We have a new, peer-reviewed paper just out on media coverage of climate change, specifically sea level rise to 2100. We find that overall the major print media in the US and UK has done a nice job reporting on this topic. This post describes our paper and its findings. The image above comes from the paper and shows (a) media reports of predicted sea level rise to 2100, (b) IPCC projections of sea level rise to 2100, and (c) projections of sea level rise to 2100 found in the peer-reviewed literature.
The print media is often the subject of criticism for its coverage of climate change. The criticism usually occurs in the context of a high-profile article that this or that person happens to disagree with. Since there are varied agendas and perspectives on climate change it is virtually certain that someone in the climate debate is not going to like pretty much any article, leading to a steady chorus of criticism.
This has led my colleague Tom Yulsman here at the University of Colorado to comment:
[D]uring this past year, environmental journalists have been the subject of lots of criticism, often vituperative, from both sides in the climate change wars.Tom is right -- one can be led astray by relying on anecdotal impressions to assess the quality of reporting on any topic. So to get a better understanding of media coverage of climate change we decided to investigate the issue quantitatively.
If you read any number of partisan climate bloggers who claim to carry the torch of scientific truth, we’re mostly stupid, we’re hopelessly biased, we’re carrying water for warmist scientists, or we’re stenographers who copy down whatever the denialists have to say because we’re too dumb to know what false balance is.
It might be tempting to conclude that since we’re catching hell from both sides, on balance we’re probably getting it about right. But I think the topic is too overwhelmingly complex, and there are too many people covering the issue in myriad ways (daily reporters, magazine writers, bloggers, documentarians, even formerly ink-stained-wretch academics like me), to make such a sweeping generalization.
Led by our former post-doc Ursula Rick, I along with Max Boykoff asked a straightforward question: How well did the print media represent scientific predictions or projections of sea level rise to 2100? We picked sea level rise to 2100 because it is so often used and it is also an objective measure. To conduct out analysis we looked at seven major newspapers in the US and the UK (New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, The Times (London), The Guardian and The Telegraph).
We found that the major print media in the US and UK, with a few exceptions, was generally successful in its reporting, and concluded in our paper:
The numbers and ranges reported suggest, in aggregate, reporting on sea level rise among the sources that we have examined has been consistent with scientific literature on the issue.You can read our full analysis here. Comments welcomed!
U K Rick et al 2011 Environ. Res. Lett. 6 014004 doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/6/1/014004
16 comments:
Judging from the graphs it seems to me that media generally overshot the IPCC and the literature, in some cases wildly.
Also, whilst the successive IPCC reports show decreasing figures for 2100, it appears to be a trend towards increasing figures in the literature.
What gives?
I just read the paper. While I have no doubt it is accurate, I'm not sure it's representative of the broader question.
The standard failure I see in the media is the choice of extreme value to report. This is done commonly in criminal justice, where stories state that conviction could result in a 30 years-to-life sentence - not saying that the standard sentence, without grave circumstances is 5-8 years. The use of biggest/mostest values rather than most likely or normal range, is standard journalistic eyeball-catching practice.
In the case of global warming, we get 'could be as high as' and 'may be as much as' far more often than we see 'a likely range of' or 'most likely, with a range of from/to.' In these cases, when actually dealing with published papers and not just scientists speaking off the cuff, the quote may be accurate but cherry-picked from the full assertion of range and probability presented in the paper. That is, it is true that the paper said that temperatures could be 'as high as,' but the higher probably was for far lower numbers.
And of course, the question could be asked, why is it that the high end estimate is always featured, while the equally probable low end estimate is nowhere to be seen? That's a rhetorical question: the low end estimate wouldn't make a 'story.' The low end estimate is dog-bites-man, and doesn't grab eyeballs for advertisers.
-1-Hector M.
See:
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-2592-2008.07.pdf
As we say in the paper, IPCC AR4 is not apples to apples with what came before. Some of the post-AR4 literature reflects this.
Roger, I can see your point about AR4 figures and subsequent literature, but do not see a general agreement between sc.lit and IPCC on one side, and media on the other. For understandable reasons (looking for eye-catching headlines) media have often made outlandish claims and tends to report much larger sea level rise figures than either the IPCC or the scientific literature.
