errors in reporting of new scientific

Reporting and promoting science

Science sells these days. In the push for advertising dollars and

readership, the conventional and electronic media strive to link new

scientific results to the pressing issues of the day.

And, to be fair, in the push for tenure and grant dollars, we

academics can be guilty of the same. The holy grail used to be getting

a paper in Nature or Science. Now it is getting a paper in Nature or

Science so that the paper will be reported on CNN or the BBC.

The intent, in either case, can be benign. A lot of the published

science today, on subjects like climate change, is important news. But

in the effort to "frame" - to use the terminology in the Matt Nisbet

and Chris Mooney article that created buzz earlier this year - science

for public and political consumption, a lot of mistakes are being

made. It ranges from the inaccurate reporting and questionable

publicity of the mythical lake that would resolve the very real crisis

in Darfur to outright abuse of statistics to throw stones at solid

science.

Take these three recent headlines... please.

1) Red faces at NASA over climate-change blunder

I call this is a "false positive". There's been a huge and unnecessary

uproar over the discovery of a minor mathematical error in the NASA

GISS historical temperature dataset. The error means that 1998 was no

in fact the warmest year in US history, but is tied with 1934. As the

NASA scientists themselves report (pdf), the error has a negligible

impact on the global temperature, no impact on global rankings of the

warmest years, and absolutely no impact on the evidence for human

influence on the climate (see Tamino or Realclimate for details).

2) Warming will pause then full steam ahead, scientists contend

This is the "we didn't read the whole paper". These reports of a

"global warming" forecast for the next decade come from a innovative

short-term climate modeling study published in Science. The goal of

the study was to test the ability to predict climate on decadal or

shorter time-scales, a specially developed climate model that

explicitly considers the frequency of large-scale atmosphere-ocean

oscillations like El Nino (see Tamino). At the end of the study, after

a lengthy model validation against observed data from the recent past,

the authors discuss the model's predictions for the next ten years,

stressing they are contingent on stochastic variables like the

occurrence of El Ninos. The headlines made it seem as though the

scientific community had confidently concluded that 'warming will

pause' for a couple years.

3) Trees won't fix global warming

And finally, "we just didn't understand the paper". The headlines are

based on research, presented at last week's ESA meeting, from Duke

University's Free Air Carbon Enrichment (FACE) site, where scientists

have been testing the effect of higher CO2 levels on tree growth for

the past ten years. In the past, scientists had thought that higher

atmospheric CO2 would effectively 'fertilize' plants. The Duke

experiments showed that this fertilization effect was limited by the

availability of water and nutrients (press release). In an effort to

link the result to a public issue - carbon offsets - the media stories

reported that new research shows planting trees won't work to combat

global warming. In other words, planting trees won't take up ANY

carbon. Of course it would; all that wood is made of carbon, where

else could it come from? The Duke research only showed that there

won't be an extra growth bump because there's more CO2 levels in the

air, not that there won't be any growth at all.

This is the danger of popularizing science. As we saw with the

coverage of the Darfur Lake, more attention was given to the initial

headline than to the later reports that the 'lake' did not in fact

hold any water. Unfortunately, with such quick turnaround in

reporting, it is vital that all of us, the one's doing the research,

the one's writing the press releases and the one's writing the news

story, get it right the first time. It's not a trivial task. But

otherwise, these misrepresentations (about global temperature) or

misintepretations (about short-term climate prediction) or mistakes

(about trees and carbon) make it into the public consciousness.

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