What about climate scientists? Are their findings biased by politics and other factors?
Al and me.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about bias in science. And this subject leads naturally to questions about bias in journalism, including my own.
So as a Democrat, am I hopelessly biased in my coverage of climate change and other environmental issues?
I’ll get to that in a minute. But first, let’s look at some recent claims about bias in science.
Daniel Sarewitz, co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes at Arizona State University, wrote this in Slate recently:
Think about it: The results of climate science, delivered by scientists who are overwhelmingly Democratic, are used over a period of decades to advance a political agenda that happens to align precisely with the ideological preferences of Democrats. Coincidence—or causation?
It’s not my intention to take on Dan’s argument. I want to note it, and then move on toward the role of bias in science journalism, including my own. So please keep reading. But if you’d like to hear a good rebuttal, check out what Paul Raeburn wrote at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker site.
Another recent case for bias in science has been made in the New Yorker by Jonah Lehrer. In this case, it’s non-political “selective reporting of results” as a result of “subtle omissions and unconscious misperceptions, as researchers struggle to make sense of their results.” The story is behind a pay wall, so I won’t provide a link. But Keith Kloor has written an excellent post about it, with extensive excerpts.
What about possible biases among those who cover science as journalists and commentators, including yours truly? Here’s what the Journalism Tracker’s Charlie Petit has to say about that:
A bit of ‘Democratic’ climate news?
I am betting that, while I don’t know, the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has more liberals asssociated with it than conservatives. Just guessing. And I’d apply that to its director Tom Yulsman. Just guessing, again. But here’s a post to ponder at its website:
- CEJournal – Tom Yulsman: The heat goes on… ; Yulsman digs up data hinting strongly the globe is about to finish the warmest year in the modern, recorded era, and warmest in millenniums if one goes by proxy data like tree rings and ice cores used to make hockey sticks. Dunno if liberal bias is at work here in skewing the numbers. My guess: no.
Well, that got my attention. So I penned a response that I posted at Charlie’s site. But I thought readers of CEJournal should see it too.
So basically, where am I coming from? What are my true biases, and how do I try to make sure they don’t blind me? Here goes:
SHOCKING BUT TRUE!… By way of full disclosure, and as Charlie suspected, I am indeed a Democrat. Over the course of more than 30 years as a voter, I have opted for a Republican candidate maybe a few times at most. Jacob Javits comes to mind. And no doubt I would have voted for John Lindsay if I had been of voting age as a resident of Brooklyn back in the ’60s. (Alas, I was just a tot, so what did I know?)
It is also probably true that I wound up in journalism, as opposed to business or finance, because my mom was a good Lefty who read the Sunday New York Times over bagels and lox every week.
But do my political beliefs influence how I cover science, particularly climate change and other global environmental issues?
Those views no doubt had some influence on my preference to focus on these issues. As does the fact that I have children who will be grappling with the potential environmental impacts of my generation’s actions. But do my political views predispose me to being less skeptical than I should be of scientific claims?
Well, nothing would please me more than to wake up tomorrow to learn that scientists had just discovered some huge, heretofore unknown natural factor nullifying any possibility of a human impact on global life support systems. Would that not be the science story of the century?
And wouldn’t it be fabulous if instead of being the first person to report that by NASA’s accounting the past meteorological year was the warmest on record, I was actually the first to report that global warming IS bunk? Like, for real? I can only imagine what THAT would do for my page views.
And what an amazing and fun challenge for a science writer: having to explain how physics, paleoclimatology, observational climatology, and climate modeling — not to mention more than 100 years of scientific research — all were wrong.
Alas, this is exceedingly unlikely to happen. (Because Andy Revkin is likely to beat me to the story.)
In all seriousness, I know that I am biased; all human beings are. And so as a journalist I struggle constantly to acknowledge those biases to myself and do the best that I can to circumvent them in my reporting.
So, for example, next week I am hoping to carve out the time to write a piece (that could be cross-posted at Climate Central; stay tuned) examining why NASA GISS, NOAA-NCDC, and the UK’s HadCRUT all come up with somewhat different readings on global temperature anomalies. Speaking of WUWT, what IS up with that?
My intention is to scrutinize in particular NASA’s technique of filling in observational gaps in temperature data up in the Arctic with modeled temperatures — something that, as far as I know, the other two science groups don’t do. Is this legitimate? Does it tend to inaccurately inflate global temperature anomalies? I would like to know.
