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Presentation by Daniel Grossman
At the Congressional Briefing on Abrupt Climate Change
September 15, 2004  

Apart from researchers like the scientists here today, most people learn about the science of global warming and about abrupt climate change from reading newspapers, listening to the radio and watching television. So if the people of the United States and the rest of world are going to confront global warming and are going to address the concerns raised by research like that discussed today, journalists have to report on the story. And they have to do a good job. Unfortunately the track record of my discipline is not very good.  

I’ve been a freelance science journalist and radio producer for about 20 years. In the last several years I’ve been reporting primarily on climate. In the process I have had the chance to travel to some out-of-the-way places to see how scientists do their research. The research I’ve seen in the field has made a big impression on me and, I hope, on my audience.  

Despite the reporting I and many other journalists have done, the American people are less informed about global warming than inhabitants of many other parts of the world. This is the conclusion of Steven Brechin, a sociology professor at the University of Illinois . He found that only 15 percent of U.S. citizens surveyed for a variety of polls could correctly identify burning fossil fuels as the primary cause of global warming. This in a country that is the world’s single largest producer of carbon dioxide. By way of comparison 26 percent of respondents in Mexico correctly identified the cause of global warming.  

Journalists bear some responsibility for this shocking ignorance. Before explaining why, let me say a bit about where the scientific community stands on climate change.  

In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, issued its Third Assessment Report, a multi-year labor of scores of the worlds leading climate researchers from around the world. In its summary, the report stated unequivocally: 

“There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.”  

Strong words in the cautious discipline of science.  

Last year, the American Geophysical Union, a membership organization of 41,000 space and planetary scientists adopted a statement with the following conclusion: “Human activities are increasingly altering the Earth's climate.”  

The American Meteorological Society recently adopted a statement that includes this sobering assessment:  

“…we are, in effect, conducting a global climate experiment, neither planned nor controlled, the results of which may present unprecedented challenges to our wisdom and foresight as well as have significant impacts on our natural and societal systems.”  

These few examples illustrate the incontestable fact that the overwhelming majority of the scientific community believes that the Earth is getting warmer, that humans are at least partly responsible and that the consequences are grave.

A handful of scientists question these conclusions, the so-called “skeptics.” Some of them are paid by the coal and oil associations to poke holes in the scientific consensus. It’s hard to find an independent scientist who seriously questions that humans are most likely heating up the Earth. I wrote a profile for Scientific American on one such scientist, Richard Lindzen an MIT meteorology professor. Professor Lindzen has briefed President Bush about global warming. The scientist told me that most leading climate researchers agree with him that global warming is not a problem but don’t want to stick their necks out on this contentious issue. That’s a statement that’s hard to prove or disprove, though I’ve seen no evidence to support it. In an interview that lasted about an hour, he misrepresented the work of other scientists and touted what he called “potentially the most important” paper he has written on this topic. This study has since been deemed flawed by three separate research teams.  

Dr. Lindzen is the most credible and credentialed critic of the mainstream thinking on global warming. But I concluded that on close inspection even he doesn’t make a good case. Yet according to a recent paper in the journal Global Climate Change, reporting on global warming has been heavily influenced by such skeptics. The study examines six years of reporting in four major U.S. papers, including the Washington Post and the New York Times. It shows that the majority of stories about global warming gave roughly equal attention to the view that humans are not contributing to global warming as to this consensus that humans are a major cause of global warming. This is akin to quoting a member of the flat Earth society in a review of Around the World in 80 Days.  

The authors of the Global Climate Change paper say the problem is the journalist’s credo of objectivity. Objectivity is a lofty and honorable goal. But in practice it’s hard to know if an article is objective. So journalists have come up with a surrogate, called balance, The idea is to interview and quote people on both—or all—sides of an issue. A journalist may not be able to get to the bottom of a dispute, but if his or her article is balanced, goes the thinking, the audience can decide for themselves what the truth is. This practice sometimes works for political coverage like the presidential race, though some journalists say even there it is problematic.  

In any event, it doesn’t work in science. One or even a handful of dissenters can’t invalidate the consensus of thousands of scientists. By giving climate skeptics equal weight with mainstream scientists, many journalists have inadvertently tilted their stories in favor of the skeptics and mislead the public about what is likely to be the truth. They’ve given a false sense of balance. Doug Starr, a co-director of the Boston University science journalism program teaches his students to incorporate what he calls “balance through depth.” By this he means that they should give the readers the context to understand how to interpret a skeptic’s views. For instance, it could be that Richard Lindzen will turn out to be a Galileo who sees what almost all other scientists have missed. But a journalist who quotes him, according to this approach, would want to say that only a tiny fraction of dissenters in science perhaps one in a thousand or fewer, end up proving everyone else wrong. “The age of the stenographer journalist is over, says professor Starr. “It has to be replaced with the analyst journalist.”  

The mores of political reporting, which some journalists consider the apex of the profession, distorts science reporting on subjects like climate change in other ways. Most journalism deals with what happened, events that occurred with relative certainty, and did so in the past. But the climate change story often concerns what might happen, in the future. To report on it means dealing with events that might be uncertain not certain and, usually, that will occur in the future not the past. Try selling that to an editor. As a result of this problem, most articles we read about global warming concern new research results. I guess they figure that at least there is a “news peg” justifying the story. Unfortunately the slow, steady increase in Earth’s temperature, accompanied by changes in ecosystems, weather patterns and water supplies is usually not considered news.  

I just co-produced an hour-long documentary about abrupt climate change for Minnesota Public Radio. It took me about 4 years from the time I conceived of the show to the time I actually produced it. One reason for the delay was because in the media abrupt climate change is a hard sell. That’s why the movie The Day After Tomorrow distorted the science of this field with hype, turning science fact into science fiction.  Abrupt climate change is what scientists call a low probability high impact event. Even the most vocal scientists on this topic, such as Richard Alley say an abrupt change in climate caused by humans is not likely to occur anytime soon. Editors don’t like reports on things that might not happen. Even some of the scientists who believe humans might cause an abrupt climate change are reluctant to talk about it on the record. Because this new discipline is somewhat speculative, they worry that talking about it will muddy the already turbulent waters of global warming, where consensus does exist.  

The topic of abrupt change is also complicated. It requires an understanding of changes in Earth’s past and how they might be analogous to changes that could happen, under different conditions, in the future. It is hard to explain succinctly.

As you’ve seen from Dr. Alley’s presentation, abrupt climate changes have occurred in the past. There is no expert I’ve spoken to who questions this. What is less certain is whether people could trigger one in the future. I am convinced that it is possible. What impact would this have? The largest abrupt changes that have been observed by researchers happened before civilization. However, some archeologists speculate that the collapse of a number of civilizations was caused by the onset of long deep droughts. They point, in particular, to the end of the Old Egyptian Kingdom, which built the great pyramids and declined during a 300-year-long drought 4,200 years ago, The Yucatan Peninsula’s Mayan civilization, declined during a long drought 1,200 years ago.  

In conclusion, though there has been lots of great reporting on climate change, I’d advise you, regretfully, to be skeptical of what you read in the press on this topic. Pay attention to the good and readable reports that have been issued by scientific institutions such as the IPCC and the National Academy of Science. I’d be glad to answer questions. 

Links to Some of Daniel Grossman’s Work

 

 

 

 
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