Why does it seem as of late (meaning the past 20-30 years) that journalism has been morphed into pushing narratives through writing, as opposed to simply reporting facts/viewpoints like in investigative journalism?
This washington post journalist seems to think it's their obligation/duty to inform the seemingly "uneducated" people of Alaska of the impending doom of climate change, but I'm pretty sure Alaska knows its permafrost is melting.
That all being said - it's a bit disappointing to see such a beautiful landscape change so quickly, however it's just another sign of the times changing and everybody will need to adapt to it.
They're performing for their audience. They aren't trying to inform Alaska about climate change, they are catering to their readers' fears about climate change; and catering to their egos by reinforcing how stupid and uninformed everyone else is compared to them, the readers.
I dunno what you call it, but it certainly isn't journalism; more like infotainment.
It's frustrating how close some people are to realizing that their favorite news sources are not news anymore. They're all propaganda pieces bought and paid for by big tech and government subsidies - being used to report on narratives and feelings to control how people react and think on social issues instead of thinking and reacting for themselves.
If they truly wanted to be unbiased, you'd write an article like:
- Permafrost is melting at faster rates than before in Alaska, showing varied studies and charts.
- People are being displaced because their houses were built for permafrost and now that it's gone their houses are falling apart. The journalist seems to have done this from my reading.
- We need to look at the future and see how this will affect our planet, our ecosystems around it, and the people directly affected by it.
- We're looking at old traditions and cultures to try and come up with new unique ideas to living in the north as 'naturally' as possible.
The journalist doesn't need to "tell" you you need to be concerned. They don't need to tell you "possible reasons or speculations in an industry or environment the journalist has next to no experience in, that may or may not directly correlate to the plight of the Alaskan permafrost but it's convenient and helps drive the narrative so we'll put it in". Tell us the facts and let us make our own opinions.
I'd read the original washington post article in full, but they want me to pay for it so I'll pass. Pay for biased journalism? Nah, I'm good.
I think a worse problem is the advertisement-based revenue stream and the analytics enabled by modern technology. They have to keep the audience’s attention, or their revenue dries up. So they try to maximize engagement, which often steers them in a direction that’s more about the feelings of the reader; what’s left is very little room for any serious thought.
There’s also the Twitter mob. If you don’t toe the line to some people’s preferred narratives you start losing advertisers and getting death threats.
Today I learned that up until the 90s, the general populous accepted global warming as scientific fact. At that point, numerous studies dating back to the 50s had confirmed the effect, and there was mostly bipartisan support for environment preserving legislation.
This is misleading. No one has to this day "confirmed" that anthropogenic global warming is a "scientific fact".
We have evidence which suggests that climate is changing and humans may be responsible. But the global climate system is complex, constantly oscillating on periods ranging from days to eons, and our data is sparse, especially going back 20+ years.
The certainty behind this consensus has been drastically overstated by ideologues who have taken it upon themselves to prioritize action over accurate reporting. There fundamentally is no proof that the changing climate will be catastrophic or result in runaway, especially when our historic temperature data is not fine grained enough to measure abrupt changes on the scale of 100 years. Though it is taboo to discuss, there is in fact evidence that such a rapid change is not unprecedented, that the earth has been hotter than it is now in the past, and that past sudden temperature swings clearly did not result in a venuslike earth.
The fact that virtually all major climate change model forecasts published in the last decade or two have significantly overpredicted temperature increases is telling of the bias in mainstream climate science.
I similarly take issue with this revisionist history wherein oil companies "knew" of climate change 60 years ago and deliberately ignored the danger. A claim of catastrophic anthropogenic terraforming requires evidence collection and modeling capability that simply did not exist 60 years ago, and given the periodic nature of climate, we simply will not know if this warming will indeed continue and/or become catastrophic without a lens into the future. Our current modeling capabilities are still inadequate.
Anthropogenic global warming is scientific orthodoxy at this stage. You vastly underestimate the amount of evidence there is for this.[1]
You're wrong about climate change models. The first 1990 one was based on a simplistic energy balance model and did overestimate warming. But all the later models have proven to have been uncannily accurate. [2]
The fact that it is indeed an orthodoxy is why the research is blatantly one sided. There is far less interest in, for example, unlocking millions of square miles of fertile, arable land. Instead its all doomsday - and the issue is systemic, publish or perish and orthodoxy are a dangerous combination, for any field.
> No one has to this day "confirmed" that anthropogenic global warming is a "scientific fact".
You talk about "scientific fact" and "proof" like this is mathematics. The best empirical science can do is to gather as much data as possible and arrive at a probability that a conclusion is true given what is known. And what is known is that there is a greater than 99% chance that global warming is anthropogenic:
You're right that our instruments and data have only gotten better over the last 70 years, but studies from the 50s conducted by oil companies already suspected that that global warming was happening and experimentally confirmed that CO2 released by fossils fuels were a likely contributing factor:
But all of that is beside my point about media propaganda, much of which you are simply reciting in your own comment. My point is that the propaganda works, so thank you for taking the time to illustrate that.
