> Rhode points out that temperatures this week were just under two-tenths of a degree warmer than the previous record. “Two-tenths doesn’t sound like a lot—but in ocean terms two-tenths is actually a lot because it doesn’t warm as quickly as the land,” he says. As you can see from the chart’s record of past years, March is normally when average sea surface temperatures start declining.
But then the article wanders away from that point before saying when the temperatures do start declining.
This is a big failing of science advocacy as it relates to journalism, public policy, and public discourse. Two-tenths of a degree requires interpretation to understand its significance, and it feels like a small number.
Instead, lead with something like the oceans should have started cooling down a month ago but they haven't. It's more relatable and gets right to the point.
I'm neither criticizing this article nor science journalism in general. I just wanted to draw a comparison to the issue where science communicators need to figure out how to more effectively present information to journalists, policy makers, and the general public.
Science journalists are no better at describing chemistry, paleontology, or condensed matter physics. The climate is controversial because there are people who want it to be controversial.
There are plenty of articles that are perfectly clear, and have been for decades. Having this article be blinding clear and unambiguous would not change the underlying induced distrust. No amount of editing will fix climate denialism until the denialists cease making it a culture war, or readers decide they'd rather take an interest in reality.
> The merchants of doubt dominate media. And spend billions of dollars shaping discourse.
Then let them sow doubt. If the case is "we're not sure but it's very possible that continued CO2 emissions will cook the Earth", what should we do? Continue emitting CO2, or stop until we're sure that it won't cook the Earth?
It's the precautionary principle - if the science isn't settled, given the catastrophic risks, we should limit CO2 as much as possible until it is settled that emitting it is safe.
To be the devil's advocate, the deniers will say "We've been emitting CO2 since the beginning of the world, and it's been fine, why are you worrying now?" - yeah sure that's ignoring the fact that there are now more cars, more planes, more factories, more cows, etc, but that's to be expected of these unscientific people.
Who is spending "billions of dollars shaping discourse" exactly, unless you mean governments and their academics? The idea that people don't trust climatologists because they get paid not to is simply an absurd lie. It's the other way around: the budgets are all on the side of the academics.
Take it from climatologists themselves, talking about who are these skeptics who cause them so much trouble?
Exxon Mobile, for example, is known to have had incredibly accurate warming models built by its own scientists going back as far as the 70s, and then lied to the public about the dangers. They also lied when the existence of these models became public knowledge saying the scientists told them they should "make up their own minds" about the science, but fortunately a bit of investigation into their internal communications revealed the differences in what they said internally and the lies they told the public.
Just one example of 1,000s. Every single facet of every single effort faces this kind of manufactured opposition. Throw a rock in any direction and you'll hit one.
It talks about one organization, the "Caeser Rodney Institute", which received a $10k grant from an organization that disperses tiny grants to all kinds of random groups, like diabetes research and the "National Foundation for Women Legislators". The CRI does many things.
These guys are such oil company shills that if you check their website you will find them directly attacking the oil industry:
"The big picture is that the oil industry is investing billions in offshore wind, and the Caesar Rodney Institute (CRI) opposes their projects."
"CRI receives donations from donors who agree with our policy recommendations, including about 1% of our total donations from the oil industry."
Your article says that "400 of those residents sent a combined $50,000 in donations to support the opposition effort", so this one man writing letters was able to raise 5x the amount of money from random locals as from (lol) Big Oil.
The guy claimed Big Oil is spending billions and this is the best example anyone can find? This is proving the point, isn't it? It's at the scale where maybe one guy who happens to work for an oil company decides he doesn't like wind turbines in his view of the sea, and this is supposed evidence of a global conspiracy.
Now compare that to the BMGF spending over a billion dollars on climate related topics. These things are in different leagues. All the financial power here lies with the net zero lobby.
Troll claims he's not a troll. I guess we have no choice but to believe him.
Seriously?
You are the living embodiment of Brandolini's Law.
Dave's CV shows he's deeply embedded in the climate denial (now climate slow rollers) strategy. Former DuPont exec. Henchman in Trump Admin's efforts to dismantle the EPA. Member of f!@king Heartland Institute, ground zero for the loons.
Oh yea, definitely a champion for our renewable energy future.
> The CRI does many things.
Yup, grifters gonna grift.
PS- ExxonMobil's wind energy bonafides are that they'll sell industrial lubricants for windmills. Separately, they're part of a group effort to stop new offshore wind in Texas.
