I’m always amazed at how climate bloggers blame the media every time the narrative isn’t to their liking. Joe Romm and Michael Tobis, on one side of the spectrum, are famous for this. They often complain of a press that gives too much credence to climate skeptics. Additionally, both have asserted that “climategate” was a non-story that became a media-manufactured controversy because of irresponsible journalists.

Now I see that Bishop Hill, on the other side of the spectrum, believes that media outlets have recently “coordinated” a wave of stories with “warmist themes.” Right. I’m sure the editors of BBC and The Times and Nature got together at a London pub and said, “Time to move the pendulum back to the pro-AGW angle.”

C’mon. Pack journalism ain’t pretty, that much we should agree on. And it can be tragic and shameful.

Unfortunately, it’s an entity of the profession that is hard to do away with. But it’s not coordinated.

Over the years, Andrew Revkin has perceptively identified “slow drip” environmental stories as a category unto itself. These range from the tragic to the banal.

It’s bad enough that these “slow drip” stories receive little sustained coverage; it’s worse when you write about them and nobody seems to notice. John Fleck, the superb science writer for The Albuquerque Journal, reflects on why this might be at his blog:

I did a story in 2001 about research by a clever scientist named Bob Root who had quantified the lead wheel weights falling off of our cars’ wheels. The amount was staggering – four tons per year in a city the size of Albuquerque, being ground up into toxic dust.

I wrote a front page story. No one called me. No one called Bob. There was no outrage, no calls for regulation. Nada.

It’s easy to imagine what the level of outrage would have been if the contamination was coming for a corporate polluter. Or, this being New Mexico, one of our nuclear weapons research centers. But perception of risk and outrage over its causes seems to be strongly linked to our beliefs about who is responsible. With no evil actor behind the lead wheel weights, no one seemed to care.

Fleck’s post was prompted by a column (sub req) he wrote this week, revisiting the same toxic dust problem ten years later. This time, he put a different twist on it:

Imagine what might happen if we discovered some company was clandestinely dumping 4 tons a year of toxic waste on the streets of Albuquerque.

Let’s call it DefenseCo Inc., and let’s say its workers were dribbling out their toxic waste a tiny bit at a time as they drove around the city’s streets, year after year after year, spreading it all over town hoping no one would notice.

Just to juice it up, imagine it was a type of toxic waste that was especially harmful to children, and that this was happening all over the country, not just in Albuquerque.

Imagine the outrage.

That is, in fact, what is happening, with a caveat. It’s not DefenseCo Inc. that’s dumping the toxic waste in our streets. It’s you and me. The waste we’re dumping is lead, which falls off our cars’ wheels in dribs and drabs, is ground into dust, and ends up who knows where.

As hazardous materials go, lead is a bad actor. Children are especially vulnerable. It can damage nervous systems and slow cognitive growth.

The fact that it’s ordinary drivers causing this, rather than an evil corporate polluter, matters not a bit in terms of the health and environmental risks. Lead is lead.

Again, Fleck was greeted by silence from readers.

And people wonder why there’s no public outrage over global warming, perhaps the biggest “slow drip” story of our time.

I’m surprised Tobis didn’t include Fred Pearce in his little Broderite grouping. BTW, I’m just a piker compared to Revkin (and Pearce), both who are far more distinguished than me.

Speaking of Pearce, a Bishop Hill reader provides a nice dispatch of a recent Pearce lecture at the Royal Institution. As for the Jay Rosen meta post (which he is famous for) that Tobis references, count me in the This is complicated! camp.

Are traditional journalists who take a vow of objectivity walking around like libido-suppressed priests? Except that reporters struggle to keep a lid on their opinions? Here’s Matt Welch, a former UPI reporter, on the Helen Thomas eruption:

I am tempted to feel bad for an 89-year-old lady getting caught in what might be passed off as a senior moment, but there’s no reason to believe that her statement and tone don’t reflect her basic views.

They also, I believe, reflect an interesting, under-appreciated, and ultimately impermanent media phenomenon: The longer someone is submerged in what they and their organizations regard as traditional “straight” reporting, the more gruesome the results are when the gloves come off.

Welch’s hypothesis is worth considering in the blog age, in which “straight” mainstream reporters are increasingly shedding their neutrality belt. While I think he’s on to something, I also think his journalistic psychoanalysis goes a bit too far:

Straight reporters have been taught for six decades to submerge or even smother their political and philosophical views in the workplace. Like all varieties of censorship, this process creates resentment and distortion. Whatever it is that you feel prevented from saying, you will be more likely to scream once given the chance.

