CJR And Chris Mooney On The Warming Pause That Wasn't & The Shitty Journalism That Kept It Alive

[hatrack]

EDIT

How do you think that became such a big story?

It looks like the Economist started it. For at least five years, probably more, the skeptics have been trying to say that there’s no global warming anymore, because 1998 was so hot. Many of the years after ‘98 did not equal ‘98 in their temperatures. If you pick the hot year, and the reason it was hot was because of El Nino, it’s basically cherry-picking. And if you just go by decades, you see that the 2000s are hotter than the ’90s. That kind of thing. It’s a little statistical game that’s being played, and this is not a complete analysis of the data set.

And the media picks it up and repeats it.

Yeah, but they have a different incentive. If they’re centrist type media, somewhat contrarian, which is more like what I’d call the Economist, the incentive is, “Wow, this is what’ll surprise people. Look at how contrary this is to what people think!”

You mentioned that something like the global-warming pause got a lot of undeserved coverage, but what are some important stories right now that aren’t being covered enough?

My opinion is that the real story we don’t hear enough is all this attention to the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]. I’m increasingly convinced that the way that it does things is really flawed. Not scientifically flawed, really, so much as just a bad communications tool. It’s so technocratic and technical. What you ultimately get is journalists trying to figure out what percents scientists are actually using, but what’s missing when you do that is the really big-picture perspective. And the IPCC won’t say this because it’s so kind of clinical in how it handles things—what does it mean to destabilize a planet through its temperature? That’s the biggest roll of the dice that you could ever imagine. These are the things that terrify scientists but that most people have never even thought of, because they don’t have a big picture sense.

EDIT

http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/chris_mooney_q_and_a.php?page=2

[longship]

1. A 4th paragraph...

And it's more theoretical, as opposed to an event that gets immediate coverage?

Right. Yeah. But I don't think anybody, except for those few of us who are following scientists closely, or are the scientists--I don't think anybody really gets what it means to change the energy balance of the planet. I don't think anyone really gets that except the scientists, and they're just stunned. But then they put on their science hats and they're scientists and they can't say it either.

And that's why the science deniers have so much power over opinion. It's a matter of ethics. Scientists are a conservative lot. (Thankfully, not politically.) They try very diligently not to make statements beyond the data. But when you just make shit up you don't need to pay attention to details, or the data. That's the denier's strategy.