Guest post by Tom Sheldon, Senior Press Officer at the Science Media Centre
On 16 September we were alerted to a flurry of activity on the CRYOLIST discussion group. Glaciologists around the world, it seemed, were getting steamed up about the Times Atlas "turning Greenland green" because of the dramatic effects of climate change. At the SMC we are familiar with bloggers and commentators bleating about 'the climate hoax'. But CRYOLIST is no den of deniers; it is a used by an international group of snow and ice experts to freely and openly exchange ideas about global ice cover. When these people start to complain, you listen.
In one way, this was straightforward. With great fanfare, a book was published and an accompanying press release trumpeted its arrival - along with some scientific errors. At the SMC we see this stuff all the time, and it is usually an easy decision to try to correct those errors before they reach the mass media. So why did this feel different – and why did we get some criticism for helping to publicise the error?
Most people who reject the theory of global warming do so on ideological grounds, not scientific ones. They cherry pick the pieces of evidence that support their political cause, twisting the evidence base to suit the conclusion they cling to. Science, however, is neutral. It must never be partisan, and it must never be used selectively. This is its great strength of course: facts speak for themselves. But in this case the facts showed that climate change had not caused the melting indicated by the new maps.
It's not surprising, therefore, that some scientists were nervous about conspicuously issuing a correction. There was every chance that some of the noisier climate sceptics would seize on the opportunity to say "Aha! Another climate lie – even the scientists say so this time!" After Himalayagate and Amazongate, the prospect of 'Greenlandgate' was not appetising.
But consider the alternative: scientists living in fear of climate sceptics, and keeping quiet in the face of certain errors for fear of 'doing damage to the message'. First, this would be completely wrong in principle; an error is an error, regardless of who might make political capital from its correction. Second, it would also be a bad move for climate science. Keeping quiet would be asking for headlines proclaiming "more dodgy data found in new climate shame". This would have been grossly unfair, as one press release would have been used to drag down a whole branch of science. But as is often the case with the media, there is no 'no risk' option. And such headlines would have been the risk of keeping quiet.
Instead, because of the courage of some principled and honest scientists, the press coverage was much closer to the truth:
"The publishers of the world's most prestigious atlas have been caught out by Cambridge scientists exaggerating the effects of climate change," said the Mail. Quotes issued by the SMC appeared across the spectrum of media. The Telegraph quoted Graham Cogley as saying "Climate change is real, and Greenland ice cover is shrinking. But the claims here are simply not backed up by science." And Jeff Kargel on the BBC: "a number like 15% ice loss used for advertising the book is a killer mistake that cannot be winked away."
The Sceptic movement has damaged climate science by spinning evidence to its own ends. It is ironic that the deep green NGOs have done similar damage to climate science by overclaiming for the effects of climate change with pictures of polar bears clinging to apparently dwindling chunks of ice and other messages that prioritise emotion and ideology over fact. And so it didn't surprise me when one senior climate scientist told me recently that he hates being called part of the climate movement. "I'm not part of any movement," he complained. "I'm a scientist. I just report what I find. And what I find is that the world is warming, and only CO2 can explain it."
Science is self-correcting, and we should be proud of that. It is also above politically-motivated bickering, or worse, 'messaging'. If we want science to have the respect of the public, scientists must be seen to be honest and neutral. This stance can be difficult to maintain when caught between sustained, vitriolic barracking on one side, and a politicised green lobby on the other. But by acting quickly and decisively scientists have done climate science a great service, and the SMC is proud to have played a part in the process.
Showing posts with label climate change. Show all posts
Showing posts with label climate change. Show all posts
Monday, 3 October 2011
Thursday, 22 July 2010
The media on UEA: guilty as charged?
At the press briefing in the SMC for the third and final inquiry into the UEA emails, Sir Muir Russell, Chair of the review, dared to hope that a line may now be drawn under this particular row, if not under the debate over climate change itself. But one row that has been reignited by Russell is whether the media were right to give this story such prominence in the first place when no smoking gun has been discovered and no 'scalps' have been delivered.
Dr Myles Allen, Oxford climate researcher, used his reaction to the Russell review to reiterate his early criticism of the media:
"What everyone has lost sight of is the spectacular failure of mainstream journalism to keep the whole affair in perspective. Again and again, stories are sexed up with arch hints that these 'revelations' might somehow impact on the evidence for human impact on climate."
Allen speaks for many scientists who have been dismayed by the apparent willingness of the media to give credence to the selective interpretation of the hacked emails that was first splashed around the world.
I have blogged before on why we should not appeal for special treatment for climate science, but there are also specific reasons why I don't agree that the vindication of Professor Phil Jones et al on the substantive issues of their science and integrity amounts to a guilty verdict against the media. It's just not that simple.
