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In the latest issue of Science, Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich, UK and a group of social scientists have a letter of complaint [subscription] regarding media coverage of the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change, held March in Copenhagen, and point in particular to Science’s own coverage from the event.

I and my colleague Oliver Morton covered the Congress here. Its overall aim was to update the assessment of global warming ahead of the UN negotiations on climate change taking place in the same venue in December.

Hulme et al. point out that the dominant mode of media reporting after the event was of impending doom, even though nearly half of the research presented at the Congress was from scholars in the social sciences and humanities offering new insights on how to avoid the catastrophic outcomes foreseen by biogeophysical scientists,

They’re right, of course, and I think it’s worth thinking about why there was a bias in the type of material covered by the media from the Copenhagen Congress. Is it simply that reporters like to be scaremongers or that editors are only interested in hard figures? Admittedly, there could be some truth in both of those statements, but I think it’s more complex than that.

Partly, the issue is that the responsibility for coverage also lies with those communicating the science – a point that was overlooked by some both during and after the event.

The stated aim of the conference was to update the science on global warming since the IPCC’s 2007 assessment. So the first question on every reporter’s lips was ‘What’s new?’. A partial answer to that question came on the first day in the form of a press conference with climatologists Konrad Steffen, Stefan Rahmstorf and others giving revised estimates of sea-level rise based on new evidence. Needless to say, this resulted in a slew of media reports on the topic - and more than a few dismayed attendees wondering why the media had focused almost exclusively on sea level, at the expense of all other topics on offer. Well, that was hardly surprising considering that sea-level rise was the only topic during the Congress that had a press conference devoted to it.

Some might argue, or course, that by covering this, reporters were simply picking the low-hanging fruit rather than seeking out diverse news stories amid the numerous (57) sessions on offer (each with about 10 presentations). But if you have to file on deadline, then getting a heads-up on new exciting research with sources in attendance isn’t a bad strategy.

Continue reading "Copenhagen Congress: why the biased reporting?" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on May 20, 2009
Categories: International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The clear message to emerge from the 3-day climate congress that wrapped up yesterday here in Copenhagen is that the prognosis on global warming is worse than anticipated by the IPCC in 2007. I reported the full story over on Nature News yesterday (no* subscription required). Here’s an excerpt:

The latest results made for bleak listening at times. Scientists cautioned that some of the impacts of global warming, such as sea level rise and loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, are happening much sooner and more severely than scientists had estimated just two years ago. "What we are seeing now is that some aspects are worse than expected," says Stefan Rahmstorf, head of Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and a plenary speaker at the congress.

What is also clear from my news story is the growing sense of frustration that the urgency of climate change is failing to permeate. While I imagine the climate community has felt that way for some time, it was palpable at a different level this week, I felt. For one, there seemed to be a lot of finger pointing – at the media for poor reporting, at policy makers and the public for failing to understand, and at scientists for failing to make the implications of their work more policy prescriptive.

I can’t help feeling that’s not going to bring us much closer to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. At the final plenary session of the congress, Danish PM Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that scientists who want a significantly more ambitious global carbon cut target of 80 percent by 2050 must not move the goal posts.

If this sense of frustration can be channelled into very clear communication on what needs to be done and when we need to start, could it increase the chances of an effective deal being reached in Copenhagen?

Olive Heffernan

*Correction: This article is now subscription only

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 13, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I took part in a session today at the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change in Copenhagen on the role of the media in communicating climate change. Organised by Max Boykoff at the University of Oxford, the session brought together a diverse panel of journalists and academics who study media trends.

The backdrop to this session was quite interesting. Throughout the 3-day conference, there was a palpable sense of frustration among the scientific community that the media simply hasn’t done an adequate job in reporting climate change, and that it may be partly to blame for lack of public understanding and for inaction of the part of policymakers. This theme emerged in many of the talks on the first day alone.

There were many highlights from today’s session, but I’ll just mention a few. William Freudenberg of UC Santa Barbara said that climate scientists on the whole are being too optimistic about the prognosis for global warming and called for a new era of media coverage to highlight the conflict within the scientific community between what is ‘consensus’ and the reality of a more serious situation.

Naomi Oreskes of the University of California, San Diego, famous for her 2004 Science paper on the scientific consensus, said that the scientists needs to rethink their strategy on communicating climate change and asked whether they should collaborate with PR agencies to get their message across (she wasn’t advocating this, but asked whether this or other strategies could be employed to inform discussions on science more effectively).