As for myself, this blog does serve as both my shingle on the web and a platform for expression. But mostly I do it to keep myself intellectually engaged in a variety of topics that interest me. Not to vent my spleen. I tend to have long deadlines as a freelance magazine writer. And I usually teach one course every fall and spring semester at NYU. So this blog is an outlet that allows me to participate in the daily conversation.

On that note, I’m aiming to serve up less opinion and instead use the space more as a forum for those who have varying (and informed) opinions on the subjects that interest me, like climate change and sustainability. I’ve been experimenting along those lines the last few months and will contintinue to do so.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to foster constructive dialogue that is inclusive and welcoming of diverse perspectives, please do share them in the comments. Over the next few days, you’ll notice some changes in the site, including a comment policy that will set out civility guidelines. And there are great exchanges coming up between some very smart people, so stay tuned.

UPDATE: Do check out the dynamic comment thread, where Andy Revkin makes a confession (and also a tart observation on journalistic peer review); John Fleck calls out a frequent critic of the science press; and Judith Curry corrects some blogospheric “misconceptions” of the media’s coverage of climate issues.

Let me make this quick, because according to Joe Romm, your eyeballs are already starting to wander:

As I’ve noted many times, a lot of people don’t actually get far past the headline and subhed.

So, are you ignoramuses still with me? Now a common refrain on Romm’s blog is that the mainstream media is just drop-dead dumber than dumb when it comes to reporting and writing on climate change.  At least once a week he calls attention to another supposed foul-smelling abomination (in a subhead, of course):

Worst News Article Ever Published on Global Warming?

Many climate advocates and climate scientists couldn’t agree more with Romm. One climate blogger, who is starting to sound like Howard Beale, thinks the press is easily manipulated. An environmental ethics philosopher is sympathetic to “Hide the Decline” climate scientists because…well, you read (emphasis added):

More likely to me, and more defensible in many ways, is that Mann and others were fudging the findings in order to “smooth them out” so that they were easier to read, so that their findings would not be misinterpreted by a lazy and apathetic press, so that an anomalous line wouldn’t distract from the overarching observation, which is that there is persistent change.

What ungrateful bastards we are!

At this point, you might be tempted to conclude that journalists are screwing up the biggest story of the century, that the world is on a collision course with climate doomsday because a bunch of hacks are falling down on the job. Or rather, is it because we’re not imploring everyone to stick their heads out the window every night and scream:

I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!

But wait, the Air Vent’s Jeff Id, no doubt speaking for many climate skeptics, says we are doing exactly this. And by god, it’s costing us our jobs, too! Here he is, explaining:

Perhaps if reporters stopped turning out a constant stream of alarmist, envirowhacko drivel like this link, they and the NY Times, LA Times, MSNBC, CNN, ABC and every other politically left media outlet wouldn’t have such financial difficulty.

Yeah, I guess the internet has nothing to do with that, after all. Whew. What a relief. All we have to do is stop spitting out “alarmist, envirowhacko drivel” and funders will magically reappear! Yay.

So there you have it. I now hope you understand, courtesy of Joe Romm and Jeff Id, why climate journalism is a rotting carcass.

[UPDATE: Jeff Id is pissed that I'm equating him with Romm. We've had a spirited exchange over at his site.]

I’m a little late to this Wired profile on Energy Secretary Steven Chu, since I just started reading the May issue last night.  For hardcore Chu watchers, probably not much is new, but the piece by Daniel Roth is still worth a read, if only to be reminded that the battle against global warming is being fought on many levels, some of which are not openly discussed much.

For example, the theme of the profile is Chu’s pragmatism, so here’s a meaty, revealing passage on his approach to both China and coal:

Chu’s philosophy can, of course, irritate environmentalists. One of the topics they clash over most is coal: a dark, nasty substance that is utterly crucial to the energy supplies of both the US and China but that, per unit of energy, releases roughly 40 percent more carbon dioxide than gasoline does.

Chu has called coal his “worst nightmare.” But the energy secretary also knows the big countries won’t abandon it. So he has turned his attention to what’s called clean coal. The theory: After the rocks are heated, the CO₂ would be pumped deep underground instead of into the atmosphere.