Firstly I think it's crucial to emphasise that the UK's specialist science and environment reporters simply did not know whether the references to 'tricks', 'hiding the decline' and keeping some research out of the IPCC's report amounted to an orchestrated attempt to distort and exaggerate the case for man-made climate change. What's more, many of their editors, sceptical by nature, were not in the mood to give their specialists the benefit of the doubt. A febrile mood developed in some newsrooms, with specialist reporters under pressure to prove that they had not gone native and got this story seriously wrong.
Compounding this was the lack of a detailed rebuttal and explanation from Jones himself and others at UEA. While many have suggested that this vacuum was disastrous, it's not hard to see how it happened. Jones was coping with the news that he had been the victim of a crime with international implications, and the University has now admitted that their own shock at the contents and the need to verify the accuracy of the emails contributed to their delayed response.
And on top of that the entire story was breaking just days before the Copenhagen summit. Many news organisations had so much journalistic fire-power directed at Copenhagen that they struggled to find the journalists to read and scrutinise the emails - hence the Guardian bringing in veteran environment reporter Fred Pearce.
Either way the world's media were largely left to their own devices in establishing whether or not these emails amounted to the conspiracy that was being alleged. Given what they could have meant about the most important science story of our age, I would suggest that ignoring or downplaying this story was not an option and would have done climate science no favours.
Obviously this was frustrating for Myles Allen and the many other climate scientists who were familiar with Phil Jones and the work of CRU. They knew what three reviews have now found: that these researchers were known for their scientific integrity and, far from exaggerating their findings and courting media attention, had tended to be cautious in their interpretation of their data and shunned the media spotlight.
While some scientists came out early on to defend the strength of climate science, the responsibility for verifying these emails, working out what they meant scientifically and putting them into some kind of context fell largely to the UK's science and environment journalists. Aware that the emails were being seized on by the most vocal critics of climate science to drive home their message that climate change is a huge hoax, these journalists none the less had to make judgements about where and how to cover this story in the absence of the detailed answers that only Phil Jones and his colleagues could provide.
Ask any of the science and environment journalists who first reported this story whether they got everything right and they will be the first to say no. Under fire from the sceptics for not doing more and the scientific community for doing too much, and under the watchful gaze of editors, specialist reporters worked hard to report this messy, complex and important story accurately and proportionately. Of course there were exceptions. Some newspapers could hardly hide their glee and we saw the kind of lurid headlines that all stories attract in the midst of a feeding frenzy, but on the whole the early reporting was a serious attempt to get to grips with the seemingly alarming facts by a largely responsible group of specialist reporters. The argument put by some scientists that the media should have held off reporting this story until the official enquiries rolled in is just totally unrealistic. Of course we would all love a media that waited a little longer for solid facts to emerge, and no journalist should have declared Phil Jones guilty in those early days. But if we consistently applied this idea we would be asking the media not to report the oil spill in the Gulf or the MPs expenses scandal. We would be asking the media not to be the media.
The other thing that critics of the media coverage of UEA miss is that it provided huge opportunities for climate scientists. The SMC was alerted to the UEA story in the very early days after a call from James Randerson on the Guardian asking for individual reactions from climate researchers and a comment piece to go alongside his news report. This appetite for reaction from the scientific community has continued apace over the past six months and the SMC has never before been so successful at placing opinion pieces from scientists on relatively arcane issues like peer review and scientific uncertainty. Thoughtful scientists like Professors Bob Watson, John Beddington, Alan Thorpe, Mike Hulme, Dr Chris Huntingford and others have been invited to play a prominent role in the media debate and have risen to the challenge. Indeed Myles Allen has been encouraged by the Guardian to vent his wrath at their coverage in print and in public debate.
And the journalists too have done their bit to put the UEA emails into a broader context. Despite the particular criticisms heaped on Fred Pearce, the specialist climate reporter who wrote so much copy for the Guardian that it has now been published as a book, close reading shows that throughout his reports Pearce was at pains to refer to the balance of evidence on climate change, the context in which emails were sent and the long and painful background to what he describes as 'Climate Wars'. Many specialists attempted their own analysis of the most contentious emails, and, way before the official enquiries had reported, many journalists had explained that a 'trick' simply meant a clever - and legitimate - way of doing something rather than a deception. And as the UEA emails merged with IPCC errors to create the predictable 'Climate-Gate', editorials started to appear concluding that the media too has a responsibility to get better at reporting the uncertainties. The SMC's founding philosophy was to encourage scientists to see science in the headlines as an opportunity as well as a threat, and I predict that future analyses of the UEA story will show that it was far from all bad for the scientific community.