It is just a theory. There's no such thing as "scientific fact". That's simply not what science is capable of, and you're showing you're anti-science by promoting those ideas.
You're being pedantic about terminology which I've already demonstrated my understanding of in this thread. In the context of the general populous, "scientific fact" means that a random lay person on the street, despite not doing any of the research themselves or reading any of the literature on the matter, accepts the conclusions of the scientific community as the truth. It's a scientific fact that the world is round even though most of us have not taken any measurements to verify this, and almost none of us have been to space. We just trust the wealth of data produced by professionals in several different domains which all point to the same conclusion.
You're also being disingenuous if you think "just a theory" isn't a phrase constructed to mislead. Your comment implies that you understand that a theory is literally the strongest model that science can give us about a topic, but saying something is "just X" implies that there is something else beyond X. So which is it? Is a theory as strong as it gets, or can science do better? If it can't do better, then never use the phrase "just a theory".
I agree about the "just". You're right. It's about the same level of misleading as "scientific fact". People used to use "just a theory" to discredit relativity or evolution, exploiting the fact that the alternative terms like laws of physics or truth sounded stronger even though they weren't.
I still think it's harmful to general understanding to put any scientific knowledge on a pedestal of being unchallengeable fact. How can we know where we might be wrong? The earth is round, is it? What if that's just a slice of it in 3 dimensions and it's actually some other higher dimensional shape? Future people might laugh at our simplistic belief based on only seeing a little part of it - similar to ancients believing the Earth was flat because it was flat as far as they could see.
> Today I learned that up until the 90s, the general populous accepted global warming as scientific fact.
No, they didn't. In the 1970s, global cooling was the "scientific fact". The "global warming" narrative wasn't really being pushed until the late 1980s, and it wasn't until well into the 90s that discussion of the overall issue of what the climate might be like in the future was widespread.
> oil companies started media propaganda efforts specifically trying to change the public opinion on the matter,
So did global warming activists--in fact they did it sooner (what started the "global warming" debate in the late 1980s was a Congressional hearing purposely staged by activists to occur during a summer heat wave--and the A/C for the hearing room just "happened" to not be working that day). We are awash in propaganda on all sides of this issue.
> In the 1970s, global cooling was the "scientific fact".
No, there was much more uncertainty in the 70s, but the idea that global cooling was even a moderately dominant idea was a narrative constructed largely in the 2000s.
Tell that to all the people that were talking about the next Ice Age coming. They seemed pretty confident.
However, even if we accept "much more uncertainty in the 70s", you're agreeing with me that the post I was responding to, which said that global warming was accepted as "scientific fact" back then, was wrong.
You're falling prey to yet another disinformation tactic: "Is it warming or is it cooling? Make up your mind science!"
The consensus was/is/always has been that humans are impacting the climate by burning fossil fuels. What has always been uncertain is what impact this would have on the environment/animals/humans long term. Will it heat everyone up? Will it trigger an ice age? Didn't matter, everyone agreed that more information was needed and we had to take action UNTIL a lot of money went into dovetailing that uncertainty into doubt about the whole thing. And here we are still arguing at square one 30 years later.
> The consensus was/is/always has been that humans are impacting the climate
Yes, to the extent there has been a consensus about human activities in general, it is that those activities do have significant effects on the climate.
> by burning fossil fuels
No, that hasn't always been a consensus. The human activity with the largest impact on the climate is land use: in the past 10,000 years or so we have significantly changed the surface reflectivity properties of the planet by converting land from forest to farms and cities (and now paved roads and skyscrapers and many other things). It's still not clear that the impact of fossil fuel burning is of comparable magnitude. But it's a lot easier politically to demonize people for burning fossil fuels than for farming and building cities. So that's what gets all the attention.
> everyone agreed that more information was needed
Yes, there has always been broad agreement on that.
> and we had to take action
No, there has not been broad agreement on that. There is certainly not broad agreement that, if we are going to spend trillions of dollars to do something, it should be on browbeating people into not burning fossil fuels. It would make much more sense to spend that money on (a) bringing more people out of poverty, and (b) beefing up our infrastructure. Those things will benefit everyone no matter what happens with the climate--and will also put us in a much better position to adapt to whatever climate change does happen. And in a situation where our information is incomplete and we don't have a good understanding of the overall system (the climate), it's much better to take an action that will benefit you whatever happens, than to place a huge bet on an action that will only be beneficial if one particular theory about what is happening turns out to be right.
