Slashdot Mirror
Bad Science Journalism Gets Schooled
TaeKwonDood writes "Biology post-doc Dr. Michael White takes a look at the '2007 Best American Science and Nature Writing' and doesn't like what he finds in an article called Bad Science Journalism and the Myth of the Oppressed Underdog. Turns out it's not just political writers who pick a position they want to advocate and then write stories to confirm it. Science journalism gets a scolding and it's been a long time coming."
Kuhn is very very explicit about the normal state of science being the evolutionary expansion of the paradigm/work within the paradigm. It's only when the extremely rare paradigm shift occurs that there is an overturning of the established order. Even there Kuhn seems to think these shifts often occur because the strain on the previous paradigm grows too great to sustain, i.e., a wide variety of experiments taken together require such unsatisfying explanations that the paradigm is overthrown for a new one.
I think it would be more appropriate to say that Kuhn is mostly rejecting the idea of science proceding via revolutions. The sort of view that preceded Kuhn was that science proceeds by formulating hypothesises which in turn are overthrown should they be contradicted by experiment. Thus Kuhn is actually arguing against the idea that science primarily progresses via the disproof of the prevailing view.
In fact I think it's a fair interpretation to say that Kuhn does not even believe there is an objective fact of the matter of which paradigm is better. It's quite clear that Kuhn holds out evolutionary expansion of the paradigm to be the stereotypical example of progress in science.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
The "friendly article" is about a specific narrative, "the establishment and the underdog", not about bias. The submitter got (as always on /.) it wrong. I have no idea whether the submission is an example of stupidity, bias, or maybe a different narrative. The "they are biased" narrative is very popular on /. for some reason.
And while journalists of course have bias as everybody else, what characterize the profession is not bias (in fact, they are probably better than average at hiding it), but the search for narratives. Without a narrative, news stories will get boring, and they will lose readers (or viewers, or listeners). The term they themselves uses for a narrative is "an angle". Unlike with bias, journalists just want an angle (or narrative) in order to tell their story, they do not (in general) particularly care about what the angle is.
Certainly. It's very easy to think everything is covered under science. But, there are many things (mainly, philosophical questional) that some would try to group under science because they believe they can conjecture out an answer.
Perhaps you haven't heard of cosmology and WIMPs vs MACHOs? Seriously, though, people who tend to quickly polarize over Global Warming tend to do so because of the seemingly obvious ramifications of admitting whether Global Warming exists. In short, the issue has more to do with people unwilling, on both sides, to go over the evidence and accept the proof that's available and leave it at that. But, then it's the same issue that came up ages ago when discussing the racial relations (especially, any claimed superiority) of various ethnicities. And *that* issue is still unresolved because dogma can override common sense.
Sorry to break it to you, but universities existed long before there were governments to fund them. And, they will continue to exist long after governments refuse to fund them. Academics, in general, are interested in their work above all else. Now, this may lead to dogma and pet theories without any evidence. But, that doesn't translate into trying to sustain a revenue stream (well, at least, it only does so in the sense of funding their research, not in padding the academic's pocketbook). And sure, there are academics who are in it for the money, just like there are charlatens in any field. But, there isn't any evidence (at least, none I'm aware of) to hint at some sort of inherent academic conspiracy, no matter how good such conjecturing looks good on paper.
Or, people with evidence they think will be helpful are trying to warn people of the potential risks of merrily continuing our current actions. Most, realizing they *don't* know the long-term consequences (at least for humanity) of what happens if we continue, urge those with the most power to effect change (citizens and through them, their nations) to effect change. Of course, they realize they can't do much (at least, not without advocating military force) to push "the poor" countries or dictatorships to do the right thing. So, the tend to focus on "the rich".
We're already engaging in an experiment on a planetary scale (you know, burning all that oil, coal, etc). And it happens that people are constantly making predictions based on those fossil fuels burned and how that affects the global climate. And all those scientists with their measurements of ocean CO2 absorption, temperature stations, measurements of ice sheets, etc all provide the data to confirm or deny those predictions. The only real question, then, is if the people on either side are actually looking at the theories that repeatedly pass and the evidence collected (to verify that it does, in fact, not contradict the theory). And if one side, after seeing the evidence, dismisses it based upon their own beliefs without any proof, then they are being anti-science. But, that says nothing about Global Warming.
I'll try to be more angry next time.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Try Science News. Short, clear articles on new scientific developments and some review articles, and when they do write about sociological or historical meta-issues in science, it's usually done so in a relatively unbiased manner and confined to separate articles.
Ben Goldacre, who writes a regular column on bad science for the Guardian on bad science wrote a great column about this once, in which he pointed out the obvious-in-retrospect: science journalists don't have science backgrounds. He regularly takes on both bad science and bad science reporting, and his blog/column is a lot of fun to read. Fun in a deeply disturbing way.
The one startling regularity I have noticed across all science reporting is that the more I know about the subject area, the more misleading the article seems. It seems clear this pattern can't be completely limited to science reporting. I cut popular media a lot of slack in terms of glossing over details and simplifying for a popular audience. But the distortions I see are more often fundamentally misleading about the nature of the work and the details that are relevant to the story. Disturbingly, I'm still tempted to believe some of what I read in areas about which I know little. Even more disturbing, I find this mode of reporting seeping into the scientific articles I read and review. I guess this saves the reporters the trouble, but points out one of the many problems with science reporting done by people who have no ability to read science critically.
The one time I was interviewed about my work, I had the sense the reporter already had a story outlined, based on a science-fiction-y reading of the press release, and was basically fishing for quotes to add meat to the story.