The final thing I would say to anyone singling out the media's coverage of UEA for criticism is that it suggests that the media reporting of climate change before UEA was always balanced and proportionate. It was not. There have been too many stories on climate science in the past few years where the caveats, uncertainties and nuances expressed by scientists have failed to make it into the next day's headlines. Such was the appetite for alarmist coverage of climate change that at one stage new research that could not be reported under a banner of 'worse than previously expected', 'beyond the tipping point' or 'catastrophic climate change' would struggle to get covered. One respected think tank described the coverage as 'climate porn' and a variety of academics published studies showing that the exaggerated framing may have the effect of putting people off taking action to tackle climate change. The best climate researchers have always been uncomfortable with the simplistic presentation of climate research in the media but, with the exception of UEA's Professor Mike Hulme, few have said so publicly. One of the results of that silence has been that the scientific community now stand accused of glossing over the uncertainties in climate science with the Chief Scientific Adviser Professor Sir John Beddington appealing to scientists to communicate uncertainty more openly. Most climate researchers do emphasise these uncertainties when publishing their work and speaking to each other. But it is also true that some scientists were prepared to go along with the media's playing down of uncertainties because they feared that too much emphasis on the remaining uncertainties would dilute the message or be seized on by their critics - a position which many now accept has backfired.
Nobody embroiled in climate science has enjoyed all aspects of the media's coverage of UEA, and the whole saga is well described by Fred Pearce as a human tragedy. But I have now chaired the press briefings of all three inquiries into what went wrong. The same journalists that brought us the grim headlines about the story of UEA emails have now delivered the headlines about the exoneration of their authors. That the media coverage of UEA revealed no smoking gun is not an argument against the media's interrogation of the emails - it is an argument in favour of the scientific research discussed in those emails which has stood the test of the most enormous scrutiny. Research that Phil Jones will now hopefully be allowed to continue!
Dr Myles Allen, Oxford climate researcher, used his reaction to the Russell review to reiterate his early criticism of the media:
"What everyone has lost sight of is the spectacular failure of mainstream journalism to keep the whole affair in perspective. Again and again, stories are sexed up with arch hints that these 'revelations' might somehow impact on the evidence for human impact on climate."
Allen speaks for many scientists who have been dismayed by the apparent willingness of the media to give credence to the selective interpretation of the hacked emails that was first splashed around the world.
I have blogged before on why we should not appeal for special treatment for climate science, but there are also specific reasons why I don't agree that the vindication of Professor Phil Jones et al on the substantive issues of their science and integrity amounts to a guilty verdict against the media. It's just not that simple.
Firstly I think it's crucial to emphasise that the UK's specialist science and environment reporters simply did not know whether the references to 'tricks', 'hiding the decline' and keeping some research out of the IPCC's report amounted to an orchestrated attempt to distort and exaggerate the case for man-made climate change. What's more, many of their editors, sceptical by nature, were not in the mood to give their specialists the benefit of the doubt. A febrile mood developed in some newsrooms, with specialist reporters under pressure to prove that they had not gone native and got this story seriously wrong.
Compounding this was the lack of a detailed rebuttal and explanation from Jones himself and others at UEA. While many have suggested that this vacuum was disastrous, it's not hard to see how it happened. Jones was coping with the news that he had been the victim of a crime with international implications, and the University has now admitted that their own shock at the contents and the need to verify the accuracy of the emails contributed to their delayed response.
And on top of that the entire story was breaking just days before the Copenhagen summit. Many news organisations had so much journalistic fire-power directed at Copenhagen that they struggled to find the journalists to read and scrutinise the emails - hence the Guardian bringing in veteran environment reporter Fred Pearce.
Either way the world's media were largely left to their own devices in establishing whether or not these emails amounted to the conspiracy that was being alleged. Given what they could have meant about the most important science story of our age, I would suggest that ignoring or downplaying this story was not an option and would have done climate science no favours.
Obviously this was frustrating for Myles Allen and the many other climate scientists who were familiar with Phil Jones and the work of CRU. They knew what three reviews have now found: that these researchers were known for their scientific integrity and, far from exaggerating their findings and courting media attention, had tended to be cautious in their interpretation of their data and shunned the media spotlight.
While some scientists came out early on to defend the strength of climate science, the responsibility for verifying these emails, working out what they meant scientifically and putting them into some kind of context fell largely to the UK's science and environment journalists. Aware that the emails were being seized on by the most vocal critics of climate science to drive home their message that climate change is a huge hoax, these journalists none the less had to make judgements about where and how to cover this story in the absence of the detailed answers that only Phil Jones and his colleagues could provide.