People don't invest time and resources to dig for information if they don't think will have any impact on anything. Investigative journalism is inherently "agenda" based in the same way that science is hypothesis based. I wouldn't even say they're "like" each other, they're the same thing.
The problem is when journalists/scientists cherry pick the information that helps their agenda/hypothesis and downplay the rest. That's unscientific. But that's why we need multiple journalists working the same topic, i.e. replication. And we need a general population/peer review who is intelligent enough to spot biases.
But historically humans are just bad at spotting their own biases, and more often than not, "A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
So when Fox and MSNBC gets sued for slander, they claim that it isn't news, it's entertainment. If we simply restrict the freedom of the press from any corporation that claims their news department is entertainment and not news (and therefore not press), that might solve some problems.
Of course that won't happen, most of these corporations are just mouth pieces for politicians, and they like to keep them around.
Yes, it was mostly in jest. I don't think freedom of the press covers entertainment, but freedom of speech certainly does. The only way to combat this stuff is to realize they're just peddlers of fear. Also, they're on cable so they can't be included in the fairness doctrine if we were to ever bring it back.
What are some examples of good user-funded investigative journalist sources? Because the obvious hole in this panacea is that it's literally impossible to know where the actual funding comes from. Anything can be bankrolled under the table by anyone, and you'll never know. In fact, small payments from viewers all over the world are even easier to launder than large sums.
IMO the news sources we have are as good as it will ever get. Maybe we can enact some legislation about advertising, since we all know there are privacy issues around it as well, but at the end of the day we just need people to evolve in the information age. To understand that our attention is valuable, and it's important to be able to distinguish what is worth our attention. We're in for some rough years until we figure that out as a species.
> What are some examples of good user-funded investigative journalist sources?
Go to substack and find someone you trust.
I like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, but YMMV.
Also, check out Congressional Dish. She reads legislation and reports.
> Anything can be bankrolled under the table by anyone, and you'll never know.
Sure, but should we take the possibility of mixed compromised interests as a reason to stick to the known compromised?
Government media sources will have interests counter to your own. Large corporate media sources as well. Advertiser funded sources must not report negatively of their cash cows. I'll not be getting my information from sources like these
I'd settle for a decent means of rewarding the good ones. There are plenty of great journalists who have paid a hefty price for doing their jobs properly. If there was a way to balance the social cost of being a real journalist by rewarding journalists when they do good work, that would go a long way to getting us the kind of journalism we would all like to see.
Investigative journalism has always, always, always pushed narratives. In fact, you can't avoid it. There will always be information that is included and information that is discarded in any piece of journalism. Both the information that is included and the information that is discarded are critical for pushing a narrative, telling a story.
Responsible journalism asks questions like these: "What perspectives on this issue am I leaving out? Is it justified to do so?". There's a near endless supply of perspectives on virtually any issue. Of course representing all of them in a journalistic piece would be impossible, so a journalist needs to make a decision about which perspectives should be included and which should be left out.
Is it fair for journalists writing about climate change to leave out climate change denialist perspectives? Perhaps, especially when climate change denialists engage in deceptive arguments, which is extremely common. But often, some amount of skepticism is totally warranted, as there is even quantified uncertainty in the IPCC reports. Often journalists can cross into propagandist territory by not including some of that skepticism, and it makes their presented narratives a bit less credible, especially to people who have been inoculated by hardcore climate change denialist propaganda.
We really don't know exactly how bad things will get by 2100 (or later), there are several different models based on many different parameters, and humans can significantly alter those outcomes based on decisions we make. There are a few facts which are undeniable, and can be verified by virtually anyone: atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are rising, mean global temperatures are rising yoy. Based on many models, the rate these changes are occurring at will very likely cause significant systemic problems to the ease at which we, and most other species, survive on this planet.
Yes, but for me, at this point, it has gone from being informative to just peddling fear. We've been fear mongered for at least 15 years now about climate change. Everyone knows it's an issue, enough with the fear mongering. They're just doing it to sell papers at this point I feel.
Just think, a group of 5 year olds will have a career as journalists writing the exact same articles about climate change in 20 years, just like a group of now 40 year olds did when they were 25, 15 years ago.
Well, without fear you can't bring in a global carbon market that benefits corporations while cutting off spending to individuals that have hit their 'carbon limit.'
When I was growing up in the 70's the climate fear pR0n was about the impending ice age. There's always something that has to be a crises - otherwise these media types wouldn't be able to drive eyeballs to their stories.
The people who pushed that story in the 70s should be ashamed, considering there was more evidence to support a warming theory than a cooling one, even then. Alternatively, they might be pleased if it was some kind of intentional misinformation.
To be fair though this is a journalist's blog, which is more like backstory context or addendum to the actual article in WaPo which to me doesn't feel biased or to push a 'narrative.'
Is there something in the actual article that you feel pushes an unfair narrative?