A knowing cynic might suspect that my true bias here is that I secretly hope there IS a problem in the way NASA does its temperature analyses. After all, that would simply be a much better story. And at the end of the day, isn’t our biggest bias as journalists the fact that we are, in fact, looking for the best, most newsworthy, most impactful story we can find?
That is so much more satisfying than writing, “Nothing of much importance happened today.”
And it would be so much more satisfying than reporting, as I did yesterday, that, “Yes folks, it looks like the world is still warming.”
This thing has 27 Comments
On politics, bias and climate science:
http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/27/2-3/100.short
Tom,
Your bias shows up with the way mix editorial comments about the implications of the science in with the facts.
For example, this post:
http://www.cejournal.net/?p=4525#more-4525
You said:
“One last thing: I don’t mean to make light of what this graphic depicts. But when I viewed the original images this morning, I was struck by the beautiful way they depicted scientific — and unsettling — information.”
You felt it necessary to put the word “unsettling” which implies that increasing temperatures are something we should be worried about. But that sentiment requires that you buy in to the extremely speculative narrative about how the consequences of the warming are universally bad and the presumption that adaption will be difficult to do. That is mostly political/economic opinion – not a scientific one.
In my opinion, people on the left are risk adverse and fear the unknown. People on the right tend to be more comfortable with risk. That is why entrepreneurs tend to be right wing and government workers are left wing (at least from an economic perspective). That is also why people on the left put more weight on the precautionary principle. This is why some on the right can accept all of the concrete scientific evidence for AGW as true but then insist that no action is required. IOW, they are fine living with the risk and no amount of gnashing of teeth is likely to change that.
If you really want to be neutral in your coverage you would have to carefully avoid making inferences about the political/economic implications of the science you report.
Tim: I never said I wasn’t biased. In fact, I said quite the opposite.
And why do you think it is inappropriate for me to offer my opinions in a blog dedicated to analysis and commentary? This isn’t a newspaper. It’s a blog.
I don’t hide anything here. WYSIWYG. And YMMV, depending, of course, on the screen of values that you see the world through.
Concerning your question, I used the word “unsettling” because a warming world does bring a number of challenges, including rising sea level. This is unequivocally, objectively true. Depending both on how high and how rapidly sea level rises, the results clearly should be unsettling to people who live along the coasts — and worldwide there are many hundreds of millions of them.
But Tim, I used the word “unsettling,” not “terrifying.” And in my comments above, I used the word “challenges.” I did not say the world is coming to an end. Nor did I make any kind of catastrophist statement. Moreover, if you read CEJournal you would see that I try to steer clear of that kind of language. I may miss the mark sometimes, but I do try hard.
But quite frankly Tim, the changes that we are likely to face in the future ARE “unsettling.” As a father who more than anything else values doing what I can to give my children the best opportunities to succeed — and also to leave them a better world — that is simply my honest reaction.
So Tim, do you think I ought to value something else? And what do you value the most?
I think I partially misunderstood your point.
I have no issue with journalist who are upfront with their biases and I think most journalists who put their name on pieces are reasonably up front. Usually learn the most when I can see what two journalists with opposite biases say about the same issue. Bias only really becomes a problem when anonymous editors and writers publish stories that are presented as being neutral when they are usually biased.
You are right that on the scale of emotive adjectives “unsettling” is fairly mild compared to terms others use. I picked up on it because I wanted to give you concrete example that explains why I see your presentations on this blog as biased towards the climate activist side of the debate.
As a father, I am also worried about my children but for me I am much more worried about the efforts to hamstring our economy with restrictions on energy use while our economic competitors are allowed to do whatever they want. If the climate activists are successful in imposing a lopsided treaty on us they will do more harm our children’s future than climate change. But that is just my opinion.
As a dear friend described us in the sixties, i suppose i am a Jeffersonian Trotskyite, whereas today i may be fairly called a rational anarchist. Be that as it may, i am often reminded in these sorts of discussions that indeed reality does have a liberal bias.
Economic competitors allowed to do whatever they want (China and Japan, two of the more environmentally progressive nations selling green technology to us already)? Hamstring our economy (war, massive subsidies for fossil fuels, regressive tax strategies that favor the richest)? Lopsided treaty (so so far from any agreement on anything)? Cannonballs of rhetoric that seems to fall softly when actively challenged by, well, the facts.
spyder,
All of the claims of catastrophe due to AGW are unsupportable when one looks at the facts today. The fears are based on projections of what might happen in the future. The same is true of the severe economic consequences of carbon rationing in a world where only some countries are required to actually reduce emissions.
