Month 10, Day 27: Down Under…

The Australian Newcastle Herald (NSW) has an article noting that scientists talk like scientists, and people often have trouble understanding what they’re talking about when they do that.

Ben Newell, a psychology lecturer at the University of NSW, and Professor Andy Pitman, a scientist from the same body’s climate change research centre, put their findings together recently in The Psychology of Global Warming, a paper for the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

They urged scientists to think about four aspects of how they delivered information: sampling, framing, comprehension and consensus.

“Sampling” is the evidence you use in making judgments. If half the opinions you hear support the view that globing warming is doubtful, you’re more likely to believe that scientists are only half-convinced of its truth.

So an audience that saw a program about “Climategate emails” the night before is going to be a harder sell than the one that saw a map in the paper that morning showing the main street under water by 2050.

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‘‘Comprehension” is a battle, since it depends on what mental models people are already using.

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The problem for scientists is that different groups have already reached a consensus about global warming based on any number of factors, including religion and politics, and the members tend to believe each other before they will believe an outsider.

(Indeed. A sceptics group in Minnesota, reviewing the Sydney duo’s paper on their website, commented: “Their conclusion seems to be that people who don’t believe in global warming are too dumb to understand.”)

Actually, that’s my conclusion, too. This letter is a little longer (their limit is 200 words) and is pretty much a standard screed on false equivalency.

And…(drum roll)…it’s letter number three hundred.

Yes, scientists do have trouble communicating with the general public. But it’s crucial to recognize that the facts of global climate change have been obscured for decades by the irresponsible laziness and profit-fixation of our news media. Actual reporting is hard work, involving research, fact-checking and the correlation of data; it’s costly, too, requiring lots of reportorial time. It’s easier to quote a few people with sufficiently divergent opinions, thereby seeming “balanced.” Thus news outlets mislead the public into believing that there are equally valid arguments for and against the reality of climate change — after all, there are people on television representing each side! This abdication of journalistic responsibility has contributed significantly to our current predicament.

But not all arguments are valid. The medieval theory of humours is irrelevant to a report on medicine; an article on global travel doesn’t require input from the Flat Earth Society. With ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agreed on the human causes of global warming, our news media should focus on reporting the bad news as accurately and carefully as they can, rather than hewing to the specious policies of false equivalence that have made their jobs easier in the past.

Warren Senders