To me it reports facts, which are scary. I don't think the article uses much hyperbole, but even if one concedes your point there IS impending doom to the people he interviewed. Their houses are sinking and rotten and becoming not livable because of climate change.
I really liked the Newsroom show; there's a great quote about narratives and bias. Sometimes giving equal weight to arguments just for the sake of 'fairness' is inherently unfair on settled topics like basic fundamental climate change facts.
As others have pointed out this type of journalism has some inherent bias simply from the choice of the journalist to do research & write on the topic.
Quackenbush writes in this blog how the hot moldy house piqued an urgency in himself, which he (rightly) feels is important to report on.
It's fundamentally a human interest piece, just like interviewing people who's houses were destroyed after a hurricane.
IMHO this is the most important & pressing issue today and should be #1 news and Quackenbush is right in trying to report more stories that give real human emotional consequences to the reality of destruction.
I really thought it was some attempt to worsen the apparent effects of climate change and got confused when it started talking about house piles sinking on their own in thawing permafrost, not being somehow deliberately sabotaged or whatever the scramble was doing.
I know it takes time and mental facilities you might not possess to actually read the article but it is about making climate change impacts in Alaska real to readers of the Washington Post, not to Alaskans.
I don’t accept when people say “see, it’s snowing, climate change isn’t real!” so why would I accept the equal but opposite statement? Just because it reinforces my beliefs?
It’s anti-science to pretend they are the same thing because you want them to be. A random anecdotal sample is a single data point, or twenty data points, etc. The actual scientific problem of estimating and anticipation climate effects are the modeling billions of those data points, almost none of which we were around to actual observe.
This blind tribalism where ”You don’t get to use x as evidence but I do” hurts climate science overall.
When you flip a coin five times and get heads each time, you shrug and assume you were just lucky that day. When you flip a coin a 20 times and get heads each time, you start to wonder if the coin is unevenly weighted. A consistent pattern of extremely hot weather year after year breaking established records at least suggests a trend.
> A consistent pattern of extremely hot weather year after year breaking established records at least suggests a trend.
You're right. However, it is annoying when there's a cold snap that "weather isn't climate", but, when there's a hot-snap suddenly the weather is climate. Yes, this is generally not coming from climate scientists, but, it still makes advocates for a reasonable global warming response seem like a bunch of hypocrites and enhances the idea that global warming is purely political to the people who aren't informed, aren't totally closed minded either, but, who are turned off by apparent hypocrisy.
it's only annoying and seems like hypocrisy if you are willfully ignoring that unusual heat waves and other climate volatility are a trend and cold snaps don't refute that?
> it's only annoying and seems like hypocrisy if you are willfully ignoring that unusual heat waves and other climate volatility are a trend and cold snaps don't refute that?
Except any given heat wave has just as much probability of being a spike up as the cold snap has of being a spike down. You're right to say that the pattern is the climate, but the reaction I'm talking about is the reaction to the spike not the pattern. That is the apparent hypocrisy.
That’s exactly what I was getting at. It’s the same as people pointing to new record temp as ”definitely climate and you are stupid if you disagree” but seeing the previous record was 1920 as “well that was just a fluke”.
I don’t know what it is about climate change that seems to encourage a tribalistic ”if you aren’t entirely with me you are entirely against me”. Because I’m super skeptical that China will abide by import tax schemes without war, but that must mean I’m a denier now!
It hurts the debate to say there is no debate. There are tons of things to debate and discover. This is poor messaging above anything else.
I think the “true believers” that exaggerate to make their point are more hurtful than any single “denier”.
> The email that appeared on Phil Jones’s computer screen in November 2009 was succinct. “Just a quick note to encourage you to shoot yourself in the head,” it said. “Don’t waste any more time. Do it today. It is truly the greatest contribution to mankind that you will ever make.”
To be honest, your argument rather sounds like victim blaming.
> It hurts the debate to say there is no debate.
There's no moratorium on debate over the details of climate change or related policies. Scientists argue whether some specific weather event is linked to global warming all the time.
What we don't need is another "debate" on whether AGW is real. 99% of people who still want to argue on that point don't want a debate, they just want to derail discussion because otherwise they'll have to talk about "OK so we're in deep trouble, what should we do now?"
Care to explain why China is the villain here? They're the workbench of the western world that has outsourced those emissions. Per capita they use less and historically have not contributed much to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
We live longer than weather patterns and it's not difficult to see how things have changed within living memory. Especially in regions like Alaska
Ultimately, the problem lies in treating climate change as something that still needs to be proven. It isn't. Whether anecdote X "proves" global warming is only of academic interest because we already know it's happening.
It's like someone walking in saying "Oh my god, the rain is really pouring down, I'm soaked!" Everybody nods and silently accepts the sentence.