For now, clean coal is hypothetical. But because Chu wants us to figure out a way to make it happen, he announced in spring 2009 that the DOE would channel $1 billion into FutureGen, a carbon-capturing power plant planned for Illinois. And not surprisingly, one of his next priorities has been getting China and the US to commit to clean coal projects together.

But even thinking about clean coal infuriates environmental hard-liners. Jeff Biggers is a prominent author who writes about Appalachia, a region ravaged by coal mining. “This is where Chu is a failure,” Biggers says. “He can’t look anyone straight in the face and say that within 10 years we’ll be able to capture carbon emissions.”

Chu can, however, say that he has no time for chasing all-or-nothing proposals, or ones that nobody is going to buy into. He sees the need to act now and to act fast. And most important, to act in a way that will bring China along. According to Chu, the old way to solve environmental problems was to say “Eat your peas, they’re good for you.” The new way is to invent clean energy technology and say “If you do this, you’re going to be richer, you’re going to be happier. And it turns out that it creates jobs, and oh, by the way, you have to do it anyway.”

A side note: this fine profile is part of Climate Desk, a multi-magazine venture, defined as

a journalistic collaboration dedicated to exploring the impact—human, environmental, economic, political—of a changing climate. The partners are The Atlantic, Center for Investigative Reporting, Grist, Mother Jones, Slate, Wired, and PBS’s new public-affairs show Need To Know.

It’s a great idea, and I’m rooting for it to have a big journalistic impact. But why, oh why, did they launch this thing without an accompanying blog to trumpet the stories? This is what I don’t get about my print magazine colleagues: they produce excellent content and yet all too often let it disappear into a black hole. For pete’s sake, put up a blog at Climate Desk, so these pieces have a forum where they can be chewed on and discussed (and distributed) more widely than they will be on a static website.

In the super-charged, heavily politicized climate change debate, we journalists often find ourselves getting scorched from all sides: We suck, we’re biased, we’re stupid, we’re clueless, we’re a pack of conflict junkies, a blob of false-balance jello.

Yeah, we’ve heard it all. So what about it?

It’s all true. But not all the time. Which makes many people crazy delirious. To which I say, as I do to both teammates and opponents on a basketball court when I throw an errant pass or elbow: sorry, my bad.

Or I can assemble some colleagues who I hope will offer something more meaningful and contrite. And so, without further ado, here’s Charles Petit, science reporter and critic at the MIT-Knight Science Journalism Tracker website; Curtis Brainard, Editor of The Observatory, CJR’s online science and environment news desk; Bud Ward, a veteran environmental journalist and editor of the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media; and Stephen Leahy, a freelance environmental journalist, who has covered climate science for the past 16 years.

Essentially, I wanted them to opine on whether we’ve screwed up the big climate stories in recent months–and whether we’re still screwing up. (Please feel free to chime in.) It was a blind Q & A, conducted separately earlier today, and via email. Each person responded to the same two questions:

Q: Climate advocates and climate scientists alike have asserted (often bitterly) that the press has blown Climategate and the recent IPCC miscues way out of proportion. What do you think?

Charles Petit: I think some media have swayed toward berserk coverage, and many other media avenues have largely ignored the whole affair. If the IPCC cleans up its act – after all, its underlying message is solid – the end result might be fine. Besides, media exaggerate so many things – why DO we hear so much about non-events in the lives of celebrities? – it’s hard to pin any special incompetence on news outlets for their handling of this news.

Generalities are always dangerous too. The ways the Guardian and Telegraph handled it in the UK are poles apart. By which does one judge overall industry performance? While the UK coverage was obsessive, in the US, climategate was largely a creature of the internet, not mass media. In both countries, the primary rap for overblown reaction is not on media but on politicians (and others paid to know better) for their overreactions – which inevitably and properly had to be reported.

Finally, in media, most of the egregiously hysterical reactions to IPCC’s sloppy discipline and to the CRU’s emails was by opinion
columnists, not in the straight news reports. The East Anglia emails are a special case, of less significance than IPCC’s summary report errors. Reporters and their editors should know better than to take seriously what amounted to bar-talk among a few researchers furious at their relentless attackers – and venting to one another with meaningless, unrealized threats against their foes. Big whoop.

Curtis Brainard: Yes, the press absolutely blew Climategate and the recent IPCC controversies out of proportion. The British press led the way, leveling false accusations of data manipulation and scientific corruption where none existed,in the case of Climategate, and exaggerating the significance of minor errors, in the case of the IPCC report.

