How great headlines mislead

How great headlines mislead - William Horsley's CFOM blog, January 11 2010

This nice example comes from Prof Robert Watson, one of the UK's top authorities on climate change and a former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

On December 29 last year, following the shambles of the Copenhagen mega-summit, the Wall Street Journal carried an article which Watson co-wrote with another authority on (and firm believer in) climate change, Mohamed El-Ashry.

The point of the piece was to support the "orthodox" scientists' position that carbon dioxide is the main culprit causing long-term and inexorable climate change, but also to get across a second important message -- that in the short term we should be focusing more on cutting the "other greenhouse gas": methane.

Watson and El-Ashry explained that cutting emissions of methane can make an immediate impact to "buffer" or slow down climate change. And compared to taking action on CO2, cutting methane "requires only modest investment".

The article was printed on the Journal's op ed page all right. But Prof Watson was dismayed to see the sub-heading above the piece. It said "Forget about carbon. If we want to buffer global warming, cutting methane is the key". Forget about carbon? No way was that what the authors meant.

Watson was talking to a meeting of the Association of European Journalists in London on January 4, the first working day of the year for many of us.

The 25 journalists there were quite typical of the general public in Britain -- only half-persuaded about the scientific orthodoxy that climate change is due mostly to rising levels of CO2 and is mostly man-made, but well aware of the gaps in our own understanding of the science.

Robert Watson is a brilliantly clear and expert speaker, the most articulate scientist many of us have ever heard talking about policy issues.

He frankly acknowledges that scientists "are not winning the battle for public opinion" about the real threat of climate change.

But he was (I thought, as a non-specialist) pretty convincing on the central arguments -- those deeply annoying points about the need for carbon capture, emissions trading and climate change being man-made.

He also seems to be onto something important when he says that methane is responsible for 75% as much warming as carbon dioxode, and while CO2 remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years (so reversing global temperature increases by cutting carbon emissions is bound to take many decades, at least), methane "lasts only a decade but packs a powerful punch while it's there".

For the journalists Prof Watson had a special message: "The role of the media [in informing the public about climate change and other seminal scientific issues] is unbelievably central".

Which I translate as meaning "get your facts straight and dump your misleading headlines!".

He was too polite to put it so directly. But he does accuse the media of distorting the way the facts are presented to the public at large.

The media, by their nature, love controversy. So the climate change debate, Watson says, is often presented as a roughly balanced contest between two opposing sides. Whereas in fact, he says "95% of scientists now believe in climate change".

But, he complains, newspapers like to run stories that say things like "2,500 scientists say one thing -- but one scientist at MIT (or wherever) disagrees!". Indeed they do run stories, and headlines,like that.

A couple of days after Watson's appearance at the AEJ I spotted the issue of apparently overhyped media coverage being examined somewhere else -- in Vanity Fair's January edition.

VF nowadays regularly does more investigative and original journalism than most of the conventional news magazines.

Their science feature on the Large Hadron Collider was the first piece I have seen anywhere (OK, I don't subscribe to any specialist science publication) that explained in graphic detail the metal-crunching accident that occurred some 100 metres underground in September 2008, when the collider broke down just before the proton beams were due to be shot round the whole circuit to start the experiment in multiple proton stream collisions.

In the article Kurt Anderson took aim at the way much of the media made headlines out of the scientists' talk about the possibility of the L.H.C producing weird and wonderful things like extra dimensions and black holes.

The kind of black holes that scientists are excited about perhaps finding at CERN are "harmless ones, microscopic and incredibly short-lived", Anderson says. Yet alarmists who hyped the danger of the L.H.C destroying the earth had a much bigger platform thanks to the internet and cable news channels, and mainstream media, he writes, "consistently took the apocalypse possibility seriously."

OK, but those headlines -- "forget carbon" and "maybe our scientists are about to destgroy our planet" probably ensured that a heck of a lot more peope read about those complex "scientific" topics -- didn't they?

So is Professor Watson right about the media muddying vital messages about science? And does it matter?

Well, perhaps it's a coincidence, but the BBC Trust has just ordered a review of science coverage on the BBC -- reportedly the world's largest news organisation -- after complaints from the British public that it doesn't give enough weight to climate change sceptics.