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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.

Posted in Climate, Media, Misinformation, Science, Uncategorized | 1 Response »
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NY Times Plays Fake Balance Game, but Pales in Comparison to the Crack Science Team at the Washington Post Editorial Pages

Monday, January 25th, 2010

According to NASA, 2009 was the 2d warmest year on record, tied with a few other years, including 1998.

2005 was the warmest year on record

All of the top eleven warmest years on record have occurred since the beginning of 1998.

Not according to long time Washington Post syndicated columnist George Will, who makes up his own facts,  and comes up with some fairly twisted logic — perhaps for these reasons expressed here — and the Post calls it “debate.”  But then, to the Post, this is “debate” also. But not this.

The NY Times notes that:

A separate preliminary analysis from the National Climatic Data Center, a unit of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, found that 2009 tied with 2006 as the fifth warmest year on record, based on measurements taken on land and at sea.

The Times elects to also add:

The new temperature figures provide evidence in the scientific discussion of global warming but are not likely to be the last word on whether the planet’s temperature is on a consistent upward path.

The interesting thing is this use of the word “consistent.”   What does that mean? Climate change means expected increases in temperatures, and increasing variability. More importantly, the relevance of several years in terms of climate shifts are about as meaningful as measuring the weather shifts between a Monday and a Thursday during any random week, in ascertaining whether we are heading toward winter, or summer.

The Times goes much further to show how “balanced” it is, however. To it’s article on 2009 temperatures, it adds:

The question of whether the planet is heating and how quickly was at the heart of the so-called “climategate” controversy that arose last fall when hundreds of e-mail messages from the climate study unit at the University of East Anglia in England were released without authorization.

Critics seized on the messages as evidence that, in their view, climate scientists were manipulating data and colluding to keep contrary opinion out of scientific journals. But climate scientists and political leaders affirmed what they called a broad-based consensus that the planet was growing warmer, and on a consistent basis, although with measurable year-to-year variations.

Does one see anywhere in this article how there is a several decade lag between an atmospheric heat re radiation forcing (what increased greenhouse gas concentrations, by trapping more heat, result in) and actual effects?  Does one see anywhere in the article how effects that result from any increased concentrations are not likely to be linear, but accelerating, or, more importantly,the reasons why?  [See endnote [i] to this, or middle section, here.] Does one see that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are significantly above any level that we have been able to measure — through ice core sampling — over the past three quarters of a million years (while levels of methane, the next most significant greenhouse gas, have skyrocketed above even the highest levels of the past three quarters of a million years)? Or that the atmospheric concentrations of these gases is rising at what, from a geologic perpsective, is almost instantaneous speed?

No.  But one does see how this is “not likely to be the last word” on whether the climate is in fact warming, even though, what one does not see, is that the reasons for this broad based scientific consensus, are pretty basic. [See here.] Or the actual ideological rather than scientific reasons behind why this is not likely to be the “last word” on climate change itself,  rather than the more sensible question,as to what to do about it.

And one of course sees what a big deal “climate gate” was.  One does not see this NASA chart, which has now gone up even more. Nor does one see that the levels of increased atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations will likely not result in a one to one correlation with actual effects — consistent with nearly everything else in nature and science. Nor does one see that much of the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations has occurred over the past several decades, causing compounded effects (on top of earlier,already anthropogenic increased levels) that we will see well after their cause has been instituted, not contemporaneously with.

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Responses »
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