James Kanter of the International Herald Tribune spoke of the role of the media as watchdog and pointed to a feature he investigated over five months last year on how electricity companies are making billions in windfall profits from the European ETS. RWE, a major German power company, and the biggest carbon dioxide emitter in Europe, received an estimated windfall of roughly €5 billion in the first three years of the system, more than any other company in Europe. The feature, which made the front page of the IHT in December, provoked a response from REW, which acknowledged the profits it had made (although said they wouldn’t be pocketed) and could serve as a warning to other cap-and-trade schemes under consideration.

My talk looked at the issue of whether a topic of socially and scientifically complex as climate change can be communicated effectively on blogs. The answer to this, in my view, is an unequivocal yes, for the following reasons. Back in August, Nature hosted the first international science blogging conference, where it was evident that bloggers are increasingly taking on the role of journalists in breaking news and providing genuine investigative reporting. That’s likely to become an emerging trend in the current economic climate, where traditional media outlets (think CNN) are seeing cutbacks in science reporting. Perhaps more importantly, as Gavin Schmidt of Real Climate previously pointed out, blogs can provide context to news and explain the significance of new research in a level of detail that can never by achieved by newspapers, which have a limited number of column inches dedicated to science.

Unlike many bloggers, journalists who blog have access to embargoed information, which means they can cover science stories as soon as they break, reaching a wide audience effectively and rapidly. But blogs can also provide a forum for scientists to engage more directly with society. While some argue that scientists (and indeed science journals such as Nature) should channel all discussion of research through formal routes such as ‘letters to the editor’, this will only ever reach a limited number of well-informed readers.

To communicate science to a wider audience, a faster and more accessible route is necessary.

Continue reading "Copenhagen: Why the media matters " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 13, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Conferences and Meetings, Features, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A sobering presentation by Marshall Burke of Stanford on future agriculture. He and colleagues looked at historical climate and yield data for various crops in various parts of the world and projected the relationship they found into various future climates as found in the IPCC. As the IPCC itself reported, much of the tropics did badly in this analysis, and the worst performer was maize in southern Africa which was down in yield by about 30% by 2030.

More granular data run out to 2050 showed similar or worse trends, and the rest of Africa did pretty badly too. So did other crops in the same countries, such as millet and sorghum, though as Andy Jarvis of Biodiversity International pointed out from the floor, this may be somewhat worst case. You don't just go on growing the same thing as the situation gets worse and worse. As climates change so will the crops farmers grow, which should help a bit.

While the IPCC has already predicted that tropical agriculture will have its productivity hit by any climate change, it said it expected that in temperate zones modest warming might help productivity. In at least one case Burke went into -- maize in the US -- there are studies suggesting things start going wrong much sooner than that, with yield losses of 30% or so by 2030. Modest rises have been seen: sharp downturns are to come. Burke says that an economic model fed with these and other gloomier-than-common yield assumptions suggests that prices are set to rise more steeply than the IPCC has foreseen: a 1ºC rise in temperature looks like a 25% increase in prices, hurting some poor farmers and a lot of poor consumers.

As Burke pointed out, we care about these food security issues because we care about people. A World Bank study suggests that the food crisis of 2007-2008 pushed 100m people into poverty. Reduced yields are normally bad for poor farmers, for whom consequent price increases rarely make up for lost production. They are also bad for the urban poor, who just see the price increases. That 25% increase in prices will some poor farmers and a lot of poor consumers. And on current trends that's just the beginning.

Posted by Oliver Morton on March 12, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Conferences and Meetings, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I had a look this morning at a breakdown of the press registration at this conference by country. Clear winners are Denmark and the UK, with 40 or so people each. Both of those are inflated figures, because some third-country and international organisations are covering the meeting out of Copenhagen and London (Japanese TV stations are listed as UK, for example, as is Al Jazeera English). But still there is a lot of genuine UK interest: national papers and the BBC. And the locals are out in force.

US representation, on the other hand, seems distinctly on the modest side. As far as I can see from the press room and by searching the papers' web sites there's no-one here from national papers (the Paris-based International Herald Tribune is a sort-of-exception) and not much broadcast. Time is listed as a media partner, but I haven't seen Bryan Walsh here. The rest of the world is represented at a pretty low level, but still here -- I was struck by a biggish contingent from Bangladesh.

