There they go again

Once again, the Bush administration apparently is trying to muzzle government scientists from talking about climate change. It's yet another example of a clumsy and ill-advised attempt to control speech — and once again, it has backfired, thanks to vigilant reporters.

The news came from two stories, one posted Wednesday on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Web site and the other by Andy Revkin of the New York Times yesterday. The stories reported on memorandums from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that seem to ban government biologists travelling to meetings in Norway, Russia, Canada, and "any northern country," from discussing how global warming and melting Arctic sea ice are affecting polar bears.

According to the Post-Intelligencer story, the memorandums were prompted by upcoming trips to Norway and Russia by two biologists. The first, Janet Hohn, was scheduled to travel to Norway in a group led by Julia Gourley of the State Department to participate in a meeting on conserving Arctic animals and plants — which are under pressure from a changing climate. The second biologist, Craig Perham was going to Russia to advise villagers along the Siberian coast on how to avoid dangerous encounters with polar bears — which are on the rise because melting sea ice has forced them to shift their migrations.

One of the memorandums requires that an official spokesperson be named when a group of fish and wildlife biologists undertakes foreign travel — and that no one else can speak about issues related to climate change, polar bears and sea ice. My guess is that Gourley would be that spokesperson, since the state department official presumably can be trusted not to engage in any discourse that might cast administration policy in a negative light.

But the memos go even further. From Revkin's story: "The sample memorandums, described as to be used in writing travel requests, indicate that the employee seeking permission to travel 'understands the administration’s position on climate change, polar bears, and sea ice and will not be speaking on or responding to these issues.' This would appear to prevent both Hohn and Perham from saying anything about climate change, melting sea ice and polar bears — an absurd requirement, since the issues at the heart of the meetings in Norway and Russia relate directly to climate change.

In a story in today's Times, Tina Kreisher, a spokesperson of the Department of the Interior, was quoted as saying that the requirements simply indicated that climate change was not part of the agenda for the meeting in Norway, but that they would not ban Hohn from talking about global warming "over a beer." And the director of the wildlife service, H. Dale Hall, said the requirements simply would insure that Perham would stick to the agenda for his meetings in Russia. But the World Wildlife Fund, which is participating in the Siberia trip, says no set agenda had been negotiated.

This is just the latest attempt to control what government scientists say about climate change. News reports by Andy Revkin of the Times and others have documented other instances involving scientists from NASA and NOAA. The administration and its supporters have responded by saying that individual instances were handled poorly, but that controlling what government employees say about policy, as opposed to science, is wholly appropriate.

I was born in Brooklyn, so I know this bridge just ain't for sale. A single case of an inappropriately worded memo would be one thing. But this keeps coming up over and over again. So either this is yet another example of breathtaking incompetence. Or higher ups in agencies across the government are getting the message that scientists must be censored from talking about scientific issues they're qualified to discuss, lest Americans conclude that U.S. policy on climate change is ill-advised.

Or both.

-- Tom Yulsman

La Nina may arrive soon, NOAA says

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that La Nina conditions may be developing the Pacific. The changing conditions are depicted In the image at left, in which cooler ocean surface temperatures are in blue and warmer in yellow and orange. During La Nina conditions, the east-central equatorial Pacific becomes cooler than normal, influencing rainfall and temperature patterns around the world.

A La Nina sometimes follows on the heels of an El Nino. According to NOAA it tends to be associated with a greater-than-normal number of hurricanes in the Atlantic, but fewer hurricanes in the eastern Pacific. La Nina conditions tend to develop between March and June and then reach peak intensity from December to February. NOAA says a lengthy La Nina between 1998 and 2001 contributed to serious drought in the West.

So after this year's epic snow in parts of Colorado, we may see a return to the dry conditions that have seemed ever more common in recent years.

-- Tom Yulsman

Creating a Climate for Change on Global Warming

What role has communication about global warming played in delaying action on this issue? And how might scientists, journalists and others do a better job of communicating about it to bridge the gap between a high degree of public awareness and a low degree of concern?