The fact is countries have destroyed their economies with bad economic policies many times in the past and this makes the dangers carbon regulation something that we ignore at our peril.
TomYulsman says:
“Well, nothing would please me more than to wake up tomorrow to learn that scientists had just discovered some huge, heretofore unknown natural factor nullifying any possibility of a human impact on global life support systems.”
You mean a huge unknown natural factor like clouds?
Writing something serious against the climate scientists would get you ostracized from mainstream journalism and hounded as a Holocaust Denier. I’m betting that you will take the safe route and just say that mixing thermometer readings with projections is not shady at all. After all, you will be a Holocaust Denier if you say that is ripingly obvious data rigging.
Koogle: http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2010/12/09/2923/
Anon: I welcome your comments, but please try to keep the conversation on a higher level. As someone who grew up in a neighborhood with a number of Holocaust survivors, I don’t appreciate the flippant use of the word, in whatever context it is applied. I am making this request respectfully and I am hoping you will honor it.
Concerning your comments about the GISTEMP temperature record: Perhaps I am making an unwarranted assumption, but my guess is that you believe the satellite temperature record of Roy Spencer and his colleagues is the most reliable. And if it is, what do you think this says about the GISTEMP record, interpolated as it is in major parts of the Arctic?
Before you jump to answer that, consider that the trends seen in the GISTEMP record look much more like those in the satellite record than they do the non-interpolated HadCRUT record. Of course, one can manipulate things by cherry picking the year in which a particular data series begins. But try out different ranges for yourself over at http://www.Woodfortrees.org, where you can use their interactive graphing application to plot different temperature series using GISTEMP, UAH, and HadCRUT data.
Check it out for yourself and let me know what you conclude. If you make any graphs that you think are interesting or revealing, please consider sharing them here. (Just copy and past the URLs of the pages containing the graphs you find revealing.)
Lastly, you’ve implied that you think I am a coward. I’m not exactly sure what leads you to that conclusion. Since I’m the target of that accusation, I think I’m owed an explanation.
Ton: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/12/the-dessler-cloud-feedback-paper-in-science-a-step-backward-for-climate-research/
To downplay the uncertainty the role that clouds play by linking to a bogus Dessler study is just a silly public relations 101 game the CAGW crowd usually play. IPCC ar4 admits the level of understanding of clouds is “very low”. James Hansen says it’s even worse than that. If there are even 2% more clouds as a CO2 feedback there is no scare. So wake up and enjoy the interglacial.
If you take the trouble to say or write ANYTHING, it’s because of some value-driven motive (self-serving or otherwise) to communicate and influence – and that must be a fairly fundamental personal BIAS, not necessarily shared by others.
Any crime in bias, lies in conscious (to a lesser extent, ‘unconscious’) attempts to influence by pretending your motives are other than what they appear and/or that ‘faulty’ logic is sound and/or bad data is ‘good’.
As biased as Tom may be, I don’t believe he’s guilty of any of these crimes!
@Tom — GISS looks the furthest (warmest) vs. the UAH from 1979 (beginning of satellite), both in slope and anomoly — or am I reading this wrong?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1980/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1979/trend/plot/uah/every/plot/uah/from:1979/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1979/plot/gistemp/from:1979/trend
BTW — good article. The intensity of the narrative used can undercut the credibility of the argument. Those who talking about (alternatively) “killing the planet” or “destroying the economy” speak well to their respective bases, but confuse those in the middle, and deafen the opposition to any rational content or argument.
The ongoing cloud debate is really not all that much of a debate.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/12/feedback-on-cloud-feedback/#more-5676
I’ve read your stuff for a few years now and I’m fairly convinced that the science and the facts shape your world view (and hence your writing) and not the other way around.
There’s a difference between analysis and dogma. Facts keep streaming in that strengthen the scientific consensus. We’re talking about issues that involve the physical sciences here. You’re not required to give “equal time” to those whose world view prevents them from acknowledging scientific consensus.
If the Dow Jones Industrial Average closes down 20 points on a given day, business reporters don’t give time to people who assert it actually closed up, or even that “the jury is still out” on where the Dow closed that day. They’ll talk to analysts who explain what closing down means. They won’t give time to people who assert that there’s some conspiracy afoot to make you THINK the Dow is closing down. And if someone is out there trying to insist the Dow is up, and tries to get on television or run TV ads about it, that reporter should start to look at the financial interests of that person.
the “political affiliation” argument is a smokescreen created by people who don’t want people to know the facts. They want you to worry more about what people might say about you than report the facts.
