" The basal forgetting rate differs little between individuals. The difference in performance (e.g. at school) can be explained by mnemonic representation skills. This means that some people are able to "imagine" memories in the right way while others are not...." -- Wikipedia entry 'Forgetting Curve'
News coverage of contrarians in the representation of global warming
Environmental reporters have been complaining for many years about an expectation that they report "two sides" to the global warming / climate change story. Naturally, the scientists who are issuing the warnings are one "side," and their ideas are obviously newsworthy.
But what about the contrarians who say that climate science is off base and who (like Patrick Michaels) say that the public "has been been bludgeoned with climate disaster stories" and that there is little danger.
Given that contrarians are a tiny minority, often in the pay of the fossil fuel industry, and often having done no actual research on their own, the question is whether they should or should not be taken seriouisly.
Or, as ABC news put it recently, "was confusiuon over climate change a con job?" (1 -- All links /footnotes below)
Getting "both" sides when one side is ludicriously off base has been called "false balance" by many science writers and climate scientists who believe the contrarians have not really contributed to the science and are not worthy of being taken seriously. Would we have cover the flat earth society during the Apollo missions to the moon?
Or perhaps a better analogy is the tobacco "scientists"who kept insisting there was no proven link between smoking and cancer when that issue was covered in the 1960s and 1970s. Similar attempts to undermine science and promote confusion to the benefit of industry have been seen in the lead paint / gasoline controversies and the hexavalent chromium controversy (2,3) and others.
At the heart of the problem is the expectation that most questions have two sides (at least); that both sides deserve representation; and that an adverserial political and legal system provides stability and justice, which would be lacking in a one-party system.
But science is in many ways a very different enterprise. Rather than the give and take of compromise over values, science is often an uncompromising search for proveable truth. In the climate change area, scientists have a very strong consensus. Out of 928 scientific papers published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003. three quarters either explicitly or implicitly accepted the consensus view while one quarter dealt with methods or prehistoric climate change, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. "Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position." In addition, organizations supporting the consensus position that climate change is serious and its causes are anthropogenic include the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the American Meteorological Society , the American Geophysical Union , and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). (4)
Given this, it is hard to see how industry-paid contrarians with no actual research work have anything of value to contribute to the discussion. To include them is to use an adverserial political framework to try to understand a scientific problem. That's like using a bicycle to go fishing -- it's the wrong tool.
So an adverserial system tends to promote "both sides" when that might be inappropriate. But how much does it promote the contrarian position? Before we say contrarians are getting "too much" news coverage, we need to know how much are they actually getting and how that is changing over time.
Content analysis of climate contrarians
Scientists at a climate change - environmental journalism seminar in the summer of 2005 theorized that there might be a "forgetting" curve for news coverage of climate contrarians that could be analyzed, and that it might be similar to one for tobacco contrarians who were left behind in the news coverage about tocacco and cancer in the 1960s (5)
Given the need for data, I searched Lexis Nexis - General News / Major Papers for news articles citing a contrarian meteorologist (Patrick Michaels / Series 1) and a climate scientist (James Hansen / Series 2) during the 1985 - 2006 period. Preliminary data is posted here. Each data point is a year.
Note that the 2006 results, which show 53 hits for Hansen, are for the first three and a half months alone. The Bush Administration's attempts to silence Hansen obviously have something to do with the intense recent coverage.
And the dips in coverage of global warming in the 2001 -2003 period may perhaps be explained by war coverage, in that environmental coverage tends to greatly decrease in times of war. (6)
The Michaels public visibility curve confirms the speculation of climate scientists at the 2005 seminar. It shows a moment around 1995 when climate contrarians were considered to be as newsworthy as climate scientists. However, by the early years of the 21st century there was a decided decay in the Michaels public visibility curve, while the Hansen curve accelerated, indicating perhaps that the problem of over-coverage of climate change contrarians was a thing of the past.
Some caveats: This chart represents only major newspapers, not wire services, magazines or television scripts (which will be the subjects of future content analyses). Nor have I yet located the tobacco cancer contrarians for an analysis of a similar contrarian decay curve.
----
Further notes and questions:
If we think of the news media as the memory of a society, and imagine that, like a person with a memory, a society tends to forget people and things as they become less and less relevant, then there should be a standard "forgetting curve" for nearly all public figures and issues unless there is some reason that journalists bring them back into the collective memory.
Psychologicial testing has found that there is a fairly standard basal memory curve and that differences between individual memory retentions have more to do with active learing strategies than with latent abilities (students take note!!)
Because social memories are constructed by people with individual memories, it would be interesting to learn whether a basal "forgetting curve" for public figures would be measurable with a standard coefficient such as the one used in individual psychological memory tests for exponential memory decay. (7)
_________ Links / footnotes
1. ABC News "Was confusion over climate change a con job?"
2. David Michaels, An Industry campaign to undermine an OSHA hexavalent chromium standard. Environmental Health
3. William (Bill) Kovarik, Ethyl-leaded Gasoline: How a Classic Occupational Disease Became an International Public Health Disaster, INT J OCCUP ENVIRON HEALTH 2005;11:384–397 (PDF file)
4. Naomi Oreskes, Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change, Science Magazine, 3 December 2004:
Vol. 306. no. 5702, p. 16865. Communicating Science and Journalism Workshop, June 1-3, 2005, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University.
6. For the influence of war on environmental coverage at home, see The confluence of newspapers and the environment in the early 20th century, AEJMC paper, 1998. For example, note the collapse of coverage of air pollution during WWI; New York Times 1905 - 1930)