Ask any of the science and environment journalists who first reported this story whether they got everything right and they will be the first to say no. Under fire from the sceptics for not doing more and the scientific community for doing too much, and under the watchful gaze of editors, specialist reporters worked hard to report this messy, complex and important story accurately and proportionately. Of course there were exceptions. Some newspapers could hardly hide their glee and we saw the kind of lurid headlines that all stories attract in the midst of a feeding frenzy, but on the whole the early reporting was a serious attempt to get to grips with the seemingly alarming facts by a largely responsible group of specialist reporters. The argument put by some scientists that the media should have held off reporting this story until the official enquiries rolled in is just totally unrealistic. Of course we would all love a media that waited a little longer for solid facts to emerge, and no journalist should have declared Phil Jones guilty in those early days. But if we consistently applied this idea we would be asking the media not to report the oil spill in the Gulf or the MPs expenses scandal. We would be asking the media not to be the media.
The other thing that critics of the media coverage of UEA miss is that it provided huge opportunities for climate scientists. The SMC was alerted to the UEA story in the very early days after a call from James Randerson on the Guardian asking for individual reactions from climate researchers and a comment piece to go alongside his news report. This appetite for reaction from the scientific community has continued apace over the past six months and the SMC has never before been so successful at placing opinion pieces from scientists on relatively arcane issues like peer review and scientific uncertainty. Thoughtful scientists like Professors Bob Watson, John Beddington, Alan Thorpe, Mike Hulme, Dr Chris Huntingford and others have been invited to play a prominent role in the media debate and have risen to the challenge. Indeed Myles Allen has been encouraged by the Guardian to vent his wrath at their coverage in print and in public debate.
And the journalists too have done their bit to put the UEA emails into a broader context. Despite the particular criticisms heaped on Fred Pearce, the specialist climate reporter who wrote so much copy for the Guardian that it has now been published as a book, close reading shows that throughout his reports Pearce was at pains to refer to the balance of evidence on climate change, the context in which emails were sent and the long and painful background to what he describes as 'Climate Wars'. Many specialists attempted their own analysis of the most contentious emails, and, way before the official enquiries had reported, many journalists had explained that a 'trick' simply meant a clever - and legitimate - way of doing something rather than a deception. And as the UEA emails merged with IPCC errors to create the predictable 'Climate-Gate', editorials started to appear concluding that the media too has a responsibility to get better at reporting the uncertainties. The SMC's founding philosophy was to encourage scientists to see science in the headlines as an opportunity as well as a threat, and I predict that future analyses of the UEA story will show that it was far from all bad for the scientific community.
The final thing I would say to anyone singling out the media's coverage of UEA for criticism is that it suggests that the media reporting of climate change before UEA was always balanced and proportionate. It was not. There have been too many stories on climate science in the past few years where the caveats, uncertainties and nuances expressed by scientists have failed to make it into the next day's headlines. Such was the appetite for alarmist coverage of climate change that at one stage new research that could not be reported under a banner of 'worse than previously expected', 'beyond the tipping point' or 'catastrophic climate change' would struggle to get covered. One respected think tank described the coverage as 'climate porn' and a variety of academics published studies showing that the exaggerated framing may have the effect of putting people off taking action to tackle climate change. The best climate researchers have always been uncomfortable with the simplistic presentation of climate research in the media but, with the exception of UEA's Professor Mike Hulme, few have said so publicly. One of the results of that silence has been that the scientific community now stand accused of glossing over the uncertainties in climate science with the Chief Scientific Adviser Professor Sir John Beddington appealing to scientists to communicate uncertainty more openly. Most climate researchers do emphasise these uncertainties when publishing their work and speaking to each other. But it is also true that some scientists were prepared to go along with the media's playing down of uncertainties because they feared that too much emphasis on the remaining uncertainties would dilute the message or be seized on by their critics - a position which many now accept has backfired.
Nobody embroiled in climate science has enjoyed all aspects of the media's coverage of UEA, and the whole saga is well described by Fred Pearce as a human tragedy. But I have now chaired the press briefings of all three inquiries into what went wrong. The same journalists that brought us the grim headlines about the story of UEA emails have now delivered the headlines about the exoneration of their authors. That the media coverage of UEA revealed no smoking gun is not an argument against the media's interrogation of the emails - it is an argument in favour of the scientific research discussed in those emails which has stood the test of the most enormous scrutiny. Research that Phil Jones will now hopefully be allowed to continue!
