[Vision2020] 949 Responses to “Whatevergate”

[Ted Moffett]

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/whatevergate/#more-2806
 Whatevergate
Filed under:

   - Communicating
Climate<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/communicating-climate/>
   - Reporting on
climate<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/communicating-climate/reporting-on-climate/>

— gavin @ 16 February 2010

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/gavin-schmidt/

Gavin Schmidt is a climate modeller at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space
Studies in New York and is interested in modeling past, present and future
climate.
---

It won’t have escaped many of our readers’ notice that there has been what
can only be described as a media frenzy (mostly in the UK) with regards to
climate change in recent weeks. The coverage has contained more bad
reporting<http://climatesafety.org/swallowing-lies-how-the-denial-lobby-feeds-the-press/>,
misrepresentation<http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/leakegate_the_case_for_fraud.php>and
confusion<http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/01/rosegate_david_rose_caught_mis.php>on
the subject than we have seen in such a short time anywhere. While the
UK
newspaper scene is uniquely competitive (especially compared to the US with
over half a dozen national dailies selling in the same market), and
historically there have been equally frenzied bouts of mis-reporting in the
past on topics as diverse as pit bulls, vaccines and child abductions, there
is something new in this mess that is worth discussing. And that has been a
huge shift in the Overton window for climate change.

In any public discussion there are bounds which people who want to be
thought of as having respectable ideas tend to stay between. This is most
easily seen in health care debates. In the US, promotion of a National
Health Service as in the UK or a single-payer system as in Canada is so far
outside the bounds of normal health care politics, that these options are
only ever brought up by ‘cranks’ (sigh). Meanwhile in the UK, discussions of
health care delivery solutions outside of the NHS framework are never heard
in the mainstream media. This limit on scope of the public debate has been
called the Overton window <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window>.

The window does not have to remain static. Pressure groups and politicians
can try and shift the bounds deliberately, or sometimes they are shifted by
events. That seems to have been the case in the climate discussion. Prior to
the email hack at CRU there had long been a pretty widespread avoidance of
‘global warming is a hoax’ proponents in serious discussions on the subject.
The sceptics that were interviewed tended to be the slightly more sensible
kind – people who did actually realise that CO2 was a greenhouse gas for
instance. But the GW hoaxers were generally derided, or used as punchlines
for jokes. This is not because they didn’t exist and weren’t continually
making baseless accusations against scientists (they did and they were), but
rather that their claims were self-evidently ridiculous and therefore not
worth airing.

However, since the emails were released, and despite the fact that there is
no evidence within them to support any of these claims of fraud and
fabrication, the UK media has opened itself so wide to the spectrum of
thought on climate that the GW hoaxers have now suddenly find themselves
well within the mainstream. Nothing has changed the self-evidently
ridiculousness of their arguments, but their presence at the media table has
meant that the more reasonable critics seem far more centrist than they did
a few months ago.

A few examples: Monckton being quoted as a ‘prominent climate sceptic’ on
the front page of the New York Times this
week<http://climateprogress.org/2010/02/09/new-york-times-elisabeth-rosenthal-unbalanced-climate-coverage-ipcc-pachauri/>(Wow!);
The Guardian digging up baseless fraud
accusations<http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/weather-stations-china>against
a scientist at SUNY that had already been investigated and
dismissed; The Sunday Times ignoring
experts<http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/leakegate.php>telling
them the IPCC was right in favor of the anti-IPCC meme of the day;
The Daily Mail making up
quotes<http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/01/rosegate_scandal_grows.php>that
fit their GW hoaxer narrative; The Daily Express breathlessly
proclaiming the whole thing a ‘climate
con’<http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/154428/Global-Warming-What-a-climate-con->;
The Sunday Times (again) dredging
up<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7026317.ece>unfounded
accusations of corruption in the surface temperature data sets.
All of these stories are based on the worst kind of oft-rebunked nonsense
and they serve to make the more subtle kind of scepticism pushed by Lomborg
et al seem almost erudite.

Perhaps this is driven by editors demanding that reporters come up with
something new (to them) that fits into an anti-climate science theme that
they are attempting to stoke. Or perhaps it is driven by the journalists
desperate to maintain their scoop by pretending to their editors that this
nonsense hasn’t been debunked a hundred times already? Who knows? All of
these bad decisions made easier when all of the actually sensible people, or
people who know anything about the subject at all, are being assailed on all
sides, and aren’t necessarily keen to find the time to explain, once again,
that yes, the world is warming.

So far, so stupid. But even more concerning is the reaction from outside the
UK media bubble. Two relatively prominent and respected US
commentators – Curtis
Brainard <http://cjr.org/the_observatory/mia_on_the_ipcc.php?page=1> at CJR
and Tom Yulsman <http://www.cejournal.net/?p=2797> in Colorado – have both
bemoaned the fact that the US media (unusually perhaps) has not followed
pell-mell into the fact-free abyss of their UK counterparts. Their point
apparently seems to be that since much news print is being devoted to a
story somewhere, then that story must be worth following. Indeed, since the
substance to any particularly story is apparently proportional to the
coverage, by not following the UK bandwagon, US journalists are missing a
big story. Yulsman blames the lack of environmental beat reporters for lack
of coverage in the US, but since most of the damage and bad reporting on
this is from clueless and partisan news desk reporters in the UK, I actually
expect that it is the environmental beat reporters prior experience with the
forces of disinformation that prevents the contagion crossing the pond. To
be sure, reporters should be able and willing (and encouraged) to write
stories about anything to do with climate science and its institutions – but
that kind of reporting is something very different from regurgitating
disinformation, or repeating baseless accusations as fact.

So what is likely to happen now? As the various panels and reports on the
CRU affair conclude, it is highly likely (almost certain in fact) that
no-one will conclude that there has been any fraud, fabrication or
scientific misconduct (since there hasn’t
been<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/are-the-cru-data-suspect-an-objective-assessment/>).
Eventually, people will realise (again) that the GW hoaxers are indeed
cranks, and the mainstream window on their rants will close. In the
meantime, huge amounts of misinformation, sprinkled liberally with plenty of
disinformation, will be spread and public understanding on the issue will
likely decline. As the history of the topic has shown, public attention to
climate change comes and goes and this is likely to be seen as the latest
bump on that ride.

Eppure si riscalda <http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif>
.
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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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