Jose L. Duarte
  • Home
  • Blog
  • Media Tips
  • Research
  • Data
  • An example
  • Haiku
  • About

How not to report science

4/23/2015

11 Comments

 
I was disappointed to see this article by Gayathri Vaidyanathan in Scientific American: How to Misinterpret Climate Change Research. It's an attempt to defang the recent surge of interest in Bjørn Stevens' aerosol forcing estimates. To some people, those estimates imply a lower estimate of ECS, and a reduced likelihood of the more extreme future warming scenarios (Stevens agrees with the latter point.)

The article is not just deeply biased – it's structurally biased.

1. It purports to debunk the implications climate scientist Nic Lewis draws from the new estimates, but does not link to his essay.

2. It does however link to Bjørn Stevens' extremely short press release where he disagrees with unspecified lower estimates of ECS that people have been making based on his new aerosol estimates.

3. The author interviewed and liberally quotes Stevens, but never quotes Lewis. The author gives no indication that she even attempted to speak to or interview Lewis. The whole thing is structurally biased against one view and in favor of the other – only interview one side, only link to one side.

4. The SciAm article suggests that Stevens debunked Lewis: "Soon after, he took the unusual step, for a climate scientist, of issuing a press release to correct the misconceptions. Lewis had used an extremely rudimentary, some would even say flawed, climate model to derive his estimates, Stevens said."

In reality, Stevens never mentioned Lewis in his press release. Moreover, he never said anything about any models or methods. He only said that he disagreed with some of the implications people are drawing, but he doesn't elaborate. And what's with "some would say"? Who? Did Stevens say that some would say that Lewis used a flawed climate model? This is weaselly Rolling Stone style journalism.

The above SciAm passage clearly implies that Stevens said these things in his press release. Unless Vaidyanathan based the above passage on an interview with Stevens, it's a fabrication. And if she did get this from an interview, the passage needs to corrected so as not to imply that Stevens said these things in his press release. None of that fixes the structural bias of the article, and the lack of engagement with the scientific issue the article purports to cover.

The article doesn't have anything to say about Lewis' purportedly flawed model. It just asserts that it's flawed, and that Stevens said it was. That's all it has to say.

If climate sensitivity turns out to be low, in the Lewis range, this politically-biased garbage is going to be an exhibit in future post-mortems on how human-caused warming was exaggerated and the public deceived by awful science journalism. The article is a hurried, slapdash effort to knock down any suggestion that warming isn't a crisis.

Which brings us to a broader issue. Scientific American is consistently politically biased, in a way that compromises its integrity. In general, they don't cover peer-reviewed scientific articles that offer lower estimates of warming, sensitivity, or impacts. They didn't cover Fyfe, et al's Nature article. They didn't cover Lewis and Curry's recent paper in Climate Dynamics (and Vaidyanathan never tells the reader that Lewis just published a peer-reviewed journal article on the very issue of reduced estimates of ECS.) They didn't cover any of the recent work that reported that parts of the ocean were cooling – but they were sure to cover papers showing that (other) parts of the ocean were warming.

They only covered Stevens' new paper because it's gotten lots of attention among skeptics for its reduced-warming implications, and they only covered it in an attempt to attack those implications.

Whenever Scientific American reports on scientific issues that have political implications, it only reports them from a left-wing perspective. Over many years, I have never seen Scientific American report any science that bolstered a conservative or libertarian position, and there are lots of bodies of scientific evidence that could bolster such positions (the effects of having children out of wedlock, the psychological costs of abortion, the invalidity of gun control studies that include criminal households, anything about the benefits of gun ownership, anything about the harms of government intervention, race differences, the dangers of believing scientific consensuses pushed by governments, like on cholesterol, and now apparently, secondhand smoke.)

I've always found it strange that they publish lots of political writers – people who inject political positions in their reporting on science. Every one of them has had a left-wing orientation. In short, you're simply not going to get balanced coverage from Scientific American on any issue that has political implications within the crude left-right landscape – you'll get a lot of cherry-picked coverage that invariably supports left-wing positions. You definitely won't get balanced coverage of climate science – if you rely on Scientific American, you'll never know about lots of major papers that give lower estimates of warming, even those in top journals.

It's extremely disappointing. They've compromised their standing and integrity as a source of science journalism.

At this point, they've gone a step further – they've abandoned basic standards of professional journalism as such, publishing structurally biased, rigged articles that deceive the public. Their writer here apparently knows nothing about the topic, and is just trafficking lazy, vague claims that x is true, and y is false, without saying much more than x is true, and y is false, and rigs an entire story to block one side from view. There's no science here.

UPDATE: Nic Lewis has an update on the SciAm article. It only looks worse. Scientific American needs to employ writers who know the science they're covering.
11 Comments
Pete Russell
4/23/2015 07:50:21 am

Jose,

Nice work, It;s good to see someone taking the scientific journals to task.

btw, Re point 3 in your post, I believe Gayathri Vaidyanathan is female, see http://gayathrivaidyanathan.com.

Pete

Reply
Chuck L
4/23/2015 02:15:42 pm

Calling SciAm a "scientific journal" is a stretch and too kind.

Reply
Richard Tol link
4/23/2015 08:21:47 pm

Gayathri is a woman.

Reply
MichaelS
4/24/2015 12:04:16 am

Hell hath no fury like a warmist scorned!