John: Over the long run, there is very little difference between NASA-GISS, NCDC and HadCRU, despite the fact that first two extrapolate whereas the third does not. (I’ll get to the satellite record in a minute.) Go here and look at the graph comparing the three temperature anomaly series: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitalweathergang/2010/12/with_climate_change_its_the_lo.html#more
The average yearly difference is 0.0432 degrees C, with a minimum difference of 0.0004C and a maximum of 0.1760.
You have argued that it hasn’t been warming much for the last 10 or so years. But as I pointed out before, in order to show that, you have to cherry pick a very particular starting date (2002 seems to work very well). Moreover, when you do that cherry picking, only HadCRUT shows a flat or declining temperature trend. No matter what starting date you’d like to pick in the last 10 or so years, your favored satellite record and GISS BOTH show increasing temperatures. In fact, even if you pick 1998, an extremely warm year due in part to El Nino, as your starting point, both GISS and the satellite record show an increasing trend. (So does HadCRUT, but it’s a barely increasing trend.)
To illustrate the power of cherry picking, try starting with 1999. Then the increasing temperature trend is much more significant. Which only goes to show how bogus cherry picking is. You shouldn’t do it.
The fact is that in every single record since 1980, each decade has been warmer than the one before it. And contrary to what the skeptics claim, the 2000s have warmed just as rapidly as each of the previous two decades.
Lastly, concerning the claim that NASA’s extrapolation is bogus, before your criticize you ought to examine the details of their technique, their argument in favor of it, and the evidence they provide that it is valid: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/paper/gistemp2010_draft0803.pdf If you don’t give it a fair hearing, you really have no business casting stones.
A couple of things stand out. Satellite monitoring of the Arctic shows significant warming there, consistent with NASA’s extrapolations, and with the greatest concentration over Greenland and the parts of the Arctic Ocean that have seen the most shrinkage of Arctic sea ice. On the other hand, an analysis of Arctic temperatures over the past 10 years using meteorological station data on land showed that warming was 0.25 degrees C LESS than what GISS estimates. But even if you accept this — and there are reasons not to (discussed in the paper) — it would cause an overestimate of global temperature by only 0.01°C. And 2005, not 1998, would still stand out as the warmest year so far. (Although in the GISS record, the 2010 meteorological year just surpassed it.)
In any case, look at the comparison of the three different temperature records (GISS, HadCRUT and NCDC) reproduced in the Washington Post and then tell me with a straight face that your bet is for flat or decreasing global temperatures over the long run. I’ll take that bet any day. I’ll be the farm on it. (No risk, since I don’t own a farm. ;-> )
I misspoke on one factor above: In the UAH satellite record, the period 1980 to 1990 showed a slightly decreasing temperature trend globally, whereas both 1990 to 2000 and 2000 to 2010 show increasing temperature. (Caveat: 2010 is not yet over, so the very final word on just how steep that 2000-2010 trend has been is not yet in.)
@Tom: we must be looking at different graphs
GISS is progressively drifting higher than HADCRUT over the last decade or so. Starting with difference of the 12 running avg .05 in 1998, increasing to .17 (current) (.67 vs. .5 — that’s 25% of the total GISS anomaly and 35% of the HADCRUT).
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/mean:12/plot/gistemp/from:1998/mean:12
About the cherries… it’s not my intent at all. ENSO events make linear trending over any short period meaningless. Excluding the beginning or trailing events completely dominate the line fit. One needs to either include them both or excluding them both to see the intervening trend. Right now we’re only seeing the ni~no phase of both and the ni~na phase of the current ENSO event.
Line fits are tools, but tools are fit for specific purposes. Some time ago I learned “the nails with the spiral grooves” need to be twisted not hammered… who knew?
FYI, JZ, the HadCRUT team recently stated that the identification of some data errors will require adjustments. These will likely bring it much more into line with GISS.
Re UAH vs. GISS and HadCRUT, you are aware that the lapse rate means they should be different, right? See this discussion by Tamino.
The upshot is that all five data sets show sharply rising temperatures, which are being reflected in major changes to the planet. It would be more instructive to discuss some of those, especially since some of them receive little (or even no) coverage compared to the global temp data sets.
