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Media’s Deep Freeze in Headline Accuracy II — Foments Further Anti Science Info Passed of as “News”

Sunday, March 7th, 2010
March 7, 2010

The New York times might well be America’s Leading Newspaper. Yet last month, The Times ran an otherwise passable piece on climate change that had a sensationalistic and highly misleading headline about the “deep freeze” we were ostensibly in, and that played into the false balance idea that scientific analyses over climate patterns and mocking anti science skepticism are almost two sides to a reasonable “discussion.”

Such skepticism — a healthy attribute in science in general — is on the issue of climate change routinely based upon ideological belief and yet offered up as ostensible “science.”

Precipitation is not temperature.  (Moreover, in 2009 the U.S. Global Change Research Program predicted the possibility of increased precipitation in the Eastern U.S. as part of the climate change phenomenon.)

And one region over a short term period relative to long term global trends, given inherent weather variability, is about as relevant as what the temperature is at 3:00 p.m. v. 2:35 p.m. on a mid October day in terms of determining if we are moving into winter or summer.

Yet sites that veer into anti science –or simply exhibit great misunderstanding of the subject matter — continue to play upon common misperceptions on the basic science and argue that unusually large snowstorms mean that the phenomenon of climate change is less likely.

As other sites have pointed out, here for example is the far right wing site Newsbusters on the recent Washington, D.C. snowstorm:

With Washington, D.C. buried beneath at least 20 inches of snow, and with more in the forecast, common sense would suggest global warming alarmists look elsewhere to make the argument to raise awareness for their concerns.

But no, Dylan Ratigan thinks it’s ridiculous to suggest all the snowfall totals could cast doubt on the theory of anthropogenic global warming.

Such sound bites as these are easy to assert yet reflect an almost complete misunderstanding of the subject matter, and tend to greatly further misinformation on the subject matter.

As a further example of how this process of misinformation takes place, and just how prevalent it is, consider what happened when the very next day after the misleading NY Times article appeared, Britain’s leading Newspaper ran the following highly misleading headline:

Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levels.

This headline implies that the claim of sea level rise was being withdrawn. In fact, what was being withdrawn was a very specific paper on the conservative end of such claims.

The real problems with such headlines is that they are then often mistakenly used by “climate change” skepticism sites and so called experts, most of whom are actually expert at passing off erroneous and misleading information as logical and scientifically based, and adding to the level of confusion, misunderstanding, and false assertions on the topic.

The Wonk Room at the liberal leaning site Think Progress, with little partisan spin, does an excellent job of powerfully illustrating how this climate headline and paper retraction report was in turn, and immediately, used by numerous ideological sites to further misinformation on the subject of climate change.

If all one read was the introduction, a reader might get the false impression that sea level rise from global warming is in doubt. The misleading Guardian headline was picked up — as per usual — by the Drudge Report and Marc Morano’s conspiracy site Climate Depot. Right-wing bloggers, unsurprisingly, latched on to the headline without any comprehension of the story:

Betsy Newmark: Another global warming claim that has had to be retracted because of problems with the data.

Sammy Benoit: OOPS Never-mind! Climate scientists withdraw IPCC-related article claiming sea is rising.

JammieWearingFool: Another global warming myth comes crashing down. No warming since at least 1995, no melting glaciers and now no rising sea levels.

Jules Crittenden: Warmal scientists are compelled to admit (again) that they don’t know what they’re talking about, retract study that predicted up to a nearly three-foot sea level rise by 2100.

Law professor William A. Jacobson: But now the seas are not going to rise? My dream of a waterfront home is melting away faster than the glaciers.

Caleb Howe: Yet another card removed from the geodesic dome of cards that is AGW hysteria.

Joe Romm from Climate Progress — a much heralded site which has its ups and downs but which is generally very informative and painstakingly researched — aptly, if generously, summarizes the phenonemon here:

Another dreadful media headline, another round of anti-science confusion.

Some of it may be confusion.  But some of it also clearly appears to be ideological blindness and or desire driving the multiple analyses and efforts to seek out belief reinforcing mistakes.

The Guardian article itself notes in the very first sentence:

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the finding

But the article then goes on to note in the very next few paragraphs that the paper that was retracted was used to support the IPCC estimates for sea level rise — estimates that as the paper also notes, many scientists have criticized as far too conservative.

