> "My role was to identify the voices that were not in the mainstream and to give those voices a stage," Rheem says. [...]
> He says the media was hungry for these perspectives.
> "Journalists were actually actively looking for the contrarians. It was really feeding an appetite that was already there."
A rare example of the BBC breaking the media omertà on itself here. You thought journalism was supposed to help you understand the world? Nope, reading our slop will actually make you *less* able to make informed decisions.
There was a good paper written about this all the way back in 2007 [1]. Makes for some eyebrow-raising reading in the year-of-our-lord 2022.
In the UK, you need a substantial amount of meta-knowledge about the media outlets and political landscape in order to use news reporting to become more, not less or dis-, informed.
It’s a shame that the idea of learning media studies and related subjects at school or university were so maligned in the 00s, but probably not a coincidence either.
> In the UK, you need a substantial amount of meta-knowledge about the media outlets and political landscape in order to use news reporting to become more, not less or dis-, informed.
This is most-certainly true, and an interesting corrollary is that journalists themselves very likely underestimate the impact their work can have. Being on the inside, they of course know (because 'everybody knows') that this Daily Mail article about Jeremy Corbyn being a soviet spy (yes, it is real [1]) is utter dreck, basically just popcorn nonsense for bored retirees to flick past on the way to the sports pages. Journalists might have a hard time believing/understanding that people actually trust and respect them, and may even take what they say at face value, with actual consequences.
Of course, their proprieters understand this full-well, which is why e.g. Murdoch is willing to plough endless cash into loss-making endeavours like The Times.
Not that I intend to absolve journalists whatsoever. Their actions have literally destroyed everything (we just haven't realised it yet).
Just because a perspective is different it doesn't mean that it's the truth, or should be treated equally importantly for the sake of some kind of balance.
Climate change denial is a good example, because it's not the truth, and it's not important. It doesn't have it's own scientific literature, nobody ever tries to prove it, it's contrarianism at best, propaganda at worst. And yet the media tends to give it an equal amount of screen time, which makes the public believe in it's legitimacy.
This might be shocking to the HN audience, but contrarianism by itself is not enough to discover the truth.
No offense, but in my experience semi-articulate wins the day. I bet you a beer nobody knows what "media omertà" means. Even Google can't define it, but it references a book called A Climate Vocabulary of the Future that defines it as the media silence on climate change.
It sounds like you never actually spent any time reading anything by people who dispute popular narratives on climate change. If you did you'd know that nothing you just said is true. They frequently prove the points they're making, often via reference to climatologist's own papers, and it's not mere contrarianism but rather is pointing out places in which their science either isn't reliable or is being misrepresented.
Look at it this way. In the past few days HN has had a bunch of submissions on the news that a major paper in Alzheimer's research appears to be entirely fraudulent. It was noticed by outside "deniers", not any scientists within the field itself, and the science based on it went 16 years and received hundreds of millions of dollars in NIH funding. All based on some dodgy Photoshops, or so it appears.
When people argue with climatology and (often) absurd media claims that aren't even well connected to published science to begin with, they're usually arguing about actual, concrete problems with what scientists are doing. To believe that it's all mere contrarianism and propaganda is the sort of naive "Believe The Science!"-ism that has trashed trust in public health in the past two years, and worse, created a culture in which researchers think that they can get away with anything.
Climate change deniers rarely argue about the details, or even know about them. The way science works is that there is a big picture, and the details are slowly filled in. Like Newton's law, which is an approximation to general relativity, which itself is an approximation to something we don't yet understand, possibly quantum gravity. At the forefront of such research there are uncertainties, mistakes, hype, fraud even, because that's how humans are, and yet there is progress.
At this point however there is no reason to wait for climate change research to discover additional details no matter how important they might be, because it is already clear that action is needed. The risks are dire and constantly underestimated.
Climate change deniers usually maliciously deny the big picture, or sometimes use new developments that are in the flux as an example of how science can't be trusted. They do this without ever engaging the science and publishing papers. It's all about the social media for them.
