Collide-a-scape

Maybe I’m whistling Dixie with this modest attempt to bridge the climate divide. Consider what Nicholas Kristof wrote last year, in an op-ed column titled, The Daily Me:

there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices. We may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions, but in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an echo chamber.

What greater proof than most climate blogs. And if you disagree, just spend a few moments reading the comment threads at WUWT and Climate Progress, two of the most popular blogs on opposite ends of the climate spectrum. The question I explored with Bart Verheggen and Lucia Liljegren in Part 2 of our conversation (here’s Part 1) was why their own blogs didn’t attract the same huge readership as WUWT and Climate Progress.

After all, if we want to ratchet down the hyperbole and partisanship in the climate debate, shouldn’t we be paying greater attention to bloggers like Lucia and Bart, both who write in a civil tone and often dive deep into the vexing subtleties of climate science issues? If we paid more attention to them, wouldn’t that help elevate the public discussion?

Here’s the second and final part of our conversation.

Keith: Why does the climate debate seem so antagonistic in the blogosphere? Why isn’t there more civil, nuanced dialogue?

Bart: I think the blogosphere is not made for nuance. It draws in people who are more opinionated, sometimes to the point of their opinions being set in stone. Of course the internet is very anonymous. The more extreme commentators are very anonymous. That’s another thing.

Lucia: Bart, what percentage of your commenters do you think are anonymous? I’m sure a lot of mine are.

Bart: Maybe a third are anonymous or pseudonymous. I’m not sure.

Lucia: I’m not sure either. Mine might be a third, too.

Keith: How can we then raise the level of debate, given that the extremes on both sides seem so strident, in part because of anonymity?

Bart: Yeah, that’s a tricky one.

Lucia: One of the problems with seeking a way to raise the debate is also the question of…if someone becomes more moderate and nuanced, will they just lose all their audience. It’s not as if I’m thinking, I want to have audience, so I’m going to write posts with titles like ‘Godwin’s Law Alert: Monckton cries “Goebbelian”‘ or “Joe Romm offers a (lame) bet!”. I write those because I think the titles are appropriate.

Bart: Exactly. And I’ve seen that with blogs—and I’ve noticed myself—that the things that get most viewers and most discussions are the posts that are a bit more polarizing and perhaps even playing a little on another person. Those are the posts that get the most exposure. I think it was some well known climate blogger who wrote once, what’s the point of a blog, if you don’t write in a little bit of a sharp tone, or something like that. Blogs are kind of made to put a sharp edge on your words. Like who’s going to read something with a lot of nuance?

Keith: But I think Andy Revkin is fairly nuanced at Dot Earth. He seems to be trying to facilitate serious discussion. And he’s got quite an audience. Of course he’s got the NY Times imprint, too. But even if you took Andy away from the Times, don’t you think he’d still have a good audience?

Lucia: Well, there is something in the blogoshphere, that once you have critical mass, you won’t lose your readership…but if Andy Revkin were reincarnated as somebody else,with no reputation, and he’s not from the NY times and started a blog like that, he might very well have great difficulty attracting a large audience. You’d like to think that that’s not true, but it is unfortunately the case that it is extremely difficult for people to start a blog, be nuanced, write long posts and get lots of people coming to the blog.

Keith: I wonder to what extent the blog format exacerbates ill will and misunderstanding between people. Because we process written communication differently than we do the kind of real-time conversation we’re having now.

Bart: I think that’s true, because I sometimes see examples [on blogs] where I see people reacting to someone else and I think to myself, hey, you’re reading something into it that the other person didn’t necessarily mean, or your’re prejudging. The blog format is definitely very conducive to blowing those things out of proportion and misunderstanding each other.

Keith: Recently Judith Curry suggested something that I found intriguing:

Maybe we should try a “blog of bloggers” whereby the blog owners from across the spectrum participate in a dialogue, perhaps with a few invited guests, and then the dialogue can be continued also at the individual blogs with the commenters. The polarization will be difficult to overcome, but I think with the waning of climategate that the blogging community is looking for something new, maybe this is a fertile time for cross-camp communications.

What do you both think of that?

Bart: I thought it was a great idea when I read it.

Lucia: I thought it was a great idea, too. Now we just have to figure out how to do it. (laughs). How would we implement it? That’s not to say it can’t be done. I think it would be a useful thing.

**ENDNOTE**

I’d like to hear from readers on Judith Curry’s “blog of bloggers” idea. Is such a thing even viable? Additionally, please offer suggestions on how to make the bloggy climate debate more civil and constructive.

I have a belated wish for the New Year. I want the CNAS Natural Security bloggers to juice up their posts. I want that blog to generate dialogue and become a must-read in green circles. I’m already a fan, but that’s because I’m interested in the environment/security intersection.  So I dutifully check in to see what the latest policy papers or related news Natural Security is flagging.

They need to liven things up over there, write with a stronger voice, and maybe throw a few elbows around. Enough already with the polite, wonky, approach. If Natural Security wants to be a player in environmental debates, it should emulate its sister blog. Or any of the frontline bloggers at Forign Policy.

To do that, they have to be fully engaged not just with current political events and recent journal articles, but also with other bloggers.  The blogosphere is where average, interested readers go to watch the action and join in. If you want your ideas to gain greater currency, you gotta step into the ring. It’s not enough to just be in the arena.

So guys, put on the gloves and get in the damn ring. It’s just a lot of sparring. And nobody really gets hurt, unless they’re overly sensitive. It’s actually quite invigorating. And who knows, you may even land a few punches.

I’m ambivalent about the value of blog comments. Part of me loves Andrew Sullivan’s blog because he spares us from having to wade through the bushels of crap he undoubtedly receives– though Sullivan often highlights and edits the best of his reader emails in a way that provides excellent counter-perspective to a particular topic or thread.

The other part of me enjoys reading comments at Dot Earth, Real Climate, or academic sites, such as Savage Minds (even though I’ve lately been critical of them), because the comments are generally intelligent.

But at so many blogs the majority of comments are either 1) inane, 2) rah, rah, 3) churlish. They add little value to the original post. They don’t foster constructive conversation.

And I haven’t even started in about comments to newspaper stories. Troll around there for a few minutes and you’re bound to drown in a cesspool of nasty bile. It’s not the best face of humanity.

Still, as a journalist, I mine blog comments the way I mine policy papers, journals, goverment docs. There’s always buried jewels for the taking. And ocassionally, revealing debates break out in a comment thread that sometimes take on a life of their own. There’s value in that.

For anyone interested in how to become a quality commenter, this post is worth a read.

And all you other little bitty blog fish swimming mightily upstream (and I’m right there, beside you), here’s something to consider next time you can’t stop obsessing over your lowly place in the blogosphere:

Blog authority as measured by Technorati is declining.

Welcome to the new “era of micromedia,” in which

Links from blogs are no longer the only measurable game in town. Potentially valuable linkbacks are increasingly shared in micro communities and social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed and they are detouring attention and time away from formal blog responses.

The DSM has all sorts of colorful names for this sort of behavior, but in web parlance, as Brian Solis at TechCrunch informs us:

Many refer to this dilemma as attention scarcity or continuous partial attention (CPA) – an increasingly thinning state of focus.

So new metrics are in order, which means there’s a new race to the top. Let’s just hope we all don’t fry our brains in the process.