That is why I and other media critics called upon the American press to become more involved in these stories – not to fan the flames of hype, but rather to carry out more nuanced reporting and set the record straight. The leaked emails and IPCC were, after all, newsworthy and exposed notable flaws in the scientific process. Unfortunately, when the American media finally came around to the story, their coverage was not very constructive. Articles were poorly structured, poorly sourced, and failed to deliver a “bottom line” for readers in terms of climate science, on the one hand, and climate politics on the other. Displaying typical adoration for the conflict narrative, the headline became, “Skeptics attack scientists’ credibility, poke holes in climate research,” rather than, “Scientists respond to criticism, seek to correct minor flaws and improve their methods.”

So, yes, I agree with climate advocates and climate scientists’ criticism that the press blew the Climategate and IPCC controversies out of proportion. On the other hand, I think some of their criticisms went too far. Many in those communities tried to argue that leaked emails and minor errors in AR4 were non-events, and wanted journalists to ignore them completely. That attitude is evasive and irresponsible. The recent controversies should remind journalists that we do in fact need to be more skeptical about information that is presented to us and ask tougher questions our sources, especially the familiar ones. If reporters were more proactive in this regard, things like the leaked emails and the IPCC errors would not seem like such a big deal. Instead, however, they are ceding important stories to skeptics and pundits who manipulate and distort them.

Bud Ward: Generalizing about how “the press” or “the media” cover an issue is as fraught with problems as generalizations, in this case, about the hacked e-mails themselves. This story amounts to one of the rare “fast-breaking” science news stories, and in that sense many of the media missed the boat…early and often.  A fatal early flaw may have been the acceptance, without qualification, by many media outlets of the suffix “gate” as being suitable. We’ve become “gate” anxious in our society, but what happened with the hacked e-mails in no way measures up to the standards of Watergate that gave birth to this craze. The media’s early and unquestioning acceptance of that suffix in effect amounted to game-over-early in the battle for public opinion.

The A.P.’s December review of all the e-mails, and its conclusion that the science remained unscathed, was important and timely…and well-done, and The Economist’s March 20-26, 2010, cover story — “Spin, science and climate change” — are outstanding examples of the best coverage of this whole mess.  But they stand out as exceptions to the rule of generally mediocre coverage overall.

Stephen Leahy: Right off the top it was easy to see there was nothing in any of it from a substantive climate science point of view. The reason it got so much press in my opinion is that media eventually looks for contrarian stories to cover even if it’s a bit thin in terms of content. This varies tremendously with each publication; some actively torque quotes/info to fit their current theme of the month: ’scientists with feet of clay’. The entire episode says far more about media and how it operates, the lack of knowledgeable reporters and editors, etc. My interview with science historian Naomi Oreskes offers a similar perspective.

*****

Q: We have another mini-controversy enveloping climate science, in which Science magazine used a Photoshopped image of a polar bear to accompany a letter from 255 scientists (all members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences), warning about the looming dangers of climate change. (The thrust of the letter assails “recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers.”) Again, some scientists are complaining that undue attention is being focused on the image and not the content of the letter. What do you make of all this?

Charles Petit: This is dumb, but a mere kerfuffle. It was a mistake to use that image not just because it is a montage, but perhaps even more because it is a lame cliche. It’s on the editors at Science – who have apologized for it, not the NAS signatories. These editors should have known better even had the photo been legitimate. A polar bear? Puh-lease. Science’s readers would have gotten more out of a Keeling Curve, even a hockey stick (amended of course to apply all the latest statistical fixes). The shouting about this phony image as a matter of genuine substance is as tiresome as the environmental activists who simply dismiss climate doubters as stooges of fossil energy interests and right wing thing tanks. There is some truth to that but we’ve heard it a million times already. My impression is that it is the list of signatures on the petition that got more news coverage in media and will, I’d hazard, have the greater impact. I hope so.

Curtis Brainard: I haven’t been following this story too closely, but I’ll make two observations. First, it is of course ridiculous that that people should focus on superficial images rather than substantive texts. But it is perhaps more ridiculous at this point that a sensible publication like Science would give people the opportunity to do so. They should know by now that even a real photo of a polar bear stranded on an ice floe, let alone this manufactured one, is likely distract attention from whatever runs next to it and cause needless controversy. When are journalists going to learn that polar bears and not the greatest poster children if your goal is generate concern for climate change?