Please do cite some examples because that just doesn't reflect my experience at all. They are never malicious, they only argue about the details to often mind numbing degrees, and are routinely engaging with the science by e.g. citing new datasets recently published.
But the people who argue with climatologists largely don't argue that the world isn't warming up, so that's irrelevant. They're mostly interested in whether the modelling is accurate (because if it's not there's no real problem; all concerning scenarios rely on modelled feedback loops), in how much of it is created by humans, in how expensive reduction is vs mitigation and so on.
There are people who argue that there have been pauses in that increase, but they're citing official temperature datasets from climatologists to show that. Usually satellite or weather balloon data because the surface temperature dataset has diverged from it, largely due to continual 'remodelling'.
"Or ask why we keep on beating heat records in the last decade."
We keep being told records are being broken but this is often on close inspection not really legit. Old data gets ignored, or datasets get altered such that years that supposedly broke records later get re-declared as not being record breaking after the fact so the same record can then be broken for a second time by the same temperature, or the record breaking temperatures turn out to be taken by weather stations at airports i.e. where they're being blasted by jet exhaust and hot tarmac.
If you actually go engage with the people criticizing the IPCC, which includes a fair number of climatologists, it's that kind of detail oriented thing you'll see being discussed. And these are important points. It's meaningless to talk about temperature records being broken if climatologists edit the historical record every few years, creating warming trends where previously none were visible.
The same people used to completely deny it, they only pivoted lately to bargaining and it's really transparent.
The IPCC scenarios don't really rely on feedback loops, because we don't know enough about them. They are rarely taken into account, while even the mildest plausible scenarios based on projected human activity project at least a 2°C change, which can't be stable. We underestimate feedback loops, and we might also get human activity wrong, but even if we don't you still get a planet that's just barely habitable.
The warming trend is not created by IPCC fudging past temperature data. This is a climate change denier talking point, but it's a lie. Land and ocean temperatures have been adjusted separately to account for the changes in the measurement methods. Localized sources were compared to their neighbours in order to be able to account for changes in the instruments, urbanization and so on. High-accuracy sensors are used to create a reference network of perfectly sited stations. Roughly half of the stations reduced the warming, half increased it. Deniers like to cherry-pick the stations to make a point. The biggest adjustment by far was because of earlier ships. They used to throw a bucket overboard, pull it up slowly and measure the temperature of the water with a thermometer, without accounting for the air temperature. Ships later switched to measuring temperatures through engine room intakes. These days we have a global network of automatic buoys. None of this increased the warming trend, the adjustments actually reduced it. Mostly only data from before 1940 had to be adjusted. Studies continue to use raw data along it's interpretations, but the necessity of an adjusted interpretation is constantly shown.
Which people are you talking about, specifically? I'm not saying you're wrong - there are so many people who disagree with one or more aspects of climate dogma that certainly there will be some out there who have changed their views over time. But you keep making precise claims about the views of abstractions, not real people.
IPCC feedback loops - they definitely do assume these. Look at any graph of temperature over time, or sea levels over time. Increases are small, slow and linear. Project them forward and even in 100 years you've got nothing of any concern. That's why the doomsday scenarios are always based on hypothesised feedback loops like melting glaciers, explosive release of methane from the ocean floor and so on. These things haven't actually been seen, they are hypothetical and supposed to kick in with higher temperatures.
The warming trend is created by the sort of adjustments you talk about. You don't have to take my word for it. Read this:
"An apparent pause in global warming might have been a temporary mirage, according to recent analysis. Global average temperatures have continued to rise throughout the first part of the twenty-first century, researchers report on 5 June in Science. That finding, which contradicts the 2013 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is based on an update of the global temperature records maintained by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The previous version of the NOAA data set had showed less warming during the first decade of the millennium."
