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."

Comments

Par for the course

[TheMeuge]

This is merely par for the course... and the observations made in the TFA are not new either. I encounter them every day on Slashdot!

HIV not causing AIDS conspiracy, Fluoride in the water conspiracy, Cancer being cured but evil corporations in league with all scientists not releasing the cure... I have to endure this every single day.

I think the more interesting subject to explore, is the psychology of why people are so eager to believe the improbable, and far more likely to accept an outrageous exaggeration, a halftruth, or an outright lie, merely to spite the establishment. As a scientist, that's a subject that interests me the most, because I would like to locate the part of the brain that will believe that the herbs in "Airborne" will miraculously prevent you from getting a disease, but will refuse to accept scientific principles and facts that have held firm under scrutiny for decades.

obvious != right

[More_Cowbell]

Science journalism would perhaps be the one area where you would expect the author to concisely go out of their way to be unbiased.

Re:obvious != right

[Anonymous Coward]

scientists are too jealous/blinded by hubris in their ivory towers to see and accept what should be so obviously true to everyone else. If your job or grant pays well enough that you can afford to build a whole tower out of the tusks of poached exotic animals, it's not hubris to be defensive of your place in the world, it's your duty as a red blooded American.

Re:Rather obvious

[ChameleonDave]

yes, the majority of writers are biased, either consciously, or otherwise.

More than the majority. I'd say that everyone is necessarily biased about everything, because we can never avoid the fact that we approach every issue with some sort of background or perspective.

However, there are those who are biased, and those who are biased and also throw all logic to the wind.

Re:Science has always been biased

[CheshireCatCO]

If you're a Phd who has spent your whole life researching and proving something then you're likely to opposed someone proving eactly the opposite. This is true to some extent, but it glosses over another even more important point: most newly proposed theories are wrong. (It's a lot like mutations in evolutionary biology.) Many of the theories are still-born, never making it past someone's blackboard before they're shot down, but quite a few get floated. Some get floated quite adamantly by their adherents. A few are better than the older models. After even a little while in science, you see the ratio and it's natural to want to stick to the tested theory until the new guy has been able to provide some strong evidence for itself.

That's sort of the rub, though, isn't it? Only a few new theories which suplant the old model do so with a really compelling single test. We can think of a few of the exceptions: General Relativity and the 1919 eclipse, the Big Bang (which was already pretty widely accepted, but never mind) and the discovery of the CMB, the giant impact theory of the origin of the Moon and the numerical simulations of the 1980s, etc. But these *are* the exceptions. Most theories which will eventually take over do so by slow accumulation of evidence in their favor, not with any slam dunk. As a result, convincing scientists to abondon the older model is difficult and there's no magic cut-off where you can say, "Now the new theory is better than the old one." So are the scientists being bad at science? Sure, it's easy to spin the narrative that way, but I'd say no. They're at worst being conservative and not wanting to leap onto a new model until they see that it's really better.

Anyone expecting unbiassed science to come out of that lot is just a misguided idealist. Now I feel like you're being insulting. Individual scientists are human, we have our flaws and our blind-spots. Some of us have real agendas and a few are even downright dishonest. But as a group, we're contradictory, curious, and anti-authority. As a result, science is pretty good at self-correcting. A single scientist can lie to himself or even lie to others. But that always gets caught eventually because someone starts asking questions and we collectively have no vested interest in covering up lies.

(Any time you hear about scientists being involved in a massive conspiracy, like some anti-global warming fanatics will try to tell you, you can bet it's wrong. Any person who could prove evolution or GW conclusively incorrect would have just made a career and world-wide fame for herself.)

Re:Can you cite these?

[Geoffrey.landis]

As a journalist myself, I, too, am most interested in seeing those thousands of studies, especially those dated more than 30 years in the past. I have done a lot of research (into extant literature) on climate change and never ran across any references to global warming that predated the 1990s. Well, turning to the bookshelf sitting immediately to the left of my desk, how about An Introduction to Atmospheric Radiation, Kuo-Nan Liou, Academic Press 1980. It's a relatively standard text about optical absorption and scattering processes in atmospheres. The greenhouse effect is brought up in chapter 4 (Infrared Radiation Transfer in the Atmosphere) and discussed further in chapter 8 (Radiation Climatology).

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.

Re:Can you cite these?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.