Al Gore versus George Will

UPDATE TO ORIGINAL POST, 2/24/09: See Andrew Revkin’s news analysis in the New York Times, here

Natural disasters 1995-2008

Not long ago, journalist bloggers and others excoriated George Will for a laughable column on climate change. (For examples, see here and here.) Meanwhile, they gave Al Gore a pass on an error he made in a speech at this year’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Why the difference? Are journalists failing to hold Gore accountable for assertions that are not supported by science? That was essentially the question Roger Pielke, Jr. asked me and a few journalists in an email Sunday night.

My answer: Will’s column was, as many people have already pointed out, a howler in its entirety. Gore’s speech, by contrast, was mostly defensible, with the exception of one significant error — partially corrected today, thanks in part to a post by Pielke, a subsequent complaint from the folks who put together a database Gore used in his speech, and the enterprising blogging of Andy Revkin at the New York Times. 

But as the climate debate moves deeper into the realm of politics, and journalism sinks deeper into crisis, who is going to continue to serve as independent monitors of the truth?

More about that in a minute. But first, a little background for those of you who haven’t read about Will’s recent column.

The Washington Post columnist tried to torpedo global warming forecasts by claiming that  climate scientists used to fret about the onset of a new ice age. They were wrong then, says Will; ergo, three decades later climate scientists are wrong now.

There’s just one little problem with this analysis, according to John Fleck of the Albuquerque Journal: “There was no widespread belief among scientists in the 1970s about a coming ice age,” Fleck writes in a recent column. “Will engages in an egregious case of cherry-picking, plucking quotes that seem to support his assertion while ignoring a vast body of literature that does not.” In fact, Fleck and two other authors on a scholarly paper published last fall in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society found that “rather than predicting a coming ice age, the majority of researchers working in the 1970s thought greenhouse warming was likely to quickly dominate any factors that might be contributing to the short-term cooling then underway.” (BTW: What a terrific thing that a journalist could collaborate with scientists on a paper like this!)

Meanwhile, up in Chicago, Al Gore covered all the usual subjects in his speech to the AAAS: rising CO2, increasing temperatures, shrinking sea ice, melting ice sheets, etc. — in keeping with what most scientists believe about climate change. But he also spent a few minutes tying a seeming long-term rise in the number of natural disasters over the past few decades to global warming. There was just one problem with his analysis: While scientists expect the number of disasters such as wildfires and floods to increase with global warming, the evidence does not yet support such a link.

And as Pielke wrote in his blog, Gore relied on data from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, or CRED, to make his case that an alarming increase in natural disasters was a symptom of global warming. But the CRED cautioned against reaching just such a conclusion. (For details, see Andy Revkin’s post.)

So, we have two errors, and very different reactions: biting blogospheric criticism of Will, but little or none of Gore. In fact, the former vice president got a round of enthusiastic applause from the scientists at the AAAS (which particularly annoyed Pielke, who wondered why scientists didn’t point out Gore’s mistake ).  Why the difference? 

Here’s what Roni Bell, one of the commenters in Pielke’s blog, had to say: ”Most media types will never expose him, for they themselves are a part of the ‘Al fawning circle.’”

“Fawning”? Bell must never have hung out with serious journalists…  

I have a different explanation: Gore made one significant error within the context of a long, detailed, and in-depth presentation that was mostly scientifically defensible. By contrast, Will’s column was feeble, wholly indefensible from a scientific perspective — and flat out wrong in its entirety. That’s why journalist bloggers lit into Will while giving Gore a pass.

Here was John Fleck’s explanation in the email conversation we had with Pielke on Sunday night:

“A reporter has two problems to solve - providing accurate information and leaving accurate impressions. The two are inextricably linked - you’ve got to have the first in order to support the second. But because of the nature of the way lay audiences tend to read us - casually and in a hurry - the second may be more important than the first.

If damage trends are the core of the story the reporter is writing, it is proper for the reporter to correct Gore’s howler. But if Gore spoke for an hour, got the rest of the science right, and made but one howler, a story trying to capture Gore’s overall message that singled out the howler has the risk of misleading by leaving the impression that Gore’s talk was full of howlers. To be clear - a story that used Gore’s misleading damage trends without question would be inappropriate. But it’s also a reasonable decision, of the sort we have to make all the time, to just leave it out.

I’m wondering how many reporters we have left in staff jobs at American news organizations who would even know that they should ask about Gore’s damage trends. Certainly not many in broadcast and cable news, where no full-time reporters or producers specializing in science and the environment likely remain, according to Peter Dykstra. (Peter’s science and environment unit was axed in December.) And even in print and online, science and environmental journalism are in serious trouble, with fewer full-time reporters and fewer front-page stories. 

So who will follow up on Gore’s response today to the mistake he made? To Gore’s credit,  he did remove the offending slide from his presentation, after Revkin contacted his office about the error. (I’m still waiting for a correction — actually, no, a retraction — from George Will and the Washington Post.) But in a post today, Pielke said there may still be problems with Gore’s linking of natural disasters and global warming.

In the end, the issue really isn’t whether Gore exaggerates here or there. The problem is bigger — it’s with the global warming zeitgeist. The terms of the debate have become so polarized, with one side attributing every flicker in the barometer to global warming, and the other doubting even whether the planet has been warming, let alone that humans are to blame. I get the sense that no evidence would ever convince folks on these extreme ends of the spectrum that they may be wrong. So who could blame ordinary citizens for being skeptical of any claims related to global warming?

Meanwhile, the ranks of the independent expert voices — the specialist journalists like John Fleck and Andrew Revkin, who know when to call a former vice president on a mistake and when to focus on the bigger picture — are thinning.

With potentially perilous repercussions for democracy.