So they were reporting a pause in temperature increases, which is by the way still readily visible in other non-surface datasets like satellites and weather balloons. It was even reported in IPCC 2013. And then, one day, they edited the data, released a new version and poof. The pause was gone. In fact, they claim it had never happened at all! If they were really just tweaking a few stations up and a few stations down with no impact, that Nature article shouldn't be possible, should it? And how can a rational person have confidence in the predictions of a group of people who for many years reported one trend in global data and then one day decides, oops, actually, everything we said was wrong. It's not rational to treat the predictions of these people as reliable when even their measurements aren't - by their own telling.
I was a journalist. The intent here, is reasonable. Whenever you wrote an article with person A claiming a thing, the editor would ask you to 'stand it up'. That involved checking the claim's validity by finding supportive and contrary sources and talking to them. The intent was to then produce a balanced, authorative synthesis.
Unfortunately, with things like climate change, the result tends to be 'false balance'. The BBC recognised this several years ago - but too late.
People will help make Earth unlivable for half a million dollars :( To me, this is a more grave crime than murder, and yet our socioeconomic system rewards it.
> He maintains that climate science was too uncertain in the 1990s to warrant "drastic actions", and that developing countries - particularly China and Russia - have ultimately been responsible for the decades of climate inaction, rather than American industry.
This is such a classic at this point. "Look, even if we are partly responsible, and way ahead in per capita terms, look at how others are doing overall".
I feel that this kind of hypocrisy has permeated down from geopolitical excuses, to the common people, who are now blamed, very publicly so, when it comes to essentially any kind of pollution, from air travel to plastic use.
> On an early autumn day in 1992, E Bruce Harrison, a man widely acknowledged as the father of environmental PR, stood up in a room full of business leaders and delivered a pitch like no other.
Sadly, the article makes no mention of his wife Patricia, who has run the Corporation for Public Broadcasting since 2005.
There were grass roots activists already talking about these issues, several years before these people got together. The GCC was professional lobbyists and advocates jumping on a market they just discovered existed.
it is high time we called 'PR' what it is - corporate propaganda - in order to strip the discipline of the legitimacy it somehow retains. It's basically paid for BS, and when it comes to climate change, everyone is going to be paying the price
The BBC as a public broadcaster isn't in the business of hosting contrarians for profit but to broadcast factful news, so.. not really.
The opinion of scientists qualified to speak on the question of CC matters, letting literal oil lobbyists speak is like asking the fox if we should keep the door to the henhouse open.
> The BBC as a public broadcaster isn't in the business of hosting contrarians
In the past, the BBC certainly has been in the business of "hosting contrarians", though perhaps with the misguided intention of providing balance rather than attracting viewers.
For example, OFCOM found them to have broken broadcasting standards by allowing Lord Lawson (a well-known climate change denialist) to make false statements on the Today Program [1, 2] without being challenged or corrected. This happened despite a complaint being upheld about a previous appearance of the same guest on the same program [3].
Weird though that it's perfectly fine to host false statements so long as they're on the correct 'side.' Those become honest mistakes or 'the science changed,' etc. This helps no one, as does not allowing opposing opinions/'science' just because, especially if controversial.
As long as the journalists are ensuring they do enough diligence to not present blatant lies or propaganda, it should not matter which 'side' is presented, journalism is supposedly (?) about presenting honest data and information for the viewer/consumer to form their own opinions on.
If someone somehow forms the opinion that climate change isn't a thing, then present better arguments and information and debate with honesty and integrity. It's not as loud and might not get the internet clicks, but it will shine through better in the end, much as it doesn't seem to in the moment. Don't let the fear/threat of trolls block being challenged by opposing ideas.
> If someone somehow forms the opinion that climate change isn't a thing, then present better arguments and information and debate with honesty and integrity.
If you're not already climate scientist, or willing to seriously read up on the literature, then you have no chance of understanding and judging for yourself arguments about the field - this is true for most fields requiring advanced mathematics and statistics. You are deluding yourself if you think you can listen to two climate scientists debate a point and accurately assess who has the better argument; not that this may even be true if you are a climate scientist, as you often need to run your own experiments or at least verify equations and statistical models before making up your mind.
