How the media has warped the debate about AGW

Discussion in 'Politics' started by futurecurrents, Mar 5, 2013.

  1. So we know Exxon in the past and others like the Koch bros and conservative think tanks are currently conducting a sophisticated and well funded denial machine that has worked very well at confusing the public and hampering efforts at finding the truth about AGW.

    In addition, the media, especially television, has both failed at getting across the facts and in cases like Fox News has actually worked toward spreading disinformation, dismissiveness and doubt about it.

    It really is not surprising that around a third of the US still denies AGW.

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    The way the media report on climate change in the English-speaking media, especially in the United States, has been widely studied, while studies of reporting in other countries have been fewer.[4] A number of studies have shown that particularly in the United States and in the UK tabloid press, the media significantly understated the strength of scientific consensus on climate change established in IPCC Assessment Reports in 1995 and in 2001.


    Scientists and media scholars who express frustrations with inadequate science reporting[13][14][15][16][17][18] argue that it can lead to at least three basic distortions. First, journalists distort reality by making scientific errors. Second, they distort by keying on human-interest stories rather than scientific content. And third, journalists distort by rigid adherence to the construct of balanced coverage. Bord, O’Connor, & Fisher (2000)[19] argue that responsible citizenry necessitates a concrete knowledge of causes and that until, for example, the public understands what causes climate change it cannot be expected to take voluntary action to mitigate its effects.

    The notion of balanced coverage may make perfect sense when covering a political convention, but in the culture of science, balancing opposing views may be neither fair nor truthful. To quote climate scientist Stephen Schneider (Schneider, 2005): “In science, it’s different.” Extreme examples bring this point home. Does a flat-Earth proponent deserve equal time to a modern astrophysicist? Surely not. Should an advocate for intelligent design be taken as seriously as an evolutionary biologist? Again no. Following this logic, some experts argue that it is misleading to give scientific mavericks or advocates equal time with established mainstream scientists.

    Yet there is evidence that this is exactly what the media is doing. In a survey of 636 articles from four top United States newspapers between 1988 and 2002, two scholars[22] (M.T. Boykoff & J.M. Boykoff, 2004) found that most articles gave as much time to the small group of climate change doubters as to the scientific consensus view. Given the real consensus among climatologists over global warming, many scientists find the media’s desire to portray the topic as a scientific controversy to be a gross distortion. As Stephen Schneider put it[16]: “a mainstream, well-established consensus may be ‘balanced’ against the opposing views of a few extremists, and to the uninformed, each position seems equally credible.”
     
  2. jem

    jem

    odd that the last week the UN admitted there has been no warming the last 16 years

    yet a trog like you is still here pasting this crap.

    is this like the last gasp of a dying agw nutter before you give up?

    Lets let the UN report come out and some of the recent data to shake out...

    Then in a few years you will have better models which can try an work going forward.
     
  3. Ricter

    Ricter

    "From a global perspective there have been 8 other years which have been warmer than last year.... recently."
     
  4. Arnie

    Arnie

  5. Volcanic eruptions, even small and moderate ones, might counter some of the effects of global warming, new research suggests.
    The planet didn't heat up as much as scientists expected it to from 2000 to 2010 (though it was still the warmest decade on record), and a new study finds that chemical compounds spewed during modest eruptions around the globe could be behind the trend.
    When sulfur dioxide emitted by a volcano rises up to the stratospheric aerosol layer of the atmosphere, it undergoes chemical reactions, forming particles that reflect sunlight back into space instead of letting it get to the surface of the planet. This has a cooling effect on Earth that can help mitigate the impacts of heat-trapping greenhouse gasses.
    Scientists observed an increase in these sun-scattering aerosols in the atmosphere from 2000 to 2010. Some studies suggested that emissions from rapidly developing countries in Asia could be largely to blame — India and China, for example, are thought to have ramped up their sulfur dioxide output by about 60 percent over the decade through coal burning. But other studies pointed to volcanoes, which are also an important source of sulfur dioxide.
     
  6. You know, for a guy so heated up,(pardon the pun), about spamming, you might want to look in the mirror. You have 6 new threads going in the last 2 days, all on the same topic. Maybe you can just put all this GW stuff in one thread.
     
  7. jem

    jem

    exactly... see the trend I reference in the solid post right below your your post.
     
  8. Ricter

    Ricter

    So there's been no warming for 16 years, but there have been eight "recent" years hotter than last year? I know it's possible, on average, but we'd have to see much colder winters, too. Unless you intended "recent" to mean some other time period...
     
  9. jem

    jem

    are you familiar with the idea of a recent low on a chart...

    it can happen near all time highs, it can happen near 5 year lows.

    I used recent... because I do believe your agw nutters scientists have fudged the data (which they now refuse to produce) and that there were warmer periods cyclically in the past.

    Hints of those facts can be seen from viking colonies being discovered as ice melts away. Or the fact that there were vineyards in England.

    Or my most compelling argument, for some, in the movies... 95% of the time the Roman army is in skirts and sandals.
     
  10. Ricter

    Ricter

    LOL, nice.
     
    #10     Mar 5, 2013