Greenhouse-effect studies before the 1990s lacked the detailed numerical models that we have developed since the 1990s, since these depend on massive amounts of computer power, but the effect has been known for a long time, and it was definitely discussed before the 1990s.
This isn't an exhaustive search of the literature-- this is the first book that I happen to have handy. If the very first atmospheric science book I put my hands on that predates the 1990s has the reference, yet you say you never ran across any references to greenhouse-effect induced global warming that predated the 1990s, this seems to be an indication that you are unfamiliar with the literature.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
TFG, I'm kinda suspecting you're trolling, but just in case...
Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. J. Hansen, et. al., 1981.
Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment. Charney, J.G., et al., 1979.
A Terminal Mesozoic "Greenhouse": Lessons from the Past, Dewey M. McLean, 1978.
Greenhouse effects due to man-made perturbations of trace gases. Wang, W. C., et al., 1976.
The effects of doubling the CO2 concentration on the climate of a general circulation model, Manabe, S., and R.T. Wetherald, 1975.
Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?, Wallace S. Broecker, 1975.
The concentration and isotopic abundances of carbon dioxide in rural and marine air, Keeling, C.D., 1961
Carbon dioxide exchange between atmosphere and ocean and the question of an increase of atmospheric CO2 during the past decades. Revelle, R., and H.E. Suess, 1957.
Or, going back a little further:
Callendar, G.S., 1938: The artificial production of carbon dioxide and its influence on temperature. Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc., 64, 223-237.
Arrhenius, S., 1896: On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature on the ground, Philos. Mag., 41, 237-276.
The current IPCC report has a review of historical climate research, and is available at http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter1.pdf.
Bollocks. "Global Cooling panic" is a myth, it's debunked virtually every time it's mentioned and yet it still keeps getting repeated as fact.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Actually, the earliest concern over greenhouse gases that I'm aware of was proposed in 1896, by Svante Arrhenius. The American Institute of Physics has a pretty extensive bibliography as part of their review paper on this subject, which goes back even further than this.
See The Discovery of Global Warming
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
Yes, but there aren't really two sides in the global warming debate. I don't know of any credible expert who denies that humans are drastically raising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and that it's going to change the climate somehow. The ongoing debate is over what's going to happen next, but that's a very complicated debate with a lot of subtlety and doesn't make for a good right vs. left narrative so it doesn't really get covered properly in the media. Instead what we get is whackjobs saying "Climate change isn't real! Humans aren't doing anything!" getting air time trying to shout down the scientists who devote their careers to studying this subject. Or we get pseudo-science documentaries about the scary "reality" of global warming that only shows a combination of all of the worst case scenarios. Neither of these is acceptable or responsible journalism.
I'm addressing the assertion that anthropogenic climate change driven by CO2 was something that was cooked up for political purposes in the 1990s. The literature search clearly shows that this is false as anybody who was alive and paying attention at the time could tell you.
Now, on to your assertion. It sounds like an unassailable philosophical proposition to say that anthropogenic (I'm glad climate change "skeptics" have relented that much at least) climate change is an untestable proposition because we don't have a control Earth in which humanity was magically whisked away in 1990.
But it's not.
It is true that having a control subject is the most reliable way of ensuring a hypothesis is falsifiable. In fact the basic design of a controlled experiment revolves around trying. The essence here is making predictions. If you check the bit I quoted above, one of the predictions made in 1983 was that the 1990s would be exceptionally warm. Had they been cool, or about the same, then the CO2 generated climate change hypothesis would have been shown false.
The question is not whether anthropogenic greenhouse effect climate change is falsifiable, the question is how much confidence we should have in the evidence so far. A priori the we can attack the claim on three fronts. First the climate might not be getting warmer; if not then we have no evidence. Second, the concentrations of CO2 might not be increasing, or they might not be increasing in a way that can be correlated to climate change. Finally, humans might not be contributing to CO2.
All these approaches have been tried, and will continue to be tried, with great vigor. If you know any Earth scientists, you'd realize they'd love to be able to knock a link out of the chain, simply because so many scientists have tried and thus far failed.
It's really time we start to call global warming, not a hypothesis, but a theory, like evolution. Nearly every biologist believes in the theory of evolution. However, if you look carefully, experiments and studies of evolution still have vestigial attempts to disprove evolution built into their methods. If you want to show that natural selection functions in a certain way, you still end up attempting to show it is not functioning at all in this particular case. The same goes for Earth sciences. Very few Earth scientists disbelieve in climate change; but disproving there is a change in anything you are measuring is always going to be the first thing you do, even if you are quite confident.\
OF COURSE THEY DO! If they didn't, then you'd really have reason to believe the numbers were cooked. I'm married to a scientist, and she sometimes says (in private, because people latch onto these things the wrong way) that the data for global warming is "too good". This doesn't mean she disbelieves the existing data, it's just that she's itching to see more contrary data. It's the nature of the animal. I can tell you if I confidently stated that day follows night she'd automatically stay up all night to make sure. It's drilled into them until its second nature. Finding something somebody forgot to check is how you make your reputation.
It is still within the bounds of possibility somebody make make his scientific reputation by disproving the anthropogenic link, although in light of how well this hypothesis has held up over the last forty years, you can't say this viewpoint represent the balance of evidence. It only represents carefully selected evidence.
What may be more likely (and relevant from a policy standpoint) is the idea it's too late for humans to do anything about it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
One place to start would be the review titled "THE MYTH OF THE 1970S GLOBAL COOLING SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS" that looks at the papers published on subject from 1965-1979. You can see it here: http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf According to this there was a mention of possible climate change due to the release of CO2 from burning of fossil fuels in a 1965 report from the Presidents Science Advisory Committee (to Lyndon Johnson).