The purpose of journalism is exactly to process facts to the public at a level where they can be understood by most people reading/watching them. The proper way to do science journalism is two steps removed from the raw scientific discussion: you ask scientists in the field about the mainstream opinion, about how strong the consensus is, about plausible non-mainstream opinions; maybe you check with a few people close to the field but outside of it to see what are opinions about the field itself in the larger academic context. If you can, you also get information about consequences of these theories in terms that can be understood by a non-expert audience (such as time dilation and the way it is used in GPS satellites for special relativity).
Then, you present to the public a condensed version of this information.
What you don't do is ignore all of this burden of journalistic research and just bring some scientists that are for or against a theory and let them make some random simplified meaningless arguments to the public to see who has the slicker tongue and nothing else.
Ah, the old everyone's an idiot that can't think critically thing.
People might not form the opinion you want, but that doesn't mean they can't still be critical and come to an informed opinion.
I think none of these topics are the problem being actually hinted at. Instead, I would ask bigger questions:
- Why do we seem to have an increasing number of politicians/positions of power with little to no depth of experience in their field?
- After decades and more of scientific abuse and manipulation by corporations, how do we rebuild trust (I think this is particularly relevant to the discussion here)?
- How do we ensure social media companies do not influence discussion, but also try to avoid echo chambers and propoganda?
In other words, it's not people not understanding a topic or the 'wrong' voices getting too much attention or too many 'wrong' opinions that is the problem, these are just symptoms.
Good arguments, data and integrity and more discussion should always be desired and encouraged as the way to debate and understand. Most other options are roads to tyranny of some form.
This is not my point at all. Instead, the problem is that scientific topics require huge time investments to be able to form an informed opinion.
To check whether someone's scientific arguments hold (assuming they are not ridiculously bad), you will need hours, days or weeks of research of your own, if you don't already know everything. You will need to check their math, to check their models, to compare with others' models in the literature, to do some small experiments of your own (even if just statistical experiments). You can't just listen to two people speak for 1 hour and meaningfully decide for yourself who is right.
Einstein couldn't have listened to two climate scientists debate for 1h and have decided for himself who is right. It just takes far more effort.
And the purpose of journalism and the scientific establishment is exactly to spare the rest of us that effort: journalists can talk to established scientists and help many millions of people form an informed opinion on what we know about a topic, without having to dedicate their week to that single topic. Those that do want to dedicate more time, and who do want to meaningfully investigate the fringe opinions shouldn't get it from Fox or BBC, they should go and read up on the literature, pro and against, with detailed technical arguments, once they understand enough of the field for those arguments to make sense.
To summarize: anyone who wants to contradict climate change should show you the math. If they can't show the math for various time constraint reasons, then it mustn't be on TV. If a TV station or news article is willing to spend 4-8 hours to discuss the technical details, then by all means, invite both sides of the argument.
Integrity in news reporting has nothing to do with presenting every possible view as legitimate.
A news report about the Earth that invites both physicists and flat earth loonies is not in any way better than one that doesn't even mention the flat Earth "theory".
You are actively misleading the public when inviting climate change deniers to a discussion about climate change.
Yes it is way better! If flat Earth is so outlandish (which it is), it should be easily dismantled in debate and journalistic investigation. Not wanting to allow it full stop for fear of internet trolls grouping up is no solution at all.
Sure: journalistic investigation should quickly dismantle it, which means they shouldn't report it to the public. It would be like reporting someone's words that you have found are lies, just to be fair and balanced.
On the other hands, debates with a general audience (i.e. non-experts) are a terrible way to judge scientific arguments. Non-experts are simply unable to judge for themselves the strength of most scientific arguments, because they simply don't know the fields well enough. The vast majority of the arguments will fly by us and we'll be left as confused or more; and we'll pick winners based on charisma rather than any deeper thought.
