Morano’s dealings with the media are certainly suspect. He was the lead source on the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smear campaign against John Kerry during the 2004 presidential election. But Greenwire also rushed to conclusions when it raised the specter of outright press intimidation. Inhofe’s critique of the media and science, however muddled, is nothing new. “He’s a politician not a scientist, and he has a very entrenched position on climate, and he is selecting facts to build a highly polemical speech around that,” Revkin said. “And that’s his right as an elected official. They do that all the time; it’s the way it works.”
That leaves the most important question hanging in the balance: to what degree is the American public capable of discerning bad reporting from bad science? That ability might improve if the media were more insistent on finding new ways to front their stories without resorting to overblown predictions of doom. Greater attention must be focused on the appropriate level of “balance” in each article, and on the arguments of men like James Inhofe. According to the senator, “The American people know when their intelligence is being insulted. They know when they are being used and when they are being duped by the hysterical left.”
Let us hope that is true, and that Americans are equally wary of the hysterical right.
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It 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
Posted by Tom Yulsman on Thu 28 Sep 2006 at 06:14 PM