guest blog opinion column in science

Guest Blog: Opinion Column in Science Times

The following is a guest posting:

The addition of conservative columnist John Tierney to the staff of

the New York Times's Science Times section has to be one of the most

bizarre--and irresponsible--editorial decisions in awhile. Tierney's

new column, "Findings," runs on the front page of the section, mixed

in with the standard-issue news and feature stories. And while

particularly astute readers might pick up on the fact that Tierney is

an opinion writer rather than a science reporter, it's a good bet that

general readers won't make that distinction. So while the section's

staff reporters and other contributors work hard to maintain some

shred of objectivity in their stories, those stories are now running

side-by-side with Tierney's politically charged commentaries--and the

result is a serious blow to the whole section's credibility, and a

public misled by opinion masquerading as fact.

Check out Tierney's column from this past Tuesday (Feb. 13). It uses

Richard Branson's $25 million prize for a solution to global warming

as a way to begin talking about Al Gore (the connection is tenuous).

Tierney's real intent is to attack Gore and his film, "An Inconvenient

Truth," which is old news at this point, since it's been out for

almost a year. One senses Tierney's been rubbing his hands together

for about that long trying to find an appropriate venue for his

attack. He accuses Gore of "hype" and of extrapolating "a short-term

trend into a disaster," and of various other crimes against science

(and indirectly against humanity). To those with good working

knowledge of climate change, Tierney sounds just half a step removed

from right-wing fiction writer and global warming denialist Michael

Crichton. But to the majority of readers, he sounds like he's reciting

facts that call into question Gore's entire endeavor (which has been,

for the most part, lauded by climate scientists).

Tierney also uses this column as a pulpit for a message he's been

hammering for years: There's no point in trying to change people's

habits, so the only solutions to environmental problems will be

technological. "As far-fetched as it seems today," Tierney wrote on

page one of the section, "removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

could turn out to be a lot more practical than the alternative:

persuading six million people to stop putting it there." Of course,

this statement is a lot more true if you are opposed, as Tierney

clearly is, to any sort of federal or international environmental

regulation. To run political commentary like this on the front page of

the Science Times is to etch opinion into the minds of many readers as

fact. Why more people haven't raised red flags is a mystery.

Posted by CEJ Admin at 6:10 AM

Labels: environmental journalism, global warming

8 comments:

CEJ Admin said...

A few thoughts:

Would you find this as egregious if there were other

opinionated columnists in Science Times, representing a greater

diversity of views? And if they carried an 'eyebrow' above the

headline featuring the word "Opinion"?

Concerning the content of Tierney's column, he certainly

provides an unbalanced view, using only evidence that supports

his view that climate change is not the looming catastrophe

portrayed in "An Inconvenient Truth." But isn't that what

columnists ordinarily do? Yes, the best opinion columnists

acknowledge evidence contrary to their point of view, and then,

show why they don't put much credence in that evidence. So in

this regard, Tierney isn't as good as he might be. Because he

stands less of a chance of convincing knowledgable folks who

are disinclined at the outset to believe him.

In his column, Tierney refers to new findings indicating that

the flow of two of the largest glaciers in Greeland slowed

abruptly in 2006 to near the old rate. In 2004, the rate had

doubled in less than a year, raising new concerns that the pace

of sea level rise may quicken. The fact is that both the IPCC

and the researchers on this study acknowledge that the future

behavior of the Greenland ice sheet is uncertain. In its recent

report, the IPCC was conservative in discussing the prospects

for sea level rise by the year 2100.

What Tierney didn't say is that the researchers on the new

study about Greenland's glaciers are cautious about drawing

reassuring conclusions. In a press release from the University

of Washington, Ian Howat, a post-doctoral fellow there (who

works with Ted Scambos at the National Snow and Ice Data Center

at the University of Colorado) had this to say:

"While the rates of shrinking of these two glaciers have

stabilized, we don't know whether they will remain stable, grow

or continue to collapse in the near future . . . That's because

the glaciers' shape changed greatly, becoming stretched and

thinned.

"Our main point is that the behavior of these glaciers can

change a lot from year to year, so we can't assume to know the

future behavior from short records of recent changes," he says.

"Future warming may lead to rapid pulses of retreat and

increased discharge rather than a long, steady drawdown."

In other words, future warming could make things much worse --

a possibility not mentioned by Tierney.

But is there something inherently wrong with a columnist

highlighting one set of facts to make an argument, especially