Tuesday, 9 February 2010
Thoughts on 'Climategate'
I don’t suppose I’m the first person to have lost sleep over climate change but it’s certainly keeping me awake at the moment – well, not climate change itself but the media coverage of it. I’m not sure what the strict definition of a media feeding frenzy is but I reckon we’re definitely in one. When the Guardian actually designs a logo for its coverage, labels it 'Climate Wars' and puts their top investigative reporters on the story, you know it's serious. Of course it’s serious for the SMC because this is absolutely what we are here for; set up after similar media furores over MMR and GM crops, it falls to us to ensure that scientists never again fail to engage effectively when a huge science story becomes headline news - no pressure then!
There has been frenetic activity at the Centre - luckily the media come to us a lot so the basic stuff about making sure that climate researchers are being heard has been relatively easy - and this week the bids came in thick and fast with Newsnight, Channel 4 News and the Today programme needing lots of different voices and print journalists needing both opinion pieces and reactive sound-bites. I even ended up being asked for my view from the Guardian for their 'round-table' discussion.
But the pro-active stuff has been more challenging. How can we seize the agenda back from the focus on the errors and flaws to an emphasis on the huge body of quality science that UK climate researchers have delivered to the world? Should we even try? Maybe this is the opportunity that scientists have been waiting for to better communicate the uncertainties and complexities that they complain get edited out by a media only ever excited by the 'tipping points', 'count downs' and 'points of no return'.
After much debate and discussion with other press officers we decided to run a briefing with three of the most prominent climate researchers in the UK – Julia Slingo from the Met Office, Alan Thorpe, head of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), and Brian Hoskins, head of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. The ambitions for the briefing were pretty modest, and we were certainly not desperate to generate more column inches. But we did feel that the time had come to inject a simple and sober audit of the science into the frenzy, and give science journalists the opportunity to question three of the UK’s top climate researchers. And that’s exactly what the panel did. In possibly the clearest and most compelling summary I have ever heard, the experts told a room packed full of science reporters what we do know and how we know it, and what is much more uncertain, immature and up for debate. The panellists also talked about how this science is done, the kinds of peer review process at work, the way research is selected for funding and the myriad ways in which the goal of quality is achieved. After a week in which poor quality science, flaws in peer review and errors have loomed large, I personally was entirely convinced by their message that we must not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
And the scientists also departed from the science itself to make a number of concessions: to admit that they have not been good enough at communicating the uncertainties to the wider public, to admit that they have been slow to share the data with the outside world and to admit that maybe refusing to debate with hard core sceptics may have actually contributed to increasing scepticism in the wider public.
So far so good. Then question time started. Unsurprisingly the questions were not about the science but about what the scientists would say about the revelations in the University of East Anglia emails, the future position of Rajendra Pachauri as the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the imminent collapse of public trust in science. The scientists explained that they were unable to answer any questions on the UEA emails until the result of the pending inquiry, and refused to call for Pachauri's head. That did not go down well with the journalists, who were not at all shy to let the scientists know that these questions need to be answered. One journalist announced that he had 'naively' attended the briefing to hear a robust fightback and was staggered to get what he regarded as a limp repetition of the science. Citing comments on Fred Pearce's online Guardian coverage as his evidence, he claimed that the public are fast turning against climate change and that repeating the science would do little to help 'win' the battle for public opinion.
The scientists reaction was anything but limp – they stood their ground firmly, robustly defended their right to stick to the science of this debate and insisted that their primary responsibility is to do top quality research to answer the remaining questions in a rigorous and scientific way, and then to communicate that science to the public and policy makers. As the briefing ended almost all the journalists I spoke to were busily concluding that while the scientists did a great job on the science, the rest of the performance was 'not enough to win the battle against public opposition'. But the idea that research scientists have to wage some major battle for public opinion and start putting on winning performances is crazy. The world needs climate scientists to do top quality climate research to answer the questions we still need to answer. They then do need to go further - they need to communicate and convey that research to the media and the public - just as those three scientists did so beautifully on that panel. But they are not obliged to go beyond that to become campaigners who must answer questions outside their science in order to win a campaign.
The Science Media Centre and the scientific community have a huge responsibility in this national debate on climate change. And that responsibility is to ensure that the debate is informed by the best science available. That did not happen in the initial GM debate and the results were a wholesale public rejection of the technology. There are things for which scientists deserve to be criticised in this whole mess, but not for turning up to brief journalists in the middle of a massive feeding frenzy and sticking to the science. And I for one got a great night's sleep that night!
There has been frenetic activity at the Centre - luckily the media come to us a lot so the basic stuff about making sure that climate researchers are being heard has been relatively easy - and this week the bids came in thick and fast with Newsnight, Channel 4 News and the Today programme needing lots of different voices and print journalists needing both opinion pieces and reactive sound-bites. I even ended up being asked for my view from the Guardian for their 'round-table' discussion.
