BLAME THE CLIMATE ON SCIENCE WRITERS. A few sessions at the AAAS meeting in Washington last week considered whether science writers (specifically journalists) are responsible for public distrust of scientific claims about global warming and its human causes.
Much of the discussion swirled around the "deficit model," which holds that the problem is public ignorance. Some climate scientists say that's science journalism's fault.
Robin Lloyd recapped the sessions at SciAm. MIT Climate scientist Kerry Emanuel asked journalists why, when an array of scientific organizations agree that people are causing global warming, journalists continue to frame their stories as debates about whether that's true. Elizabeth Shogren of National Public Radio responded that climate scientists have failed to persuade the public. Emanuel replied that it is journalists who have failed to persuade.
At Collide-a-Scape, Keith Kloor reported that Tom Rosenstiel of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism retorted that persuasion was not the journalist's job. See also Kloor's subsequent post. Here Kloor concludes
...it seems clear to me that some climate scientists are insistent that journalism as a whole is not getting the climate story right, and that this is contributing to a big communication failure in the climate debate.
I'm sorry to report that this second Kloor post is followed by more than 200 comments, and even sorrier to report that many are cogent, illuminating, and worthwhile. Prepare to set a spell.
Speakers at AAAS said public uncertainty is due partly to expensive industry campaigns designed to spread confusion, partly to vast public ignorance of science in general, and partly to media cutbacks on science journalism and journalists. Lloyd reported that Rosensteil even urged scientists to bypass traditional media altogether. Scientists should learn to speak like politicians, not answering a question directly but rather making whatever points they want to make.
Andrew Revkin tackled the AAAS climate sessions at Dot Earth. He restated his view that while research has built "a robust overall picture of a growing human influence on a complex system," there are still important scientific uncertainties and scientific debate over them. The result:
That debate can then be exploited by naysayers eager to cast doubt on the enterprise, when in fact...it’s simply the (sometimes ugly) way that science progresses.
Revkin's is a longish post that touches on several talks, especially one by Thomas Lessl. Lessl argued that while scientists may believe their debates are based solely on scientific evidence, the public assumes that they bring the same mix of political beliefs and social biases to their debates as everyone else – and that scientific debates are therefore shaped by prejudices and self-interest.
At The Intersection, Chris Mooney says the explanation is All of the Above.
And for precisely that reason, it’s very important not to fall into the trap of thinking that education and greater literacy are some kind of solution on their own.
OK. So what is?
DO WE NOW HAVE PERMISSION TO WRITE THAT EXTREME WEATHER CAN BE DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE? Curtis Brainard tackles a related hot topic at the Columbia Journalism Review's Observatory. In writing about weather, he points out, it's been conventional wisdom for science writers to note that no single weather event is traceable to climate change. But, Brainard says, that convention may be on the way to modification.
A catalyst has been the two recent Nature papers arguing that global warming can make exceptional rain and flooding more likely. Brainard reviews news stories and blogging about the papers and interviews science reporters and climate experts about whether attitudes toward explicitly linking dramatic weather and climate change are undergoing alteration.
In contrast to the claims of climate researchers at AAAS that journalists get it wrong, some of the stories seem to be a case of scientists overstating the strength of their conclusions to journalists. Brainard notes that news stories report that the paper authors claimed their data on a British flood that occured in 2000 showed that warming more than doubled the risk. Brainard says the data actually show that a doubled risk was not the most likely scenario. The news stories did, however, include many caveats, stressing the complexities and uncertainties of climate studies.
The conclusion I draw from this post is Proceed With Caution. Brainard concludes:
...as reporters plumb the depths of weather-climate connections, they should repeat this mantra: evidence, nuance, complexity, uncertainty; evidence, nuance, complexity, uncertainty.
PROCEED WITH CAUTION AT HEALTH CARE WEB SITES TOO. Reading Brainard's weather/climate post, I stumbled on an earlier post, this one about how to judge the validity of health care web sites.
For example, both WebMD and MayoClinic.com accept ads, but WebMD tends to recommend drug treatments far more often than Mayo. (Many of us already know that. Brainard polled half a dozen health care reporters; all of them recommended Mayo over WebMD.)
Brainard quotes Thomas Goetz of Wired as speculating that there may be a marketing opportunity for a service that evaluates health sites for consumers. Meantime, the useful and quite trustworthy government sites like MedlinePlus and the CDC site are underused.
ARE CELL PHONES BAD FOR YOUR BRAIN? Whether cell phones cause brain tumors or other brain damage is probably less controversial than the debates over climate change, but only just. And, like climate change, cell phones involve completely unrestricted and unmonitored experiments on billions of unwitting people. I wrote about the issue in Salon more than a decade ago, and I wouldn't say the science has advanced significantly in the intervening years.
Until, perhaps, now. For the first time, researchers have shown that cell phones do affect brain metabolism. They just don't have a clue what those metabolic effects mean. If anything.
The research team was headed by Nora Volkow, not only a high-profile brain imager but also director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the paper appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association. So the findings carry a lot of weight.
At Nobel Intent, John Timmer summarized them:
The study doesn't uncover any health risks associated with cellphone use, but it does indicate that holding a phone to one's head for an extended call seems to be enough to boost the brain's metabolic rate. The boost, however, is smaller than that seen in the visual system when it's processing images.
Over the years, several epidemiology studies have been conflicting and/or ambiguous on the question of health effects of cell phone use. But, Timmer points out, "there's no known mechanism that could lead from low-energy, long-wavelength radiation to cancer."
Timmer's is a lovely summary that considers the Volkow et al. paper in the context of the many previous ones. He also dives into the physics of sugar metabolism in the brain. ("Appreciate, for the moment, the idea of looking into potential health implications of weak cellular radiation by triggering matter-antimatter annihilations inside the brain.")
Dave Mosher's piece at Wired Science is also detailed, covering phone electronics and including interviews with the authors and others. They don't know what the findings mean yet, Volkow told him. "But this is the first reliable study showing the brain is activated by exposure to cellphone radio frequencies.”
Tara Parker-Pope's long post at Well adds detail, especially speculations about possible effects the changes in brain metabolism might have. "Although preliminary, the findings are certain to reignite a debate about the safety of cellphones," she notes. But, she concludes:
Dr. Volkow said future research may even show that the electromagnetic waves emitted from cellphones could be used to stimulate the brain for therapeutic reasons. She said the research should not set off alarms about cellphone use because simple precautions like using a headset or earpiece can alleviate any concern.