For example, does the fact that the Agulhas current has been observed to have started leaking into the South Atlantic cause for concern given that Atlantic meridional circulation was disrupted when it did so during the mid-Pliocene warm period? Or what about the recent (and ongoing) 2 degree poleward shift of the Hadley circulation (well, actually the whole atmospheric circulation, but let’s start with the one that controls where the deserts go)? Even within the tropics, are you concerned that the recent sharp warming of the tropical North Atlantic (the Agulhas at work?) will pull the ITCZ north over South America such that much of the Amazon converts to savanna? It’s a very long list, I’m afraid.
Steve: Thanks for the link to the Tamino post.
What’s most revealing, at least to me, is when both the GISS and UAH records are put on the same baseline (1979-2000) and then the time series is run. In that case, the 12 month running means look very similar, except that UAH seems to significantly accentuate the warming of El Ninos and the cooling of La Ninas. Why would that be so? (Must be part of some nefarious conspiracy by James Hansen and his fellow warmists, I reckon.)
I’m sure Tom knows, but for the record the reason is that the lower troposphere measured by the satellites responds to ENSO more sharply than does the surface.
Steve: Why does the lower troposphere as measured by satellites respond more sharply during ENSO events? I’m not sure of the explanation. And please direct me to some documentation on this if you can. Many thanks!
Steve is right when he says that UAH and GISS are not comparable because of the lapse rate. But this difference means that the UAH trend must be 1.2x the GISS for them to be considered equal. If a direct comparison of UAH and GISS yeilds the same trend then GISS high.
A reference to the 1.2 figure can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_temperature_measurements
Bottom line: GISS is likely exagerrating trends because of UHI. CRU is feeling hard done by because its data is falling behind GISS in the ‘hottest year’ sweepstakes so CRU scientists have left no stone unturned when to comes to finding excuses to adjust past data to make it show the picture they what.
The only real question is why do these scientists think they deserve to be taken seriously when they constantly “adjust” the raw data if the data does not show what they want. The one sided nature of the adjustments makes them extremely suspect.
Please don’t be worried – a very reasonable set of responses to The Declining Effect article here:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=8987
Another great take on current “weather”:
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/whispering-fire-on-a-crowded-planet/?permid=33#comment33
Also for my treasure trove: “correcting [name fake skeptic propagandist] feels like either a civic duty or a colossal waste of time.”
I think Monbiot makes clear that the campaign is not accidental, and any corrective is much needed. I know many have already seen this but it bears repeating:
On the twisting of those facts, and the organized campaign it represents, this:
“So what’s going on? I’m not suggesting that most of the people trying to derail these discussions are paid to do so, though I would be surprised if none were. I’m suggesting that some of the efforts to prevent intelligence from blooming seem to be organised, and that neither website hosts nor other commenters know how to respond.
“For his film (Astro)Turf Wars, Taki Oldham secretly recorded a training session organised by a rightwing libertarian group called American Majority. The trainer, Austin James, was instructing Tea Party members on how to “manipulate the medium”(11). This is what he told them:
““Here’s what I do. I get on Amazon; I type in “Liberal Books”. I go through and I say “one star, one star, one star”. The flipside is you go to a conservative/ libertarian whatever, go to their products and give them five stars. … This is where your kids get information: Rotten Tomatoes, Flixster. These are places where you can rate movies. So when you type in “Movies on Healthcare”, I don’t want Michael Moore’s to come up, so I always give it bad ratings. I spend about 30 minutes a day, just click, click, click, click. … If there’s a place to comment, a place to rate, a place to share information, you have to do it. That’s how you control the online dialogue and give our ideas a fighting chance.”
“Over 75% of the funding for American Majority, which hosted this training session, comes from the Sam Adams Alliance(12). In 2008, the year in which American Majority was founded, 88% of the alliance’s money came from a single donation, of $3.7m(13). A group which trains rightwing libertarians to distort online democratic processes, in other words, was set up with funding from a person or company with a very large wallet.
“The internet is a remarkable gift, which has granted us one of the greatest democratic opportunities since universal suffrage. We’re in danger of losing this global commons as it comes under assault from an army of trolls and flacks, many of them covertly organised or trained. The question for all of us – the Guardian, other websites, everyone who benefits from this resource – is what we intend to do about it. It’s time we fought back and reclaimed the internet for what it does best: exploring issues, testing ideas, opening the debate.”
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/12/13/reclaim-the-cyber-commons/
Oops, left out the current weather citation, this:
http://capitalclimate.blogspot.com/2010/12/arctic-air-attack-registers-records.html