As the Wonk Room further notes:

However, the retraction instead admits that the paper’s calculations for an upper bound to future sea level rise were incorrect, and sea level rise could be much worse. [The] study used paleoclimate reconstructions to predict that sea level rise from global warming would be constrained to between 7 cm and 82 cm (3 to 32 in) by the end of the century, in line with the estimated sea level rise in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which excluded possible effects from ice sheets.

…The best scientific estimates of future sea level rise continue to worsen, as it becomes evident that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass much more rapidly than estimated before 2007. December’s “Global sea level linked to global temperature,” published…in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences projects a catastrophic rise of 0.75 to 1.9 m (2.5 to 6 feet) by 2100:

In other words, estimates of sea level rise were based upon numerous studies and projections, not upon this one study, which was notable only in that it tended to support the earlier IPCC sea level estimates, which had been criticized for having been too low.   The retraction of this report only further supported critiques of the IPCC estimates as too low; quite the opposite of what the seeming anti climate science crowd crowed about –believing, or falsely implying, that it undermined the idea of and support for projected sea level rises.

The retracted study appeared in the Journal Nature GeoScience in July of 2009. In a post written seven months earlier, in December, 2008, entitled US Geological Survey stunner: Sea-level rise in 2100 will likely “substantially exceed” IPCC projections, Romm notes:

A major new report warns that on our current emissions path, we face the severe risk of abrupt climate change impacts. The basic conclusions themselves are nothing new — see “Startling new sea level rise research: “Most likely” 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100” and “Australia faces the “permanent dry” — as do we.”

But what is stunning is that these warnings come from the United States Geological Survey —the Bush Administration (!). This new science-based report, Abrupt Climate Change, is thus a sobering book-end to the fantasy-based talking points released by the Administration today on how the President has “Taken Constructive Steps To Confront Climate Change.”

This is a first-rate report from the USGS’s Climate Change Science Program. I highly recommend reading, Chapter 2, “Rapid Changes in Glaciers and Ice Sheets and their Impacts on Sea Level,” and Chapter 3, “Hydrological Variability and Change.” The chapters are much more readable than the IPCC reports, and the two together will make anyone an expert on what are perhaps the two most dangerous climate impacts that threaten this country.

The sea level rise conclusion, “based on an assessment of the published scientific literature” is:

Recent rapid changes at the edges of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets show acceleration of flow and thinning, with the velocity of some glaciers increasing more than twofold. Glacier accelerations causing this imbalance have been related to enhanced surface meltwater production penetrating to the bed to lubricate glacier motion, and to ice-shelf removal, ice-front retreat, and glacier ungrounding that reduce resistance to flow. The present generation of models does not capture these processes. It is unclear whether this imbalance is a short-term natural adjustment or a response to recent climate change, but processes causing accelerations are enabled by warming, so these adjustments will very likely become more frequent in a warmer climate.

For the record, our prediction is that narrow range estimates are valuable in so far as predicting expected general direction, but of very limited worth as exercises in precision. The guestimation here is that save for noting the fact that sea levels are likely to rise. Assuming a slow to moderate anthropomorphic response to the challenge, sea levels will rise between 3 to 20 feet over the next 100 years, and more likely, between 6 and 18 feet. This does not mean it can’t rise more (or less, although less than this is very unlikely). And this takes into broader account more of the uncertainties inherent in speculating such a complex, futuristic phenomenon, as well as some of the potential feedback effects from increasingly decreasing surface albedo, increasingly energy (and carbon dioxide) absorbing ocean systems, and potential increases in both wildfires and terrestrial permafrost melting, among other phenomena.) But the eventual 100 year results could still very reasonably be outside of even these much broader ranges.  (Although, barring a complete reversal of ocean patterns that shut off the flow sub tropical warm waters northward along with other factors, results outside of the lower end seem exceedingly unlikely.)

Note that said “slow to moderate” response will be almost inconsequential to the problem. This will likely lead at some point in the future, well after the causes of these changes will have implemented, to potentially radical responses when anti science furor and complacency switches over to panic. It is hard to predict just when such a similarly unproductive shift will occur, as climate is a slow acting phenomenon as well as a long term trend with excessive shorter term variability which tends to mask our ability to accurately assess precisely what is going on, from shorter term data. Further complicating the picture here is the fact that potential masking inherent variability aside, there is an enormous lag time (several decades if not more) between cause and effect regarding the full impact of climate change, so that if we constrain ourselves to acting upon what is thus observable and provable, we will always be many decades behind the curve: In other words, acting to remedy a created problem that will have been greatly exacerbated via anthropogenic forcing input not yet reflected by then current observations.