That's the subject of "Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change" edited by Lisa Diling and Susanne C. Moser, and published last month by Cambridge University Press. I haven't read the entire book yet, but I've read the introduction. And my sense is that any journalist who covers any aspect of this issue — and any scientist who may have to interact with a journalist on the subject — simply must read this book.

"Society at large does not appear to be deeply concerned with global warming, and as a result, is not yet acting on the ever-more urgent warnings emanating from the science and advocacy communities," Dilling and Moser write. Scientists tend to ascribe the problem to a lack of knowledge about the issue. "The familiar refrain goes something like this: 'If only they understood how severe the problem is … If only we could explain the science more clearly, train to be better communicators, become more media-savvy, get better press coverage … Why are they not listening? Why is no one doing anything?'"

Dilling and Moser cite research showing that while Americans are very well aware of global warming, only about a third are concerned or worried about it. "The disparity between these two findings — high awareness but low personal concern — shows that if creating urgency were just a matter of understanding the 'facts,' we would not be in the current conundrum," they write.

The way we communicate about climate change, they conclude, is not leading to action. And they identify a number of factors that make it difficult to communicate in an effective way. Among them are these: The issue has a lack of immediacy; the impacts are remote from most of our every day lives; the climate system is responding very slowly to greenhouse gases; people are skeptical that small actions such as driving less or changing light bulbs can have an appreciable impact. This is an incomplete list. Suffice it to say that Dilling and Moser identify a host of factors that make it terribly difficult for both scientists and journalists alike to communicate the urgent need for action.

And then news media, abetted by scientists, often make things worse. The authors point out that journalists have largely followed the lead of scientists in portraying the issue of climate change as primarily a scientific debate — global warming: yes or no? Scientists by nature emphasize uncertainty in their communication about issues, because this is what their research is often designed to narrow. Consequently, they tend to emphasize the things that are not known. And we've obliged the scientists in our coverage, discussing the issue in the same terms.

This has allowed opponents of action to "disproportionately" highlight the remaining unknowns. And to make sure we are being fair and balanced, we have often presented the issue as a debate between two equally ranked opponents, rather than accurately reporting on the consensus among the vast majority of scientists that humans are indeed responsible for global warming, and our impact is growing year by year. Making matters worse, Dilling and Moser point out that while there are more science stories than ever before, there are fewer reporters covering the science beat — fewer journalists with the knowledge to do the subject justice.

And then there is the issue of alarmism. In a letter in the Feb. 22 issue of Nature, Mike Hulme of the Tyndall Centre at the University of East Anglia in the UK, decries the alarmism he saw in British coverage of climate change following the release of the IPCC report. "The four UK 'quality' newspapers all ran front-page headlines conveying a message of rising anxiety," he writes. Adjectives like "catastrophic," "shocking," "terrifying," and "devastating" appeared in all nine newspapers whose coverage of the IPCC report he analyzed.

Dilling and Moser point out in their book that appealing to fear is "unreliable at best in prompting behavior change. Frequently, this technique leads to the exact opposite from the desired response," including denial, apathy, and actions that can create greater risks.

There is some good news for American journalists — at least I think it's good news. In his letter to Nature, Hulme of the Tyndall center said his analysis of media coverage in the United States showed that it generally adopted "a tone that facilitates a less loaded or frenzied debate about options for action."

But the less alarmist, more neutral coverage here in the United States has not yet bridged the gap between high awarness and low concern. So while we may be doing some things right, particularly lately, we've still got a long way to go. All the more reason to read Dilling and Moser's book.

-- Tom Yulsman

Global warming hits Mt. Everest

Ice cores drilled at an elevation of 21,300 feet on Mt. Everest's East Rongbuk Glacier reveal that summer temperatures on the shoulder of the highest mountain on Earth have likely been warmer during the 20th century than during the previous 2,000 years. "Our reconstruction points to an unprecedented warming trend in the 20th Century," the researchers wrote in the Feb. 7, 2007 issue of the European journal "Climate of the Past."