And then someone tries to say that doesn't prove it's raining, after all, yesterday I was also soaking wet after that incident with the sprinkler. And of course everybody's like, dude what's the matter with you, we can look at the window right now and see it's raining.
> Ultimately, the problem lies in treating climate change as something that still needs to be proven.
Proof, or as close as science ever comes to that, isn't the issue. It's science communication that's the issue. New people are being born all the time and no one is born knowing climate science proofs, some people don't care until it hurts them, some people are naturally contrarian, there are opposing special interest groups etc. Because of this it's vital that the science is proven again and again, and any appearance of hypocrisy, being politically driven, and outright alarmism (i.e. crying wolf) is eliminated as much as possible. If scientifically settled proofs aren't demonstrated again and again then pretty soon regardless of how true they are we'll end up with an expanding contrarian movement. The global warming issue is a master class on how to grow a contrarian movement despite excellent evidence in support of it!
In the US, record high temperatures aren't more likely to be from the present than they are to be from 100 years ago. The main effect of CO2 on temperature is that it doesn't cool off as much at night - daily low temperatures are increasing.
The typical news media coverage of weather is simply science denial. The news makes claims about weather events that aren't supported by the science, scientists don't challenge the claims (I guess because they want the public to take climate change more seriously?), and both the news media and scientists lose some people's trust. Certainly mine.
Have we confirmed that Alaska is upset about climate change? My impression is Alaska wanted to allow for example more oil drilling, but it was actually Washington politicians who stopped them.
What will happen to tourism, vacation, farming and cargo routes in global warming? Their may be major opportunities for places that have been historically "too cold". In other words, south texas may be hurt by increasing temps but alaska helped if it becomes more temperate.
Alaska isn't one entity that can be "upset" or "not upset" about climate change.
The decisions made about Alaskan oil and other extractive resources aren't always made by Alaskans. When you see Alaskan politicians, and people speaking for Alaska, it's a good idea to look into their background and see how long they've been here. It's a good idea to ask whether their involvement is primarily for the benefit of the people here, or for the benefit of people outside the state.
There's a lot more to climate change than just the idea that cold places will become warmer. Much of the issue is destabilization. Here in southeast Alaska, we've had an increase in issues related to landslides, which has all kinds of impacts on local people.
Sure, it's been nicer for recreating some summers that were warmer and drier than the usual 50-degree and rainy summers that are typical for this area. But it's also unsettling, wondering about long-term impacts on forest and ocean ecology.
There are also incredibly massive wildfires burning for months all over Alaska, more mosquitoes than anyone has ever seen, salmon runs depleting, and many other consequences that destroy any tourism hopes if we can't get climate change under control.
Not to mention algae blooms that are deadly to both aquatic plants and just about everything with a nervous system.
Temperature is part of the equation that keep dangerous microorganisms at bay.
Anyone that's seen the affect of "red tides" can attest to how fast an entire ecosystem can be decimated.
Crazy enough, it happened in Tampa bay, just this year, and other than the people directly affected from the stench or loss of business, the issue basically goes ignored.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadThis washington post journalist seems to think it's their obligation/duty to inform the seemingly "uneducated" people of Alaska of the impending doom of climate change, but I'm pretty sure Alaska knows its permafrost is melting.
That all being said - it's a bit disappointing to see such a beautiful landscape change so quickly, however it's just another sign of the times changing and everybody will need to adapt to it.
I dunno what you call it, but it certainly isn't journalism; more like infotainment.
Big bucks in that.
If they truly wanted to be unbiased, you'd write an article like: - Permafrost is melting at faster rates than before in Alaska, showing varied studies and charts. - People are being displaced because their houses were built for permafrost and now that it's gone their houses are falling apart. The journalist seems to have done this from my reading. - We need to look at the future and see how this will affect our planet, our ecosystems around it, and the people directly affected by it. - We're looking at old traditions and cultures to try and come up with new unique ideas to living in the north as 'naturally' as possible.
The journalist doesn't need to "tell" you you need to be concerned. They don't need to tell you "possible reasons or speculations in an industry or environment the journalist has next to no experience in, that may or may not directly correlate to the plight of the Alaskan permafrost but it's convenient and helps drive the narrative so we'll put it in". Tell us the facts and let us make our own opinions.
I'd read the original washington post article in full, but they want me to pay for it so I'll pass. Pay for biased journalism? Nah, I'm good.
[0] - https://archive.is/20210925074935/https://www.washingtonpost...
There’s also the Twitter mob. If you don’t toe the line to some people’s preferred narratives you start losing advertisers and getting death threats.
So oil companies started media propaganda efforts specifically trying to change the public opinion on the matter, calling it "just a theory": https://www.climatefiles.com/denial-groups/ice-ad-campaign/
And now we live in a world where you simply can't talk about climate science without running into spin and having to sink to that level to counter it.