Posted in Climate, Media, Media bias, Misinformation, Politics, Science, Uncategorized | 4 Responses »
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Media’s Deep Freeze in Headline Accuracy

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
March 03, 2010

Apparently  sensational headlines trump accuracy, for the gray lady now too.  NY Times Headline, February 10, 2010:

Climate-Change Debate Is Heating Up in Deep Freeze

What deep freeze? Times Reporter John Broder writes:

As millions of people along the East Coast hole up in their snowbound homes, the two sides in the climate-change debate are seizing on the mounting drifts to bolster their arguments.

Oh.  That Deep freeze.  The one where temperatures (but for possibly a few days) were, essentially, within normal ranges.  And where, a bit to the West and north in Vancouver where the winter Olympics were being held, the record for the warmest monthly January average was broken by a full 1.6 degrees, and was a whopping full 7 degrees above the historic average January Temperature for the area.

As the Washington Post reported in February:

Before the massive snow-hauling began last week, the freestyle skiing course that will feature gold medal competition in moguls on Saturday sported little more than grass and mud, giving a double meaning to Vancouver’s environmentally conscious effort to put on the greenest Games in history.

As Joe Romm of Climate Progress points out, January temperatures across the continental U.S. were mildly above average. And the year that had just ended,was tied, according to NASA, for the second warmest year on record.

To get a sense of just how irrelevant and variable shorter term data is, and as a random example of potentially how variable it seems to be becoming, consider that temperatures in the U.S. in December, 2009, were 3.2 degrees colder than the long term average, whereas the month earlier, November, they were a whopping four degrees warmer than the 20th century average.   These are not daily temperatures, but the monthly average, for the entire contiguous United States, and represent wildly fluctuating patterns.

As for February, complete temperature data has not yet been compiled; but preliminary data indicates that February was not radically different, temperature wise, from January.

What February did see is a lot of precipitation, which if the temperature is around or below 32 degrees, will usually fall as snow. Temperature data is what it is — whether we have snow or rain is irrelevant to ascertaining whether it is “hot” or “cold” since we have thermometers.  So what matters as to whether we are in a “deep freeze” or not is temperatures,which again were wildly warm for November, unusually cold for December, a bit warmer than average for January, and somewhat normal for February. (Although if the Times headline was referring, more relevantly, to global patterns, we are in the midst not of a deep freeze, but an extremely warm winter.)

Periods of increased precipitation are also fully consistent with the phenomenon commonly referred to as “climate change;” as one of the underlying expectations for decades has been for a potential increase in unpredictable, volatile, and variable weather patterns. The United States Global Change Research Program, for whatever is it worth, constitutes the official U.S. word on climate change. In its detailed U.S. Climate Impacts report last year (as Broder, in his article, does finally get around to pointing out near the bottom), increased rain and snow, whether correctly or incorrectly, was predicted for the Northeastern United States. Heavy snow fall in the mid to northern Eastern Regions of the United States, amidst a broader period of both above average — as well has highly variable and unpredictable temperatures, is not even remotely inconsistent with any reasonably scientific assessment given on climate change, and if anything only serves as further, if statistically of limited value, evidence of precisely these types of increasing trends.

Yet anti science types — whether driven by misunderstanding, ideological zealotry, or both — jumped all over the snow as a chance to mock climate change, as Broder’s article went to great lengths to point out.

What Broder’s article did not go to great lengths to point out is how wildly misinformed as well as scientifically specious this is. Instead, several times in the article, he plays into elementary school remedial science class nonsense as if it were part of some legitimate debate; as for example, among other instances, when he writes:

As the first blizzard howled last weekend, the Virginia Republican Party put up an advertisement on the Web — titled “12 Inches of Global Warming” — criticizing two Virginia Democrats, Representatives Rick Boucher and Tom Perriello, who voted for the federal cap-and-trade legislation last year. The advertisement urges voters to call Mr. Boucher and Mr. Perriello to ask if they will help with the shoveling.