-4-Hector M.
The relationship of the IPCC and literature is another matter altogether. The IPCC generates its own sea level rise predictions (contrary to the oft-stated claim that the IPCC does no original research).
However, we find that the instances of misrepresentation of IPCC or scientific literature in tis area are the exception, and that for the most part, the media has done a good job faithfully representing the state of the science.
Roger, it is good to learn that the media misrepresentations are the exception, but I'm afraid that is not clearly conveyed in the graphs. Just one look at the media chart compared to the other two clearly shows the large discrepancy in ranges, especially the top bound of the ranges. There are probably papers or scientists backing every particular large SLR headline in the media, but on the whole it seems to prevail a tendency to cherry pick large claims instead of the generally more sober (and much smaller) estimates emerging from the literature and the IPCC reports.
Thus the claim that the media do not misrepresent science concerning SLR may be true, but it not appears to be, not just in the charts reproduced here but in the paper itself.
-6-Hector M.
The graphs how that there are only a handful of media reports that exceed either the values found in the IPCC or the literature.
One thing that may not show up in a study like this is that it is not unusual to have statements in stories (or in Al Gore presentations) that sea level will rise 20 feet if Greenland melts or 200 feet if Antarctica melts, without any mention of the time scale. I believe that statements like this give the impression (and are probably intended to give the impression) that this rise could happen fairly soon, whereas it really would take several hundred years to happen.
-8-Mike
Thanks ... you are correct that such statements will not show up in our study.
-8-Mike
If the radiative imbalance were 1 W/m2 for the surface of the whole planet and all of it were devoted to melting Antarctica, it would take 622 years, not counting the time it took to raise the temperature of the ice to 0C. But that's not going to happen. Several orders of magnitude longer would be more likely.
Disintegration of the Western Antarctic ice sheet would be more rapid and somewhat more likely, but you still have to transfer a lot of heat so it's not going to happen overnight either.
I wonder if the uptick in sea level rise estimates in the recent literature is part of the effort to "frame the argument" better.
Roger,
We notice what is near; most US papers offer their readers edited articles/features from NYT. Is it possible to display what might be labelled ´effective eye-time?´
If most readers have no alternative to shortened ¨coverage,¨ coastal, esp. NY, prejudices may threaten public appreciation of any discussion.
I notice that your paper makes reference to the frequent statement that the IPCC estimates don't include rapid dynamical changes. But figure 10.33 does make an estimate of these changes even though it is not added into the range. And this is explained in the last paragraph of page 821. "This assumption adds .1 to .2 m to the estimated upper bound for sea level rise depending on the scenario."
So it seems to me quite easy to see exactly what effect including this would have had on the IPCC estimates, and it does not bring the IPCC into range of the more recent semi-empirical approaches done by scientists who I believe were not involved in the IPCC sea level section.
For me, selecting these recent semi-empirical estimates as more authoritative than the IPCC assessment is questionable.
-13-Nicolas
Thanks for your comment. Our paper did not evaluate various approaches to projecting sea level rise.
Actually I don't agree. You write.
"It should be noted,however, that the AR4 is widely thought to underestimate
future sea level rise because the effects of dynamic ice loss from glaciers and ice sheets were not taken into account
(National Research Council 2010). If the effect of ice dynamic losses was included in the sea level rise projection to 2100, the average number may be larger but it will also have a greater uncertainty."
and "We note again that many in the scientific community believe the most recent report underestimates sea level rise projections to 2100."
These are evaluations of the IPCC approach. And provide an explanation for why you think it is reasonable for reporters to use the much higher ranges of a few recent papers rather than focusing on the scientific consensus from only two years ago.
However certainly for those who claim that the media underestimates the potential effects of warming, or that the media gives false balance your article provides evidence to the contrary in at least this area.
-15-Nicolas
The comments of ours that you cite are not evaluations of the IPCC approach, but rather, characterizations of the perspectives of climate scientists in the community. For better or worse, our statements are accurate.
With respect to the IPCC, its word is not final or definitive, but rather it is a snapshot of the views of the people who participated in it at the time of its production. Of course newer research will offer newer perspectives, and it is entirely appropriate for the media to report on that science as it is published.
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