We have evidence which suggests that climate is changing and humans may be responsible. But the global climate system is complex, constantly oscillating on periods ranging from days to eons, and our data is sparse, especially going back 20+ years.
The certainty behind this consensus has been drastically overstated by ideologues who have taken it upon themselves to prioritize action over accurate reporting. There fundamentally is no proof that the changing climate will be catastrophic or result in runaway, especially when our historic temperature data is not fine grained enough to measure abrupt changes on the scale of 100 years. Though it is taboo to discuss, there is in fact evidence that such a rapid change is not unprecedented, that the earth has been hotter than it is now in the past, and that past sudden temperature swings clearly did not result in a venuslike earth.
The fact that virtually all major climate change model forecasts published in the last decade or two have significantly overpredicted temperature increases is telling of the bias in mainstream climate science.
I similarly take issue with this revisionist history wherein oil companies "knew" of climate change 60 years ago and deliberately ignored the danger. A claim of catastrophic anthropogenic terraforming requires evidence collection and modeling capability that simply did not exist 60 years ago, and given the periodic nature of climate, we simply will not know if this warming will indeed continue and/or become catastrophic without a lens into the future. Our current modeling capabilities are still inadequate.
You're wrong about climate change models. The first 1990 one was based on a simplistic energy balance model and did overestimate warming. But all the later models have proven to have been uncannily accurate. [2]
[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/blog/2949/why-milankovitch-orbital-...
[2] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...
> No one has to this day "confirmed" that anthropogenic global warming is a "scientific fact".
You talk about "scientific fact" and "proof" like this is mathematics. The best empirical science can do is to gather as much data as possible and arrive at a probability that a conclusion is true given what is known. And what is known is that there is a greater than 99% chance that global warming is anthropogenic:
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1QE1ZU (Actual paper is paywalled and if you cared you'd go find it)
You're right that our instruments and data have only gotten better over the last 70 years, but studies from the 50s conducted by oil companies already suspected that that global warming was happening and experimentally confirmed that CO2 released by fossils fuels were a likely contributing factor:
https://www.slideshare.net/SimoneBoccuccia/cabon-dioxide-ech...
So much for "revisionist history".
But all of that is beside my point about media propaganda, much of which you are simply reciting in your own comment. My point is that the propaganda works, so thank you for taking the time to illustrate that.
You're also being disingenuous if you think "just a theory" isn't a phrase constructed to mislead. Your comment implies that you understand that a theory is literally the strongest model that science can give us about a topic, but saying something is "just X" implies that there is something else beyond X. So which is it? Is a theory as strong as it gets, or can science do better? If it can't do better, then never use the phrase "just a theory".
I still think it's harmful to general understanding to put any scientific knowledge on a pedestal of being unchallengeable fact. How can we know where we might be wrong? The earth is round, is it? What if that's just a slice of it in 3 dimensions and it's actually some other higher dimensional shape? Future people might laugh at our simplistic belief based on only seeing a little part of it - similar to ancients believing the Earth was flat because it was flat as far as they could see.
No, they didn't. In the 1970s, global cooling was the "scientific fact". The "global warming" narrative wasn't really being pushed until the late 1980s, and it wasn't until well into the 90s that discussion of the overall issue of what the climate might be like in the future was widespread.
> oil companies started media propaganda efforts specifically trying to change the public opinion on the matter,
So did global warming activists--in fact they did it sooner (what started the "global warming" debate in the late 1980s was a Congressional hearing purposely staged by activists to occur during a summer heat wave--and the A/C for the hearing room just "happened" to not be working that day). We are awash in propaganda on all sides of this issue.
No, there was much more uncertainty in the 70s, but the idea that global cooling was even a moderately dominant idea was a narrative constructed largely in the 2000s.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/89/9/2008bam...
Tell that to all the people that were talking about the next Ice Age coming. They seemed pretty confident.
However, even if we accept "much more uncertainty in the 70s", you're agreeing with me that the post I was responding to, which said that global warming was accepted as "scientific fact" back then, was wrong.
The consensus was/is/always has been that humans are impacting the climate by burning fossil fuels. What has always been uncertain is what impact this would have on the environment/animals/humans long term. Will it heat everyone up? Will it trigger an ice age? Didn't matter, everyone agreed that more information was needed and we had to take action UNTIL a lot of money went into dovetailing that uncertainty into doubt about the whole thing. And here we are still arguing at square one 30 years later.
Yes, to the extent there has been a consensus about human activities in general, it is that those activities do have significant effects on the climate.
> by burning fossil fuels
No, that hasn't always been a consensus. The human activity with the largest impact on the climate is land use: in the past 10,000 years or so we have significantly changed the surface reflectivity properties of the planet by converting land from forest to farms and cities (and now paved roads and skyscrapers and many other things). It's still not clear that the impact of fossil fuel burning is of comparable magnitude. But it's a lot easier politically to demonize people for burning fossil fuels than for farming and building cities. So that's what gets all the attention.