But the pro-active stuff has been more challenging. How can we seize the agenda back from the focus on the errors and flaws to an emphasis on the huge body of quality science that UK climate researchers have delivered to the world? Should we even try? Maybe this is the opportunity that scientists have been waiting for to better communicate the uncertainties and complexities that they complain get edited out by a media only ever excited by the 'tipping points', 'count downs' and 'points of no return'.
After much debate and discussion with other press officers we decided to run a briefing with three of the most prominent climate researchers in the UK – Julia Slingo from the Met Office, Alan Thorpe, head of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), and Brian Hoskins, head of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. The ambitions for the briefing were pretty modest, and we were certainly not desperate to generate more column inches. But we did feel that the time had come to inject a simple and sober audit of the science into the frenzy, and give science journalists the opportunity to question three of the UK’s top climate researchers. And that’s exactly what the panel did. In possibly the clearest and most compelling summary I have ever heard, the experts told a room packed full of science reporters what we do know and how we know it, and what is much more uncertain, immature and up for debate. The panellists also talked about how this science is done, the kinds of peer review process at work, the way research is selected for funding and the myriad ways in which the goal of quality is achieved. After a week in which poor quality science, flaws in peer review and errors have loomed large, I personally was entirely convinced by their message that we must not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
And the scientists also departed from the science itself to make a number of concessions: to admit that they have not been good enough at communicating the uncertainties to the wider public, to admit that they have been slow to share the data with the outside world and to admit that maybe refusing to debate with hard core sceptics may have actually contributed to increasing scepticism in the wider public.
So far so good. Then question time started. Unsurprisingly the questions were not about the science but about what the scientists would say about the revelations in the University of East Anglia emails, the future position of Rajendra Pachauri as the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the imminent collapse of public trust in science. The scientists explained that they were unable to answer any questions on the UEA emails until the result of the pending inquiry, and refused to call for Pachauri's head. That did not go down well with the journalists, who were not at all shy to let the scientists know that these questions need to be answered. One journalist announced that he had 'naively' attended the briefing to hear a robust fightback and was staggered to get what he regarded as a limp repetition of the science. Citing comments on Fred Pearce's online Guardian coverage as his evidence, he claimed that the public are fast turning against climate change and that repeating the science would do little to help 'win' the battle for public opinion.
The scientists reaction was anything but limp – they stood their ground firmly, robustly defended their right to stick to the science of this debate and insisted that their primary responsibility is to do top quality research to answer the remaining questions in a rigorous and scientific way, and then to communicate that science to the public and policy makers. As the briefing ended almost all the journalists I spoke to were busily concluding that while the scientists did a great job on the science, the rest of the performance was 'not enough to win the battle against public opposition'. But the idea that research scientists have to wage some major battle for public opinion and start putting on winning performances is crazy. The world needs climate scientists to do top quality climate research to answer the questions we still need to answer. They then do need to go further - they need to communicate and convey that research to the media and the public - just as those three scientists did so beautifully on that panel. But they are not obliged to go beyond that to become campaigners who must answer questions outside their science in order to win a campaign.
The Science Media Centre and the scientific community have a huge responsibility in this national debate on climate change. And that responsibility is to ensure that the debate is informed by the best science available. That did not happen in the initial GM debate and the results were a wholesale public rejection of the technology. There are things for which scientists deserve to be criticised in this whole mess, but not for turning up to brief journalists in the middle of a massive feeding frenzy and sticking to the science. And I for one got a great night's sleep that night!
Friday, 29 January 2010
Launch of new scientific committee on drugs, Media Show, the Met Office and Simon Jenkins
When Professor David Nutt called to ask if we would host the media launch of his new independent scientific committee on drugs, my reply was "Is the Pope a Catholic?". David Nutt’s sacking from his position as Chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs by the Home Secretary was one of the biggest science stories of last year and led to a huge debate about the role of independent scientific advisers. Needless to say there was huge media interest in this latest twist and if, as some suspected, the Home Secretary announced the new Chair of the ACMD the day before our briefing to distract attention, it had the opposite effect. David has amassed an incredibly impressive list of scientists for his new Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ISCD) and three of them joined him on the panel, including a leading chemist, psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist. They all spoke incredibly well and convinced me that they will do important scientific work that can only help inform the debate on drugs. David explained that his new group would differ from ACMD because it will focus exclusively on the science and be geared toward informing public debate rather than government. It will of course also be independent and there was a fascinating moment where David and other former ACMD members on the panel described how liberated they felt working outside of government. The SMC strives to be as impartial as possible on issues like this, and we have in the past also run briefings for ACMD and with Professor Robin Murray at the Institute of Psychiatry, whose research focuses on the association between cannabis use and psychosis. But I do think Nutt’s committee is going to be an incredibly interesting experiment in truly independent scientific advice. While the government will want to ignore it I wonder if they really can. If, as seems likely, the new committee attracts lots of media attention, it’s likely to have a significant impact on the public debate. How ironic it would be if it ended up having more influence on government policy as a truly independent body than it did as an official one. We look forward to having these excellent scientists back in the Centre to report on their evidence gathering in future.
