Behind the News
Inhofe, Climate Change and Those Alarmist Reporters
On Monday, Sen. James Inhofe railed against climate research and the scientific press. But untangling his arguments about bad science and bad reporting is a difficult task.
By Curtis Brainard Thu 28 Sep 2006 03:00 PMIt’s hard to tell what Senator James Inhofe loathes more: the scientific consensus that climate change poses serious threats, or the journalists who write climate-related stories. In a scathing speech delivered on the Senate floor on Monday, the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee denounced the scientific press for its “alarmist” reporting on the subject of global warming. Despite Inhofe’s pointed attack, however, the media has hardly given so much as a nod to the senator’s criticism.
Both houses of Congress held a spate of hearings on climate change last week, which got some media attention, but Monday’s tirade by the Oklahoma Republican has gone largely unnoticed. Only the Tulsa World, from Inhofe’s home state, and a smattering of blogs have picked up the story. What is so challenging for journalists who might respond to Inhofe, or in some other way cover his antics, is that Monday’s speech mashed two separate arguments into one vehement diatribe.
On the one hand, Inhofe calls current research on global warming a hoax, which few would agree with, and on the other, he accuses science writers of being alarmist, a position that has far more supporters. As a case in point, during an enumeration of alarmist writings on Monday, the senator included a recent book, The North Pole Was Here, by New York Times climate reporter Andrew Revkin. Inhofe criticized a passage from the book’s first chapter, which warns there might come a day “when the new North Pole will be a place that is easier to sail to than stand on.” According to Inhofe, such “alarmist” postulations will scare American children.
In one of the only direct responses to the senator’s speech, Revkin writes on his Amazon.com author’s blog, “There he goes again, lumping me with climate alarmists.” Revkin is in an awkward position, sharing some of Inhofe’s impressions about the scientific press, while disagreeing with his distortion of the science itself. Last April, the headline of an article Revkin wrote for the New York Times warned against “Yelling ‘Fire’ On a Hot Planet”:
Without a connection to current disasters, global warming is the kind of problem people, and democratic institutions, have proved singularly terrible at solving: a long-term threat that can only be limited by acting promptly, before the harm is clear.
By democratic institutions, Revkin meant both the media and government, he explained during an interview on Wednesday. Climate change is a “bad fit” for both, he argues. Because of its amorphous nature, journalists have tried to peg stories about global warming to “in your face” events like hurricane intensity, drought, wildfires, crop failure and a litany of other terrifying hazards. Revkin calls this unfortunate trend in journalism “focusing on the front-page thought.”
The science linking climate change to conspicuous disasters is much less certain than that which labels greenhouse gases as dangerous pollutants spurring global warming. But many journalists covering research on extreme events have not included the skeptics’ view in their writing. Partly, this is a supply and demand issue. During the last two years, public opinion has, to some extent, turned against climate reporters whose stories were “balanced” to a fault. “Now some places think they have an open door to do away with it almost completely,” Revkin said.
He is not alone in his assessment.
“The media is really on thin ice on this issue,” said Gregg Easterbrook, a senior editor of The New Republic and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. The scientific press has “cried wolf” in its stories so often that its credibility has been damaged, he said. But Easterbrook, unlike Inhofe, also believes the evidence is strong on greenhouse gases. In a New York Times op-ed from May he writes: “As an environmental commentator, I have a long record of opposing alarmism. But based on the data I’m now switching sides regarding global warming, from skeptic to convert.”
Evaluating Inhofe’s speech, Easterbrook said, “For Inhofe, this is a triumph of thoughtfulness.” He added, however, that the senator’s speech fell short of a clear distinction between bad reporting and bad science. Inhofe criticized recent reports by Time, CBS’s 60 Minutes, the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, and other “eco-doomsayers.” But if he had any valid points to make, they were lost in a maelstrom of mixed arguments. Most of his tirade was based on the MSM’s coverage of alternating scientific predictions of global warming and cooling over the last 100 years. This, he said, indicates a penchant for the “sensational” promotion of extreme climate scenarios, though he totally ignores the fact that even ten years ago, technology was extremely limited by today’s standards. The problem, Revkin suggested, is that the senator’s speech was “more about politics, but artfully designed to look like a argument about science.”
Matthew Nisbet, an associate professor of journalism at American University, attempted to deconstruct Inhofe’s behavior on his blog, Framing Science: “When news reports don’t favor preferred policy positions, whether it is election politics or scientific topics like global warming, conservatives attack the messenger.”
Indeed, some would argue that Inhofe’s speech was just the most recent manifestation of a larger, more calculated plan to slam the media in public. In July, Greenwire published the story of two other attacks. The senator denounced a lack of balance in an article by Seth Borenstein at the Associated Press about scientific reaction to An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s much-hyped movie on environmental degradation, and in a documentary by Tom Brokaw on the Discovery Channel about climate change. The Greenwire article suggested that, “in setting his sights on the press, Inhofe appears to be incorporating a strategy hatched by the [Committee on Environment and Public Works’] new communications director, Marc Morano.”
1 | 2
Subscribe Today
Tom Yulsman
Thu 28 Sep 2006 06:14 PMIt is absolutely true that "overblown predictions of doom" by journalists tend to undermine public confidence in scientific predictions of climate change. On a more subtle level, stories that do not accurately portray the scientific uncertainty — and controversy — around the possible link between global warming and hurricane intensity do not serve the public well. It's my impression that journalists have not always provided a balanced view of this question, tending sometimes to describe the possible link as having more scientific support than it has, at least at this point.
But it must also be said that recent research on sea level rise does paint a rather bleak picture, and we journalists should not shy away from it. According to the IPCC, we can expect warming of up to 5.8 degrees C over 1990's average by the year 2100. The last time the planet was that much warmer than it is today was 140,000 years ago. And recent research shows that sea level was 3 meters higher at that time.
My colleague here at the University of Colorado, paleoclimatologist James White, commented in a talk today on this possibility. "If the climate comes into equilibrium with a 3 to 5 degree rise in temperature, Miami is gone, Fort Lauderdale is in serious trouble, Daytona Beach is completely gone," he said.
Of course there are caveats. We don't know whether history will repeat itself in this case. And we can't say for sure how much warmer it will be in the year 2100. "But we do know that sea level rise is not going to be in inches," White said. "It's going to be in feet. And the question is whether it's going to be three feet or ten feet." Either way, that could very well be a catastrophe for coastal cities around the world. With appropriate caveats, I don't believe it would be an overblown prediction of doom to point this out.
For those interested in the impacts of various levels of sea level rise on coastal areas, go here to Jonathan Overpeck's site at the University of Arizona: http://www.geo.arizona.edu/dgesl/research/other/climate_change_and_sea_level/sea_level_rise/sea_level_rise.htm
-- Tom Yulsman
Co-director, Center for Environmental Journalism
University of Colorado at Boulder