You're talking about the CV that lists "promoting CO2 capture" and "co-founding Delaware's Green Building Council" as evidence that he's deeply embedded in climate denial. That's as convincing as "Big Oil spends billions of dollars ok maybe $10k on a guy who thinks offshore wind is has a bad cost/benefit ratio for CO2 reduction".
Your post is exactly the type of response that wakes people up to how extreme and dishonest the green movement has become. This guy thinks offshore wind projects are a bad idea and other green projects are a better investment. All you got in response is an endless procession of thought-terminating memes: he's a "troll", a "loon", a "grifter", in the pay of "Big Oil" and so on. It's a recipe for unproductive conversation. Even climatologists knew that wasn't true when they talked amongst themselves.
I'll ask again - where are these billions being spent by Shell or ExxonMobil or whoever? This thread proves my point that you can't hide money like that, you can't even hide a $10k grant from one trade group.
We've learned that Shell, at the very least, knew about the effects of climate change since the 60s. It's not suspicious at all that whether or not climate change is even real has been debated for decades. Shell definitely wouldn't use the billions of dollars at their disposal to protect their industry from existential threat by shaping discourse.
That's a lot of smears and hypotheticals, isn't it? You have to rely on those because the claim isn't true.
If Shell are really spending billions then it should be trivial to find armies of thousands, or tens of thousands, all of whom are directly receiving grant money from Shell to talk about climate full time (negatively). But no such people exist. As the climatologists say, the only people who have the time to double check their work are retirees.
Now go look at how much money governments, BMG Foundation etc spend on climate related stuff. It's huge.
If Shell is spending billions on people to talk about climate full time negatively, it seems a rather obvious oversight that they wouldn't include instructions to not advertise that fact. But I wasn't talking about an army of paid human shills. The majority of the "discourse" around COVID misinformation came from 12 sources - not everyone who repeated their talking points was paid to do so, yet shaped the discourse was.
Governments spending billions on "climate change related stuff", an existential threat to their continued existence, is not the conspiracy you think it is.
(...And by the same token, Shell spending billions protecting its continued existence/economic model would also not be some conspiracy...)
What exactly are you talking about then? What does this imaginary money get spent on, if not people?
This whole idea is a classic conspiracy theory. Do you realize that? Obviously the only way to shape discourse is with people, because discourse is something done by people. How do you think it's possible to spend literally billions of dollars - call it $3B and that's enough to pay for 30,000 people on great salaries making reports and blog posts all day, that this could last for years - and not have anyone notice this? Nobody ever asks where the money is coming from? Not one of these tens of thousands of people have ever gone to the press and said, I was paid by Shell to say repeat things that aren't true?
There are of course massive ecosystems of NGOs and the like that do exactly that, but they're all pushing doomerism. They're also pretty open about where the money comes from. They have to be, you can't hide movements of those sorts of sums. The Gates Foundation alone spends $1.4B on climate change "shills" as you'd put it, and it's only one of many.
BTW, no governments existence is threatened by climate change, not even in the discredited IPCC worst case scenario. Not even in fiction - Waterworld has a government in it!
probably the most criminally underreported stroke of evil genius in the past 30 years, is how the Koch brothers managed to subvert the climate message of this country's most renowned national museum, the Smithsonian, by funding it. Specifically, the floor-filling installation on human evolution. I would love to have been a fly on the wall during the discussions among the curators about how to handle this conflict of interest, because the resulting exhibit doesn't reveal an obvious bias. But there certainly is one.
It only develops indirectly and cumulatively if you read the posters accompanying the various displays, many of which are skewed toward a particular emphasis on "adaptability." Which is to say, in blunt terms, "it's okay if the earth's climate is damaged by human activity, humans have adapted to so much worse, and will adapt again, because we are an adaptable species. Aren't we."
There is a climate change exhibit immediately outside of the new human evolution exhibit. It's clearly not an accident. I think the Smithsonian scientists were grumpy about taking Koch money, even for a good exhibit. (Which is actually only ok.)
Journalism continues to let humanity down as a (rightfully) protected profession that simultaneously uses that protection to operate with both impunity and irresponsibility.
And I'm not talking about political bias (though that contributes greatly to the distrust people have in media), I'm talking about what you describe; the failure to communicate nuance, the rush to publish without a clear picture of the facts, the use of emotional manipulation to generate clicks, the oversimplification or misrepresentation of the truth.
It doesn't matter when you're reporting on celebrity gossip. It matters greatly when you're reporting on things that could destroy our species.