Yes but people must do that every day anyway. It's like saying no expert opinion or statement is valid unless you check credentials first and they meet some arbitrary bar of merit.
And even then, we've witnessed a long history of 'credentialed' people being corporate puppets for certain agendas, peddlers of their own self-importance and fraud or just plain wrong.
We should pick experts, but we should pick from a range, not just the experts we like or decide are on the right side. And sometimes also pay attention to the non-experts, they can ask very interesting questions and provide good thought experiments, even if naive.
We should pick experts that other experts believe in. If we happen to be experts in a field, or even adjacent fields, then by all means, let's pick experts based on our own understanding of their arguments. Knowledge does transfer to some extent, so if you're a mathematician or physicist or statistician, you could probably judge some climate or medical papers based on their statistical methods - especially when you find flaws (even if the math is perfect, if you don't know why they chose a particular model and how well it might actually fit the thing being modelled, you may not be sure they are not choosing a known bad model).
But if we're not, the only thing we can meaningfully do is to look at what other experts are saying is the right opinion, and judge based on popularity in their field.
Here's a challenge I bet your little principle can't sustain: find a major long standing theory in human history that turned out to be wrong. Then apply your idea . The desired outcome for a rational principle would be that the truth and reality bubbles efficiently to the surface instead of gets burried and is taboo and something people are ostracized for promoting. I have yet to hear a principle that can deliver this outcome.
For pure scientific debates, I'm all for inviting any scientist with some amount of credentials to the table.
But for public policy debates, I think the track record is exactly the opposite: for every major public policy issue that required scientific knowledge, inviting the reactionary types dug out by the sleazy PR industry has done a dis-service to the public. We've seen this with tabacco, with led, and with global warming in just the last century.
And as I said: that's fine - let them publish in scientific journals, let them give lectures at universities, let them participate in scientific debates.
But as long as their opinion is out of the mainstream of their field, keep them away from discussions of that field with the general public - especially when the general public has to make policy decisions based on that field.
If their scientific arguments are not convincing to their scientific peers, then they shouldn't be given a podium to try to convince the public through rhetoric and charisma.
I wonder how long it would have taken to discover the gut-brain links if experts were not allowed to speak out of their fields. Do we also measure the credentials of the peers and check their biases before allowing them to approve arguments and enter the mainstream (whatever that's supposed to mean)?
This line of reasoning is fraught with danger, though yes we should always at least try to ensure the arguments come from expertise and experience.
The gut-brain link was not discovered by bringing in gut experts on TV to opine on questions of public mental health, nor vice versa.
I feel that you're mixing up two meanings of public debate: one is the more general notion of "any debate which is accessible to the public" (like an open-enrollment scientific conference, or publishing in a science journal), and the second one is "debating for the express benefit of the entire public", such as a news television debate.
In the first one, I completely agree with you: anyone willing to put in the work to present a rigorous scientific argument should be allowed in, even if their theory is currently way outside the mainstream, and even if they are potentially biased.
For the second one, I don't think it's in anyone's real best interest to bring in dodgy experts that everyone in their field considers to be proven wrong. Especially not 1:1, suggesting to the general public a priori that what both experts are saying carries equal weight. Particularly so in something like a climate debate, where there are 99 scientists that are convinced the evidence for man-made global warming are overwhelming for every 1 that has even a moderate doubt.
Think of the following scenario: for some bizarre reason, Congress is considering a law to forbid GPS systems to make adjustments to their clocks based on the altitude of the satellites. The public will vote on this issue, so TV stations are presenting scientific views. To be balanced, they are bringing in both a world-renowned researcher in General Relativity (say, Niel deGrasse-Tyson), and a researcher who believes Newton's law of universal attraction is the final word on the effects of gravity (not sure they could find one).
Will the public be able to judge the merits of the GR non-linear equations to understand the merits of their arguments? Or would the public be better informed by only just bringing in Neil and letting them know that he represents overwhelming scientific consensus?