IFR/John Innes Centre
I had a great day at the Institute of Food Research and John Innes Centre last week. Zoe Dunford is one of the SMC’s favorite science press officers and each time I visit I am struck by how well she knows her scientists and her zeal for their research. As well as doing a talk about science in the media for a packed lecture theatre of researchers, I also met groups working on developing exciting new antibiotics and using the waste from biomass to create petrol. I finished meeting the new Director of IFR, David Boxer, who is an expert on the gut and he told me fascinating things about just how important this organ is and his plans to make IFR a centre of excellence in promoting our understanding of all things gut-related. I’m pretty sure each of these will make great SMC briefings and know I can rely on Zoe to keep an eye out for the right pegs to make them happen.
The Media Show
On the train on the way home I got a call from the producer of The Media Show on BBC Radio 4 to remind me about my interview the next day and talk me through the content. She explained that the interview would use the impartiality review on science announced by the BBC Trust as a peg to discuss science on the BBC, and that I should think of what the BBC does well and what it does badly and said examples would be useful. I spent the rest of the train journey texting friends in and out of the BBC to ask their views leading to some fascinating insights into which programmes people have loved and hated. In the event, the entire interview actually focused exclusively on climate change at the BBC and in particular their coverage of the UEA email-hacking scandal and the latest controversy involving the IPCC's predictions about glacier melting rates. So there I was live on air, with notes in front of me that bore no resemblance to the subject I was supposed to be talking about, and at that stage blissfully unaware of what ‘glacier-gate’ actually was (a useful reminder that even the best of us can get hijacked on air). Steve Hewlett, the show’s feisty presenter, asked us to answer the charge that the BBC is soft on mainstream science and on climate change, and slow to cover stories that expose its flaws. The other guest, Mary Hockaday from the BBC, put up a robust defense of the Beeb and I at least got to argue something I believe in passionately – that climate change research must be subject to the same kind of journalistic scrutiny as any other area of science and politics. I believe that the science of climate change is rigorous and robust enough to stand up to journalistic scrutiny, and if and when it does fall down – as I now realise it did in 'glacier-gate' – then that must be exposed. Any other approach simply plays into the sceptics’ hands and does science no favours.
In praise of…the Met Office
The other nice thing about getting out of the office (and the reason I have not yet gone down the Blackberry route) is that I get to reach all the way to the Comment section of the Guardian. And on the way to Norwich I read Michael Fish’s spirited defence of the Met Office, currently under fire from all sections of the media for apparently wrongly predicting both a barbeque summer and a mild winter. I am absolutely with Michael and the Met office on this one. Because they are based out in Exeter, the Met Office use the SMC for most of their science-related press briefings and I have sat through their summer and winter forecasting ones for several years now. Despite what appears in the headlines the next day these briefings often end up as mini seminars on communicating scientific uncertainty, the limits of short-term and long-term forecasting and current state of development of computer modelling. One of the briefings that stands out was one to mark the 20th anniversary of the Great Storm of 1987. Lewis Smith, then environment reporter at the Times, supposedly spoke for all the journalists when he said, "All any of us need to know is what day and what time the next one is coming". The good humoured Met Office scientists laughed and then punished Lewis with a painstaking explanation as to why science cannot deliver such certainty. Now, I’m a grown up and I accept that none of that nuance and uncertainty and caution makes the next day’s headlines – but I do think it’s a bit rich for the media who ignore all the stuff about uncertainty to attack the Met Office for getting it all wrong. Maybe the Met Office press officers will think twice about catchy sound-bites in future (though even here it seems a bit mean that scientists stand accused of failing to communicate in soundbites and then lambasted when they do!) but I think the media should come clean and admit that no-one would have booked a holiday in Skegness based entirely on the balanced, nuanced, cautious scientists that I heard in the SMC – the journalists did their bit too!
In praise of…Tom Sheldon
And talking of great articles in the Guardian, I hope some of you spotted my colleague Tom Sheldon's brilliant response to Simon Jenkins’ latest rant about the global conspiracy to sell us swine flu vaccines. I normally love Simon Jenkins, especially when he's writing about the UK’s foreign adventures, but when you really know what he’s talking about you realize just how lazy you can be when you’re a columnist. In fact when I die I want to come back as one – then I can write anything I like irrespective of whether it’s true and the more people I annoy the more chance of keeping my column. Anyway – thanks to Tom he didn’t get away with it entirely, and judging by the number of emails we've had praising Tom’s piece, he was talking for a lot more people than Mr Jenkins was.