> It doesn't matter when you're reporting on celebrity gossip
Umm, personally I find that fairly distasteful too.
"Paparazzi pictures of Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman and Bridget Fonda have circulated online, feeding into an odd desire to force reclusive actors back into the spotlight"[0]
Now everything is done in service of ever more clicks and hence ads, I find myself less and willing to consume traditional journalism. At all.
It's more correct to say they could still be profitable while being bad at it. In the last 10 or so years, journalism has been captured by the dynamics of online advertising while the outlets themselves have become increasingly consolidated under profit-driven corporate masters. For a long time the newsroom, especially of TV and radio networks, was considered a cost center, but that was OK because the entertainment departments brought in the money. Now news organizations themselves are supposed to be profitable, which leads to incentives being skewed towards views and ad revenue.
Evergreen food fights (eg bias, partisanship) serve to distract from the base truth:
Ad-based biz models (corporate media) do not hold power (elites) to account.
Journalist David Roberts (https://www.volts.wtf) does deep dives on climate crisis and renewable energy. Here he explains why he couldn't do this work as an employee of corporate media:
David Roberts: The Transition to Carbon-Free Energy: A Story of Tech, Politics, & Community
I specifically said that I'm not criticizing the article or science journalism, but I edited my comment to further clarify that I'm only using the article as an example to tangent into a related issue. The actual facts and conclusions about the temperature are immaterial. I barely snuck in the edit before the time limit, so it's still probably not as clear as it should be.
I had to do another edit earlier when I realized that I had inadvertently invited criticism of science journalism, again despite the fact that I said I wasn't criticizing it. Maybe I should have followed my own advice and opened by saying it's a tangent.
> something like the oceans should have started cooling down a month ago but they haven't.
I don't disagree with your overall point, that science communication is frustrated by stubborn impedance mismatches between authors and the different audiences they're trying to reach.
However I would point out that if the article were written according to the example that you have just given, within minutes some crank would go find the original paper, skim the abstract and locate the actual 2/10 degree fact.
They would then blast social media with hot takes about how climate hoax scientists have once again spun a "nothingburger" story into a panic by deliberately concealing the "troof"
I'm not really concerned about that. You're right that propagandists will always find a way to exploit whatever you say or don't say, no matter how you say it. It's a fool's errand to try to manipulate the discourse through self-censorship, which is why I don't advocate for it. I'd have been perfectly satisfied if the temperature statistic was quoted in the very next sentence after the one I suggested. I did say "lead with", but it's kind of buried.
My only point was that science advocates need to modernize their persuasive argument repertoire.
most philosophy schools start when someone points out language is about setting meaning more than communication of meaning. from plato to Confucius...
> I'm neither criticizing this article nor science journalism in general
yes, you should be criticizing. specially the work of someone who decided to write for a living.
why people insist on thinking you can be neutral on mass media?
there's a newsroom joke where the editor, on a slow easter sunday, shouts to one of the idle reporters to just write something about christ. to which the reporter automatically replies "for or against?"
In practice it tends to be more cathartic than constructive. The advocate is always going to have a greater stake in their cause than the middle man.
I wrote my original comment that way because I prefer to discuss strategies for advocates. I am actually critical of mass media, I just let other people do the criticizing.
You make a good point about appearing neutral. Next time I'll try a different approach to inviting a different type of discussion.
The coldness comes from space, which is very very cold. We tend to lose most of our heat to space via radiation, rather than convection. The difference is between one of those infrared dish heaters, and a heater that blows warm air. CO2, being rather opaque in the infrared, doesn't let the heat escape into space. Instead, the radiation is reflected back into the atmosphere, heating the planet and the oceans
> Rhode points out that temperatures this week were just under two-tenths of a degree warmer than the previous record. “Two-tenths doesn’t sound like a lot—but in ocean terms two-tenths is actually a lot because it doesn’t warm as quickly as the land,” he says. As you can see from the chart’s record of past years, March is normally when average sea surface temperatures start declining.
But then the article wanders away from that point before saying when the temperatures do start declining.
This is a big failing of science advocacy as it relates to journalism, public policy, and public discourse. Two-tenths of a degree requires interpretation to understand its significance, and it feels like a small number.
Instead, lead with something like the oceans should have started cooling down a month ago but they haven't. It's more relatable and gets right to the point.
I'm neither criticizing this article nor science journalism in general. I just wanted to draw a comparison to the issue where science communicators need to figure out how to more effectively present information to journalists, policy makers, and the general public.