To be fair, Broder does slightly shift into offering up some explanation of some of these things, under the guise of “scientist say;” and the article, wildly misleading and sensational headline aside, is ultimately mildly informative.  But it also plays into the seeming reasonableness of the debate, instead of serving to illuminate the abject misinformation and wild misunderstanding (or, again, speciousness) which it is reflective of — and which is the far more relevant story here.  And in such, does very little to serve to correct it, rather than simply serve as a stenographic parrot for it all.

Posted in Climate, Media, Media bias, Misinformation, Politics, Science | 2 Responses »
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Fox Misleads its Own Viewers, Again, and Again, and Again

Friday, January 29th, 2010

What type of “news” station would repeat a false charge that ideological elements have leveled in order to maximize public science skepticism over the issue of climate change, and repeat it not as an example of the type of misleading hype that is misinforming the public, but repeat it as a fact themselves?

This type of “news” station.  Or this:

And that is exactly what this station did when it came to the issue of basic climate change science.

Let’s see how they did it:

The wildly anti environmental and Orwellian named “Competitive Enterprise Institute” (CEI) does everything possible not to level the competitive playing field, but instead give those companies and methodological processes that pollute and degrade the environment an inherent advantage over those that don’t, by working to completely dismiss the cost or relevancy of this external damage in our marketplace.

CEI is wildly ideological, puts fealty to corporations before individual freedom, and seems to confuse capitalism with unfettered oligopoly and even total resource (and market) anarchy.  It even thinks that the market itself properly solves, and protects against, company harms directly to an individual. In other words, if a company knowingly puts a highly carcinogenic substance in a common product, and 15 years later thousands die of cancer, in the CEI’s seemingly naive and ideologically zealous view, the achievement of remuneration from the company (assuming it still exists, and has not re-formed) will have corrected the wrong and somehow serve as a disincentive against such behavior.  (Yet at the same time that the CEI apparently wants to limit potential remunerations in the first place, through caps and the like.)

In other words, when it comes to abstract future damages, these will somehow compensate for a quarterly, now is what matters, profit system, when any corporate entity could have dissolved and regrouped twenty times over before even the knowledge necessary to attach liability would materialize; and let alone the fact that money after the fact is not a substitute for the avoidance of unnecessary and easily preventable harm or damage in the first place.

So the CEI seems like a good source for “fair and balanced” Fox to cite without checking a single fact, right? And this is what Fox routinely does. So when the CEI, among other places, gleefully reported how “climate gate” revealed that scientists “destroyed 150 years worth of climate data”  Fox (along with a few other less than stellar media sources, such as the similarly Rupert Murdoch owned New York Post) went ahead and parroted this falsity as fact, greatly misleading and deceiving its viewers in the process.

Blatant, erroneous propaganda housed as “‘Fair and Balanced’ news” follows a pattern by Fox on the climate change issue, as with many other issues. (Here’s an example, illustrated be a resident Fellow from the otherwise often industry supporting CATO Institute, where Fox simply doesn’t know the basic facts on the critical issue of fundamental American Liberties.)

The station has even even gone so far as to have its correspondents lie about the issue of climate change on other occasions as well — or, once again, just ignorantly recite ideological propaganda talking points like an uninformed person at the dinner table might, as opposed to, say, the “most trusted” name in news. Such as when correspondent Andrew Napolitano wildly told Fox viewers that a NASA study claimed that man was not responsible for climate change — when the study in fact said absolutely nothing of the sort.

In fact, here is what NASA says on the subject.

Several lines of evidence show that current global warming cannot be explained by changes in energy from the sun.

The report that Napolitano falsely cited, simply noted that solar irradiation (obviously), along with other things, may play a role in the earth’s atmospheric temperatures. It said nothing about man’s effect, and said nothing to undermine the general consensus on the issue, including that of NASA. Namely, that man’s activities are invariably starting to effect climate, and will likely do so increasingly. This is a consensus arrived at because greenhouse gases trap heat; heat ultimately warms oceans, which drives climate; greenhouse gases, through specific and easily identifiable anthropomorphic activities, are rising at at an alarming rate;  atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are as a result now well higher than at any time in the past three quarter of a million years; and slowly but surely, the earth is warming, as weather additionally becomes increasingly variable.

In other words, Fox’s “Fair and Balanced” means that Fox tells you what they want — even if it blatantly misleads viewers on the most basic of facts necessary to correctly understand an issue — while working hard to pretend that it is fair and balanced so that viewers really think they are being led to independent conclusions based upon an objective look at the news. When they are being repeatedly mislead, yet made to think otherwise.

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