> everyone agreed that more information was needed
Yes, there has always been broad agreement on that.
> and we had to take action
No, there has not been broad agreement on that. There is certainly not broad agreement that, if we are going to spend trillions of dollars to do something, it should be on browbeating people into not burning fossil fuels. It would make much more sense to spend that money on (a) bringing more people out of poverty, and (b) beefing up our infrastructure. Those things will benefit everyone no matter what happens with the climate--and will also put us in a much better position to adapt to whatever climate change does happen. And in a situation where our information is incomplete and we don't have a good understanding of the overall system (the climate), it's much better to take an action that will benefit you whatever happens, than to place a huge bet on an action that will only be beneficial if one particular theory about what is happening turns out to be right.
The problem is when journalists/scientists cherry pick the information that helps their agenda/hypothesis and downplay the rest. That's unscientific. But that's why we need multiple journalists working the same topic, i.e. replication. And we need a general population/peer review who is intelligent enough to spot biases.
But historically humans are just bad at spotting their own biases, and more often than not, "A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
This seems like a tough nut to crack - not sure how we'd hold people accountable for their journalistic malpractice.
Of course that won't happen, most of these corporations are just mouth pieces for politicians, and they like to keep them around.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/a-court-ruled-rachel-maddow...
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
Advertising is really just bribes for positive press.
IMO the news sources we have are as good as it will ever get. Maybe we can enact some legislation about advertising, since we all know there are privacy issues around it as well, but at the end of the day we just need people to evolve in the information age. To understand that our attention is valuable, and it's important to be able to distinguish what is worth our attention. We're in for some rough years until we figure that out as a species.
Go to substack and find someone you trust.
I like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, but YMMV.
Also, check out Congressional Dish. She reads legislation and reports.
> Anything can be bankrolled under the table by anyone, and you'll never know.
Sure, but should we take the possibility of mixed compromised interests as a reason to stick to the known compromised?
Government media sources will have interests counter to your own. Large corporate media sources as well. Advertiser funded sources must not report negatively of their cash cows. I'll not be getting my information from sources like these
Again, I don't see the difference. I think compromised news is the best we can hope for, and we just need to get better at living with it.
Particularly their bottom line.
Responsible journalism asks questions like these: "What perspectives on this issue am I leaving out? Is it justified to do so?". There's a near endless supply of perspectives on virtually any issue. Of course representing all of them in a journalistic piece would be impossible, so a journalist needs to make a decision about which perspectives should be included and which should be left out.
Is it fair for journalists writing about climate change to leave out climate change denialist perspectives? Perhaps, especially when climate change denialists engage in deceptive arguments, which is extremely common. But often, some amount of skepticism is totally warranted, as there is even quantified uncertainty in the IPCC reports. Often journalists can cross into propagandist territory by not including some of that skepticism, and it makes their presented narratives a bit less credible, especially to people who have been inoculated by hardcore climate change denialist propaganda.
We really don't know exactly how bad things will get by 2100 (or later), there are several different models based on many different parameters, and humans can significantly alter those outcomes based on decisions we make. There are a few facts which are undeniable, and can be verified by virtually anyone: atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are rising, mean global temperatures are rising yoy. Based on many models, the rate these changes are occurring at will very likely cause significant systemic problems to the ease at which we, and most other species, survive on this planet.
Just think, a group of 5 year olds will have a career as journalists writing the exact same articles about climate change in 20 years, just like a group of now 40 year olds did when they were 25, 15 years ago.
See Duconomy...
https://www.fastcompany.com/90396592/this-credit-card-cuts-y...
Is there something in the actual article that you feel pushes an unfair narrative?
To me it reports facts, which are scary. I don't think the article uses much hyperbole, but even if one concedes your point there IS impending doom to the people he interviewed. Their houses are sinking and rotten and becoming not livable because of climate change.
I really liked the Newsroom show; there's a great quote about narratives and bias. Sometimes giving equal weight to arguments just for the sake of 'fairness' is inherently unfair on settled topics like basic fundamental climate change facts.
As others have pointed out this type of journalism has some inherent bias simply from the choice of the journalist to do research & write on the topic.
Quackenbush writes in this blog how the hot moldy house piqued an urgency in himself, which he (rightly) feels is important to report on.
It's fundamentally a human interest piece, just like interviewing people who's houses were destroyed after a hurricane.
IMHO this is the most important & pressing issue today and should be #1 news and Quackenbush is right in trying to report more stories that give real human emotional consequences to the reality of destruction.
I don’t accept when people say “see, it’s snowing, climate change isn’t real!” so why would I accept the equal but opposite statement? Just because it reinforces my beliefs?