In other news, fresh evidence has emerged that global warming may be causing Atlantic hurricanes to intensify. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin and the National Climatic Data Center say they aligned new and old satellite records dating back as far as 1983 to chart the trend in Atlantic hurricanes. "The data says that the Atlantic has been trending upwards in hurricane intensity quite a bit," says lead author James Kossin, a research scientist at UW-Madison's Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite StudiesKossin. "But the trends appear to be inflated or spurious everywhere else, meaning that we still can't make any global statements."

-- Tom Yulsman

Is it time for a Society of Environmental Journalists weblog?

As journalists, we vigorously advocate for transparency in public institutions and many other areas of society. We argue that it’s good for democracy — that the people have a right to know how decisions are made.

But as journalists, we are generally shy of public attention to how we do our jobs, let alone to what we think and believe. That’s partly because our job is to report the story, not become part of the story. In the old days, of course, one would never, ever utter the “I” word in a news story. If it was absolutely necessary to bring yourself into the story, you did it awkwardly in third person: “A reporter who witnessed the event . . .”

I think we’re also shy of public attention because we worry that people might see that beneath the public front of an unbiased, objective journalist lies a human being with biases, emotions, and personal strengths and weakness.

And so blogging about how we do our work may seem risky. But at a time when newspaper readership is declining, young people are getting their news from sources such as “The Daily Show,” and the public is increasingly distrustful and even cynical about what they’re getting from news media, is it time to swallow our discomfort and get on with it?

I think many of us would probably agree that how we do our work, and how we think, are not well appreciated by our audiences. So is there a way to do a public blog — by environmental journalists about environmental journalism — that would help us do our jobs better while also giving our audiences a glimpse of the incredible care most of us take in doing those jobs?

What would we write about in such a blog? Certainly, some, but not all, of the conversation now taking place in the SEJ listserve could migrate over to a blog. It could be a place to talk about ethics, how to cover stories, the scientific status of important issues like climate change, and attempts to hinder what we do as journalists. It could also be a place to call attention to particularly noteworthy achievements, such as awards and important stories that have made a real difference. And if we're brave, we could use the blog to call attention to examples of environmental coverage we don't like.

As Amy Gahran said last year to our Ted Scripps Fellows in Environmental Journalism, young people “are more interested in conversation than lectures . . . They expect direct interaction as a basic aspect of their media experience. They expect their perspective to matter.” Similarly, “There’s a growing need/demand for greater audience participation and a remaining need for quality news content.”

I think she’s right. Many of the young people I encounter as a professor here at the University of Colorado are pretty cynical about us journalists. They feel that we’ve been bought and sold just as surely as the politicians, and that what we write and broadcast needs to be taken with a shaker full of salt. If done right, could a bit more transparency in what we do as journalists, and some interactivity with our audiences, actually help counteract this distrust and cynicism?

A Society of Environmental Journalism blog could serve other purposes as well. Look at the success of RealClimate. It is produced by climate scientists, mostly for climate scientists. But many journalists go there to see what scientists are saying outside of peer reviewed journals. If you want to see how climate scientists think — because it might help you cover them better — this is a good blog to go to. Similarly, if you were an environmental scientist, an environmental journalism blog might be useful if you wanted to learn how to deal with journalists more effectively. In other words, it’s possible that a blog like this could improve communication between scientists and journalists. (Perish the thought — we could even ask them to do guest blogs!)

We would obviously have to put our best foot forward in such a blog. That may be difficult, since emotion rules in the blogosphere. It is without question a place for uninhibited and often unrevealing bloviation. Perhaps the content would have to be moderated to some extent, because one intemperate remark from a journalist who hits the return key too quickly could become fodder for the likes of James Inhofe. That would hurt more than it would help. On the other hand, many journalists already are too keen to give fodder to those folks — and without the agency of a weblog. For example, some of us haven’t hesitated to publicly compare skeptics of global warming to Holocaust deniers. That’s been done in good, old fashioned print.

SEJ members already engage in daily conversation through the SEJ members’ listserve. It’s like a private club. A blog is more like a coffee house — a public place to come for some spirited conversation. Maybe it’s time that we open the door and let other people in to join the conversation.

