Gieryn's thinking. This said, evidence
indicates that the news media - even the broadsheet newspapers - don't find it easy to
communicate the caveats entered by good scientists (otherwise known as uncertainty).
This may also be a reason why the IPCC assessment reports seem not to over-
emphasise extant uncertainties and focus instead on probabilities and likelihoods.
I'll say more about how to address this in
Chapter 8.