IFR/John Innes Centre
I had a great day at the Institute of Food Research and John Innes Centre last week. Zoe Dunford is one of the SMC’s favorite science press officers and each time I visit I am struck by how well she knows her scientists and her zeal for their research. As well as doing a talk about science in the media for a packed lecture theatre of researchers, I also met groups working on developing exciting new antibiotics and using the waste from biomass to create petrol. I finished meeting the new Director of IFR, David Boxer, who is an expert on the gut and he told me fascinating things about just how important this organ is and his plans to make IFR a centre of excellence in promoting our understanding of all things gut-related. I’m pretty sure each of these will make great SMC briefings and know I can rely on Zoe to keep an eye out for the right pegs to make them happen.
The Media Show
On the train on the way home I got a call from the producer of The Media Show on BBC Radio 4 to remind me about my interview the next day and talk me through the content. She explained that the interview would use the impartiality review on science announced by the BBC Trust as a peg to discuss science on the BBC, and that I should think of what the BBC does well and what it does badly and said examples would be useful. I spent the rest of the train journey texting friends in and out of the BBC to ask their views leading to some fascinating insights into which programmes people have loved and hated. In the event, the entire interview actually focused exclusively on climate change at the BBC and in particular their coverage of the UEA email-hacking scandal and the latest controversy involving the IPCC's predictions about glacier melting rates. So there I was live on air, with notes in front of me that bore no resemblance to the subject I was supposed to be talking about, and at that stage blissfully unaware of what ‘glacier-gate’ actually was (a useful reminder that even the best of us can get hijacked on air). Steve Hewlett, the show’s feisty presenter, asked us to answer the charge that the BBC is soft on mainstream science and on climate change, and slow to cover stories that expose its flaws. The other guest, Mary Hockaday from the BBC, put up a robust defense of the Beeb and I at least got to argue something I believe in passionately – that climate change research must be subject to the same kind of journalistic scrutiny as any other area of science and politics. I believe that the science of climate change is rigorous and robust enough to stand up to journalistic scrutiny, and if and when it does fall down – as I now realise it did in 'glacier-gate' – then that must be exposed. Any other approach simply plays into the sceptics’ hands and does science no favours.
In praise of…the Met Office
The other nice thing about getting out of the office (and the reason I have not yet gone down the Blackberry route) is that I get to reach all the way to the Comment section of the Guardian. And on the way to Norwich I read Michael Fish’s spirited defence of the Met Office, currently under fire from all sections of the media for apparently wrongly predicting both a barbeque summer and a mild winter. I am absolutely with Michael and the Met office on this one. Because they are based out in Exeter, the Met Office use the SMC for most of their science-related press briefings and I have sat through their summer and winter forecasting ones for several years now. Despite what appears in the headlines the next day these briefings often end up as mini seminars on communicating scientific uncertainty, the limits of short-term and long-term forecasting and current state of development of computer modelling. One of the briefings that stands out was one to mark the 20th anniversary of the Great Storm of 1987. Lewis Smith, then environment reporter at the Times, supposedly spoke for all the journalists when he said, "All any of us need to know is what day and what time the next one is coming". The good humoured Met Office scientists laughed and then punished Lewis with a painstaking explanation as to why science cannot deliver such certainty. Now, I’m a grown up and I accept that none of that nuance and uncertainty and caution makes the next day’s headlines – but I do think it’s a bit rich for the media who ignore all the stuff about uncertainty to attack the Met Office for getting it all wrong. Maybe the Met Office press officers will think twice about catchy sound-bites in future (though even here it seems a bit mean that scientists stand accused of failing to communicate in soundbites and then lambasted when they do!) but I think the media should come clean and admit that no-one would have booked a holiday in Skegness based entirely on the balanced, nuanced, cautious scientists that I heard in the SMC – the journalists did their bit too!
In praise of…Tom Sheldon
And talking of great articles in the Guardian, I hope some of you spotted my colleague Tom Sheldon's brilliant response to Simon Jenkins’ latest rant about the global conspiracy to sell us swine flu vaccines. I normally love Simon Jenkins, especially when he's writing about the UK’s foreign adventures, but when you really know what he’s talking about you realize just how lazy you can be when you’re a columnist. In fact when I die I want to come back as one – then I can write anything I like irrespective of whether it’s true and the more people I annoy the more chance of keeping my column. Anyway – thanks to Tom he didn’t get away with it entirely, and judging by the number of emails we've had praising Tom’s piece, he was talking for a lot more people than Mr Jenkins was.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