It’s anti-science to pretend they are the same thing because you want them to be. A random anecdotal sample is a single data point, or twenty data points, etc. The actual scientific problem of estimating and anticipation climate effects are the modeling billions of those data points, almost none of which we were around to actual observe.
This blind tribalism where ”You don’t get to use x as evidence but I do” hurts climate science overall.
You're right. However, it is annoying when there's a cold snap that "weather isn't climate", but, when there's a hot-snap suddenly the weather is climate. Yes, this is generally not coming from climate scientists, but, it still makes advocates for a reasonable global warming response seem like a bunch of hypocrites and enhances the idea that global warming is purely political to the people who aren't informed, aren't totally closed minded either, but, who are turned off by apparent hypocrisy.
Except any given heat wave has just as much probability of being a spike up as the cold snap has of being a spike down. You're right to say that the pattern is the climate, but the reaction I'm talking about is the reaction to the spike not the pattern. That is the apparent hypocrisy.
I don’t know what it is about climate change that seems to encourage a tribalistic ”if you aren’t entirely with me you are entirely against me”. Because I’m super skeptical that China will abide by import tax schemes without war, but that must mean I’m a denier now!
It hurts the debate to say there is no debate. There are tons of things to debate and discover. This is poor messaging above anything else.
I think the “true believers” that exaggerate to make their point are more hurtful than any single “denier”.
Maybe scientists getting their email server hacked and used for doxxing should quality?
https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2019/nov/09/climateg...
> The email that appeared on Phil Jones’s computer screen in November 2009 was succinct. “Just a quick note to encourage you to shoot yourself in the head,” it said. “Don’t waste any more time. Do it today. It is truly the greatest contribution to mankind that you will ever make.”
To be honest, your argument rather sounds like victim blaming.
> It hurts the debate to say there is no debate.
There's no moratorium on debate over the details of climate change or related policies. Scientists argue whether some specific weather event is linked to global warming all the time.
What we don't need is another "debate" on whether AGW is real. 99% of people who still want to argue on that point don't want a debate, they just want to derail discussion because otherwise they'll have to talk about "OK so we're in deep trouble, what should we do now?"
We live longer than weather patterns and it's not difficult to see how things have changed within living memory. Especially in regions like Alaska
It's like someone walking in saying "Oh my god, the rain is really pouring down, I'm soaked!" Everybody nods and silently accepts the sentence.
And then someone tries to say that doesn't prove it's raining, after all, yesterday I was also soaking wet after that incident with the sprinkler. And of course everybody's like, dude what's the matter with you, we can look at the window right now and see it's raining.
Proof, or as close as science ever comes to that, isn't the issue. It's science communication that's the issue. New people are being born all the time and no one is born knowing climate science proofs, some people don't care until it hurts them, some people are naturally contrarian, there are opposing special interest groups etc. Because of this it's vital that the science is proven again and again, and any appearance of hypocrisy, being politically driven, and outright alarmism (i.e. crying wolf) is eliminated as much as possible. If scientifically settled proofs aren't demonstrated again and again then pretty soon regardless of how true they are we'll end up with an expanding contrarian movement. The global warming issue is a master class on how to grow a contrarian movement despite excellent evidence in support of it!
The typical news media coverage of weather is simply science denial. The news makes claims about weather events that aren't supported by the science, scientists don't challenge the claims (I guess because they want the public to take climate change more seriously?), and both the news media and scientists lose some people's trust. Certainly mine.
What will happen to tourism, vacation, farming and cargo routes in global warming? Their may be major opportunities for places that have been historically "too cold". In other words, south texas may be hurt by increasing temps but alaska helped if it becomes more temperate.
The decisions made about Alaskan oil and other extractive resources aren't always made by Alaskans. When you see Alaskan politicians, and people speaking for Alaska, it's a good idea to look into their background and see how long they've been here. It's a good idea to ask whether their involvement is primarily for the benefit of the people here, or for the benefit of people outside the state.
There's a lot more to climate change than just the idea that cold places will become warmer. Much of the issue is destabilization. Here in southeast Alaska, we've had an increase in issues related to landslides, which has all kinds of impacts on local people.
Sure, it's been nicer for recreating some summers that were warmer and drier than the usual 50-degree and rainy summers that are typical for this area. But it's also unsettling, wondering about long-term impacts on forest and ocean ecology.
Temperature is part of the equation that keep dangerous microorganisms at bay.
Anyone that's seen the affect of "red tides" can attest to how fast an entire ecosystem can be decimated.
Crazy enough, it happened in Tampa bay, just this year, and other than the people directly affected from the stench or loss of business, the issue basically goes ignored.
About the same R value as a wall made of 2x4s with no additional. Or about the same a 1” of extruded foam.
So… pretty poor.