Bud Ward: Another distraction from the major issue, the real story, of a changing climate and the what/how/and how much of what to do about it. No excuse for this kind of editorial clumsiness, though clearly not of the scientists’ making. This simply hands your adversaries the megaphone that they can use to bury what would/could have been the real story here. They handle such megaphones well, and have done so in this sorry case. Again, the real message gets buried, and the real science and real scientists are the worse off for it, let alone the public. This kind of editorial lapse is unacceptable, and it plays right into the hands of those wanting to continue distracting from the real issues at hand.

Stephen Leahy: Another red herring. This is like whinging about the colour of car that’s about to hit you. So a photo editor at Science used a ’shopped image as an illustration. Big deal and maybe bad judgement by some lowly editor. What’s that got to do with the content of the letter?

***Postscript***

For additional perspective and analysis on the polar bear photo episode, see Andrew Revkin here, Roger Pielke Jr. here and here, and Randy Olson here.

Now this is an interesting new job for the right kind of journalist. The idea behind it is expounded on here at Nieman Journalism Lab.

I’ll be curious to see what news the Sense-Making Project will be tracking. Seems like you could do this sort of thing for many kinds of stories that receive sustained coverage, from the recent health care reform debate to climate science.

What’s intriguing is that the tracker will be part of the conversation s/he is curating. Here’s Poynter Institute’s Kelly McBride, explaining:

The whole idea of the project is, ‘What if you had someone whose only job it was, every day, to be looking at information? And this person gets the new world and the old world, and isn’t writing to an audience of professional journalists, and is writing to Joe Citizen, saying, ‘Hey, this is kind of interesting.

One of the problems I can see arising are questions of bias. So for example, let’s say this “curator” is advising Joe Citizen to check out the latest climate science controversy. Will the curator be assessing the sources that are driving the story’s meme, or just making the connections?  McBride says both:

What we’ve found is that when you start taking a single piece of information, you can actually look at the history — where it came from, who linked to what, who transformed it, and how it got to you. And then you can look at how it went out from there.

She tells Nieman that the curator’s analysis might require “diagnosing language,” or “asking about the motivation of the person who delivered the information.”

That’s going to require a lot from the person doing the diagnosis. For instance, it sounds like a generalist–perhaps somebody with little science journalism background–will potentially be tasked with recognizing not just the swirling cross-currents of the latest climate story bouncing around the web, but also the motivations of those who are advancing it.

If this pilot project is successful, I can envision it being expanded to include a host of topics curated by individual journalists whose background matches the subject matter.

I have a guest post up at Nature’s Climate Feedback, titled “Are climate scientists ignoring the lessons of climategate?”

Here’s another dispatch from a decades-old war, in which the policy and politics never change. You couldn’t read this kind of story in the country where the war is raging, because of a virtual news blackout, enforced by fear of vicious reprisal. So what does that mean for the people caught in the crossfire? As the NYT reports,

It means that a mother can huddle on the floor of a closet with her daughter for what seems like eternity as fierce gunfire is exchanged outside their home, as occurred here recently, and then find not a word of it in the next day’s paper.

And it means that helicopters can swoop overhead, military vehicles can roar through the streets and the entire neighborhood can sound like a war movie, and television can lead off the next day’s broadcast talking about something else.

Welcome to life in the Mexican border towns, where, as the Times story reports, even the local American media has been intimidated by drug cartels.

As I noted several weeks ago, there’s some nice happy talk about cross-border cooperation on environmental issues. At least that’s one thing journalists on both sides of the border can feel safe to report on.

UPDATE: Over the weekend, three U.S. citizens with ties to a U.S. consulate office in a Mexican border town were killed in an ambush. The AP reports:

The slayings came amid a surge in bloodshed along Mexico’s border with Texas and drew condemnation from the White House. Mexico’s president expressed outrage and promised a fast investigation to find those responsible.

A fast investigation. In that lawless region, any investigation would do, but even that won’t change the facts on the ground. As the AP reports, the U.S. recognizes this:

The State Department authorized U.S. government employees at Ciudad Juarez and five other U.S. consulates in northern Mexico to send family members out of the area because of concerns about rising drug violence. The cities are Tijuana, Nogales, Nuevo Laredo, Monterrey and Matamoros.