The BBC was started with the core mission to 'Inform, educate, entertain.'
The BBC World Service - funded by the Foreign Office, rather than from the core BBC license fee funding, did indeed have soft-power as part of its remit.
It's crimes against humanity, it's what it is. Sabotaging the human race for personal gain is the ultimate crime, it makes Hitler look like a saint. Any sentient species in the Universe wishing to prevail must, absolutely must be able to effectively discourage such behavior.
It seems that there are only two differences between Hitler and climate change deniers. First, Hitler had actual executive powers to implement the measures suggested by his own slander campaign. Second, unlike Hitler, we still refuse to acknowledge that climate change deniers do have a direct responsibility over the various disasters and subsequent deaths caused by climate change.
I clearly do. Hitler killed millions of people, not unlike the Black Death or Genghis Khan, but what can you do, life goes on. Climate change is different. Life will absolutely not go on if we don't start handling it. It's an extinction event, and that's not a hyperbole, we are actually in the middle of the Holocene extinction event, also called the sixth mass extinction.
The biosphere is not undestroyable by any measure. Prior extinction events haven't manage to permanently damage it, but we shouldn't set the bar that low and rely on life's magical ability to spring forth and prosper under any circumstances.
If it weren't for Hitler, World War II might have been over climate policy instead, and there might be no nukes. You gloss over Nth-order effects and cite a single statistic to compare relative damage done to humanity (spoiler alert: what you actually tried to do here is not possible to scientifically do at all - you are pro-science, right?). This tells me that you haven't done any real research on the topic, but are obtusely confident about it, on HN of all places. Who were your most influential authors on existential risks? Have you contributed to the literature at all?
The what if game works the other way around too. The Third Reich spent a lot of rethorical attention on environmentalism that soon became a less pressing concern. Under different circumstances however one might imagine that they would have tried to make the 1000-year Reich a reality, and nature conservancy and curbing pollution would have been a fit ideologically. But priorities tend to change, and the lack of individualism is not a guarantee against hypercapitalism.
Nuclear weapons were inevitable, they are trivial inventions.
Nobody would have fought over climate policy a 100 years ago. Climate change barely received any publicity before James Hansen's testimony in 1988.
...Sentence two, and y'all folks keep wondering who is fueling the lack of trust & emergence of conspiracy theories.
When you're fueling the emotional aspect with your words that unabashedly, you are making people who are on the fence or unsure certain something is really wrong with the mainstream claims. I can tell you this just from the reaction you gave me in the pit of my stomach.
No, it's an emergency. We've screwed the planet, big time. When they're cutting open whales to reveal heaps of plastic, find it on Everest's peak and also in our meat at the supermarket, and when 3M is still, to this very day, trying to weasel out of being forbidden from making PFAS (a pointless, stupid chemical group that we basically didn't need as a race), we can't afford to sit idly by and entertain the feelings of people who never really had an interest in anything outside of their yard.
I have strong sense of justice, but this is how countries are built to last. Rest assured that I wouldn't let some libertarian think tank and their corporate sponsors get away with such manipulation of public opinion for personal gain.
On the other hand if you are on the fence about climate change please call me ASAP, I have some property to sell.
"So you believe BBC exists ? Do your own research !".
Yes, though, I'm inclined to believe a sourced article from a major publicly founded outlet including quotes from the "accused" admiting to what they have done, over most corporate PR.
No - the claim that PR agencies were involved in climate change denial is pretty solid. It's basically their work. My point is that we should resist the renaming BS
> He says the media was hungry for these perspectives.
> "Journalists were actually actively looking for the contrarians. It was really feeding an appetite that was already there."
A rare example of the BBC breaking the media omertà on itself here. You thought journalism was supposed to help you understand the world? Nope, reading our slop will actually make you *less* able to make informed decisions.
There was a good paper written about this all the way back in 2007 [1]. Makes for some eyebrow-raising reading in the year-of-our-lord 2022.
[1] https://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/publications/downloads/boykoff07-ge...