The biggest lie in American climate journalism is that reporters cover climate science as a science.
Except for a report on the Washington Post website that was picked up by a couple of regional papers, an important study on the most important question in climate science last month went completely unnoticed in the U.S. media. Consult the laughably named website Inside Climate News, which poses as authoritative. A query yields only the response “Your search did not return any results” plus a come-on for donations to “Keep Environmental Journalism Alive.”
So we’ll quote a passage in an exemplary French report that begins, “But uncertainty about how hot things will get also stems from the inability of scientists to nail down a very simple question: By how much will Earth’s average surface temperature go up if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is doubled?”
“That ‘known unknown’ is called equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), and for the last 25 years the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the ultimate authority on climate science—has settled on a range of 1.5 C to 4.5 C.”
The French report describes a new study by climate physicists Peter Cox and Mark Williamson of the University of Exeter and Chris Huntingford of the U.K.’s Center for Ecology and Hydrology. Not only does it narrow the range of expected warming to between 2.2 and 3.4 degrees Celsius, but they rule out the possibility of worrying outcomes higher than 4 degrees.
Their study might be less interesting and newsworthy if it weren’t the latest crystallization of a trend. Even the IPCC is an example. Slightly contrary to the French report, it backpedaled in 2013 to adopt a wider range of uncertainty, and did so entirely in the direction of less warming.
More to the point, this was a much-needed confession of scientific failure that the Exeter group and others are trying to remedy. The IPCC’s current estimate is no more useful or precise than one developed in 1979 by the U.S. National Research Council, when computers and data sets were far more primitive.
This 40-year lack of progress is no less embarrassing for being thoroughly unreported in the mainstream press. The journal Nature, where the new study appears, frankly refers to an “intractable problem.” In an accompanying commentary, a climate scientist says the issue remains “stubbornly uncertain.”
You may be falling out of your chair right now if you recall last year’s lawsuit by New York’s attorney general against Exxon, itself a pioneering pursuer of climate studies, for daring to mention the existence of continuing “uncertainties.”
This question of climate sensitivity goes not just to how much warming we can expect. It goes to the (almost verboten) question of whether the expected warming will be a net plus or net minus for humanity. And whether the benefit of curbing fossil fuels would be worth the cost.
Yet you can practically chart the deepening idiocy of U.S. climate reporting since the 1980s by how these knotty, interesting questions have fallen away in favor of an alleged fight between science and deniers.
“Fake news” is not our favorite pejorative. A better analysis is offered by former New York Times reporter Michael Cieply in a piece he wrote in 2016 when he started a new job at Deadline.com. He describes how, unlike at a traditional “reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper,” reporters at the Times were required to “match stories with what internally was often called ‘the narrative.’ ”
Leaving climate sensitivity uncertainties out of the narrative certainly distorts the reporting that follows. Take a widely cited IPCC estimate that “with 95% certainty,” humans are responsible for at least half the warming observed between 1951 and 2010. CONTINUE AT SITE