If transparency in the institutions we cover is good for the sake of democracy, wouldn't transparency in the institution of environmental journalism be good for the same reason?

-- Tom Yulsman

How to manage the Colorado River until 2026? Bureau of Reclamation issues an EIS on proposed guidelines

The Bureau of Reclamation has issued a draft environmental impact statement on proposed guidelines for managing the flow of the Colorado River through Lake Powell and Lake Mead, particularly under drought conditions. The guidelines, once adopted, would be in force until the year 2026.

As last week's report from the National Research Council showed (see our earlier posting), we should expect drought conditions to be common, especially as global warming intensifies. So this is a big deal. How the bureau chooses to manage water in the Colorado will impact many millions of people in Southern California, Nevada, Arizona and throughout the parts of the interior West that depend on the river for water.

The EIS considers five alternatives. The first is a "no action alternative." Here are the others:

Basin States Alternative: Under this plan, the bureau would operate Lake Powell and Lake Mead in a coordinated manner to minimize shortages in the Lower Basin states (Arizon, California and Nevada) "and avoid risk of curtailments of use in the Upper Basin" (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming).

Conservation Before Shortage Alternative: Developed by a coalition of environmental groups and other NGOs, this alternative would include "voluntary, compensated reductions in water use to minimize involuntary shortages in the Lower Basin and avoid risk of curtailments of use in the Upper Basin."

Water Supply Alternative: This plan would maximize delivery of water at the expense of keeping water in the reservoirs for future use.

Reservoir Storage Alternative: This plan was developed in coordination with Western agencies, the Naitonal Park Service and other stakeholders. It would "keep more water in storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead by reducing water deliveries and increasing shortages to benefit power and recreational interests."

The draft EIS was released for public review and comment on Wednesday, Feb. 28.

Al Gore: Mainstream Media Still Don't Get It

If you read this posting earlier, there's a bit of an update based in part on the excellent analysis by John Fleck:

The mainstream media still reject the scientific consensus on global warming, Al Gore told a media ethics conference earlier this week, The Tennessean reports.

Speaking of the conclusions of the IPCC, Gore said the media "have failed to report that it is the consensus and instead have chosen … balance as bias." Citing a study showing that 53 percent of newspaper articles on global warming offer false balance on the issue, he said, "I don't think that any of the editors or reporters responsible for one of these stories saying, 'It may be real, it may not be real,' is unethical. But I think they made the wrong choice, and I think the consequences are severe." The consequence, he argues, has been political gridlock on the issue.

I suspect Gore is referring to the study by Maxwell and Jules Boykoff examining "prestige press" converage of global warming between 1988 and 2002. ("Balance as Bias: global warming and the U.S. prestige press," Global Environmental Change, 14 (2004) 125–136.) Included in the survey were the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. The researchers found that "the prestige press’s adherence to balance actually leads to biased coverage of both anthropogenic contributions to global warming and resultant action."

After the release of the Boykoff study, John Fleck posted an an excellent critique, noting that the researchers conflated the scientific consensus on science with the policy response. (Also see his comment below.) "While they may be correct that there are cases where stories about the science are marred by a bias created by false balance, their conflation of scientific understanding of the issue and policy responses renders their argument fundamentally flawed."

According to the Boykoff paper, "the scientific community has reached general consensus that immediate and mandatory actions are necessary to combat global warming." It may well be that most climate scientists agree with this statement. But that certainly doesn't mean most other people do. This is just pointing out the obvious — scientific consensus by no means equals political consensus. And as we all know, we're not even close to a political consensus yet. So journalists providing balanced coverage of the policy side of the issue are only doing their jobs. Gore is just flat wrong. They are not guilty of false balance.

I suspect Gore was reacting to the hyper-bloviation on global warming that's prevalent on cable news (much of it directed at him this week), and to the low quality of news coverage in broadcast media. In this case, false balance on global warming is probably the least of our problems.

-- T.Y.