Reply
StewGreen
4/23/2015 08:57:21 pm

"Scientific American is consistently politically biased" yes that is rather old news.
Years ago it became clear that New Scientist Magazine is just a vehicle for selling advertising and it's ethic is no to try to have objective articles, but rather to pander to green/left journalists mindset. When I started looking at Sci-am stuff it was evident that they were pretty much the same. Confirmed when they made a policy banning climate skeptic comments.
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/03/10/censorship-at-scientific-american/
ah it's Popular Science that officially banned them : http://api.viglink.com/api/click?format=go&jsonp=vglnk_14298692821828&key=a8b3db45c5a4f36e59ba21e41d544c09&libId=i8vf3g7i0100zhvn000DAf26lo7f3&subId=221&loc=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.care2.com%2Fcauses%2F4-publications-that-banned-climate-change-deniers.html&v=1&out=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2013%2F10%2F01%2Fscience%2Fcomment-ban-sets-off-debate.html%3F_r%3D1%26&ref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com.my%2F&title=4%20Publications%20That%20Banned%20Climate%20Change%20Deniers%20%7C%20Care2%20Causes&txt=disable%20commenting%20on%20the%20site%20altogether

Reply
MikeR
4/24/2015 04:07:26 am

Nic Lewis, email from Bjorn Stevens:
http://climateaudit.org/2015/04/24/scientific-american-article-how-to-misinterpret-climate-change-research/

Reply
MikeR
4/24/2015 04:08:41 am

Ah, never mind - you saw it first.

Reply
Patrick M
4/24/2015 03:57:32 pm

As a former Sci Am subscriber, I can attest to the downfall of SciAm as a true science journal as it caught the disease of leftwing advocacy. What got me was their celebration of stem cell research (with no mention of the cases of scientific fraud in those areas), and then the fawning interview with Rep Waxman.

Similar disease afflicted Discover magazine and Nat Geographic. Discover hired on partisan climate alarmist Chris Mooney who wrote a whole book on how Republicans hated science. Nat Geo touted peak oil (oops) and climate alarmism.

30 years ago I enjoyed all these magazines. Now, they are useless purveyors of leftwing bilge. They are dead to me.

Reply
MikeR
4/29/2015 10:59:28 am

SciAm seems to have corrected the article somewhat.

Reply
Cortlandt
5/8/2015 12:27:39 pm

I independently came to similar conclusions summarized in the 7 points below. IMO the article falls far short of the best standards of scientific, intellectual, rational or journalistic reporting. It's more an political editorial or bit of social commentary than it is quality scientific communication.

1) The very one sided explanation of the implications of higher or lower aerosol levels. There is no clear “explainer” about the implications of lower levels of aerosols to balance this:
“So scientists have long harbored a fear: Perhaps aerosols are cooling the planet so much that in their absence, global temperatures will rise rapidly. ”

2) The very sympathetic, ad hominem, almost hagiographical spin given to Stevens:
– “it was not the type of attention that the study author, Bjorn Stevens … was seeking”
-“the normally reticent scientist, who says his aim is not to convince anyone of anything”

3) Of course, to hold a personal interview with Stevens, to quote Dessler but not attempt to get a comment from Nic Lewis is journalistic malpractice.

4) Highly misleading (potentially libelous by some standards):
– “Stevens said his study is something to be mulled over, but it does not call into question man-made global warming.”
In the same vein neither does Nic Lewis’s paper or ClimateAudit.org. That is probable grounds for clarification in itself.

5) Same quote regarding man-made global warming as above:
It glosses over the difference between man-made global warming as a binary state as opposed to questions of degree. IMO this is not critical journalism.

6) This one I would put to others but I question the accuracy of describing a press release as an “unusual step” in:

– “Soon after, he took the unusual step, for a climate scientist, of issuing a press release to correct the misconceptions.”

If we consider blog posts and statements made to interviewers as the roughly equivalence to issuing a press release I suggest that most fact checkers and editors would rule the statement above misleading.

(7) – “About 10 years ago, scientists did not know whether clouds were warming or cooling the planet. Now, they have more insights into their behavior.”

I believe that for the most part the situation from 10 years ago still holds today. I believe that a competent fact checker would so find.

(8) “Lewis had used an extremely rudimentary, some would even say flawed, climate model to derive his estimates, Stevens said.”

FACT: An essentially identical method was used to estimate ECS in a 2013 paper authored by Bjorn Stevens, Nic Lewis and a number of other IPCC lead authors. This is uncontested as evidenced by a email from Stevens to Lewis in which Stevens acknowledged Lewis for his “important contributions to the scientific debate”.

(9) The scientific american piece is as much or more a editorial about politics and society as it is about the science of Steven’s and Lewis’s papers. That is clear from the title and key points in the editorial, a central point of which is the allegation that "His [Steven's] work has been portrayed by conservative news outlets and blogs as undermining the theory of human-caused global warming. Red lights lit up. "New Climate Paper Gives Global Warming Alarmists 'One Helluva Beating,'" Fox News declared."

Although this alleged "misinterpretation is arguably central point of the article only one piece of reporting or commentary from one source is named; the "One Helluva Beating" piece from Fox News. An internet search traces that one piece in question back to here:
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/03/20/new-climate-paper-gives-global-warming-alarmists-one-helluva-beating/. It's not clear what is so objectionable about the Breitbart.com piece. While it does contain some political spin it's reporting of the science concludes with a qualified:

<blockquote>"If the cooling effects of aerosols turn out to be much smaller than the IPCC thinks, then what this means is that the rise in global temperatures attributable to man-made CO2 is also much smaller than the alarmists’ computer models acknowledge."</blockquote>

Reply
EV Charger Installation Lafayette link
7/31/2022 08:15:15 pm

Great blog you havee

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    José L. Duarte

    Social Psychology, Scientific Validity, and Research Methods.

    Archives

    July 2017
    December 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
  • Blog
  • Media Tips
  • Research
  • Data
  • An example
  • Haiku
  • About