Does it matter? Hard to say. The conference is hitting headlines, there are a lot of journalists for specialised outlets here, and the press room people say they are very happy with the level of coverage: Stefan Rahmstorf's sea-level talk on Tuesday, which I didn't see but which people here are talking about a lot, is getting a lot of pick up, to judge by Google News. But in the plenaries this morning John Schellnhuber and Nick Stern were reminding the thousand or so people in the room that this is one of the biggest stories in the world, and they were doing so pretty effectively. And part of the point of this meeting, as I understand it, is to take that same sort of approach and use it to set a scientific stage for the COP 15 "son of Kyoto" meeting, which will take place in the same large shed-like structure this December. By that standard, the coverage that I have seen (and I've been busy, to be fair, just talking to people at sessions, and may have missed lots of good stuff) seems a little thin.

Posted by Oliver Morton on March 12, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Conferences and Meetings, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It appears that the action on Wednesday afternoon was where I was not: in the session on tipping points. Chris Jones of the Met Office's Hadley Centre presented some studies of the Amazon (abstract in pdf) that have caused a big media stir. The studies suggest that a) there is a threshold level of warming beyond which much of the Amazon forest is committed to die back (probably being replaced by savanna) and b) that for significant parts of the forest that threshold is alarmingly low. Indeed it is quite possibly either unavoidable in the near future or already dwindling in the rear-view mirror. As I understand it from people who saw the presentation, models in which all the warming already in the pipeline (ie with no further emissions) is realised leave the forests pretty much committed to some dieback, and modest further warming seals the deal. I wasn't able to check that with Jones himself, but it seems to fit with what he and his colleagues write:

We present results to show a possible climate threshold beyond which some dieback is committed and this commitment rises dramatically for global temperature rise above 2 degrees C, a threshold often used by policy makers in their definition of dangerous climate change. Any subsequent recovery is on such a long timescale as to make the dieback effectively irreversible on any pragmatic level.

I'll see if I can find Chris Jones, or some Brazilians, or both to talk about this with on Thursday.

Posted by Oliver Morton on March 12, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Conferences and Meetings, Features, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from Heliophage

For those not eager to trawl through the aforementioned geoengineering tweetstream here's the most interesting thing I took from the geoengineering session -- a point on which, interestingly, David Keith and Ken Caldeira, who are keen to see and do more research on the topic, are close to agreeing with David Santillo of Greenpeace, who isn't.

The problem is in some ways pretty obvious: No one knows whether geoengineering can really be made to work. As Keith pointed out, even for the best characterised putative intervention -- a stratospheric aerosol like those produced by volcanoes -- the comparatively cursory research to date has turned up a wealth of complexities that have not yet been addressed by proponents, and more research will turn up even more of them. To Keith and Caldeira, this raises a nightmare scenario: that the world will have in the back of its mind that geoengineering is there as a fallback, will find that it needs a fallback, and will then find out that the fallback is not there in any practical sense. On this basis the sooner it is clear that there is no way out the better: time to do some serious research.

That is similar to Santillo's position, except he doesn't want to do the research needed to find out for sure. I took it from his talk that he wants instead to create a climate of opinion where the nagging hope that geoengineering might save us was firmly shut down more or less a priori, with commitment to emission cuts the sole and reaffirmed goal of all.

In making this argument, he came up with a nice pithy account of what he sees as the 5 drivers for geoengineering research: desperation, aspiration, fascination, delegation, remuneration. The first two he sees as essentially reasonable, the third -- "it is just such fun to play with these ideas!" -- troubling, the fourth -- "O good, someone else can solve the climate I don't have to" -- dangerous and morally defective (my term not his), and the fifth beyond the pale. (Actually in the presentation he didn't call the fifth driver "remuneration" he just called it "money" -- but he told me later he'd thought about listing it as remuneration, and I think it's slicker that way...)

What all these people agree on is that the lopsided way in which geoengineering is discussed, with a level of prominence in the media (and the unpublished musings of researchers, in my experience) and the imagination disproportionate to the actual level of knowledge among experts, needs to be seen as a real problem. Geoengineering is widely enough discussed that the thought it might be there as a last resort is widespread and quite possibly spreading wider, even though it still may be an illusion. Keith laid out the argument for reducing this disproportionality in a more formal way, looking at scenarios comparing the value of "Early Learning" v. late learning. I didn't note down all the details, but Early Learning seemed, by the economic metric he was using, to be a big, big winner.

PS: Those interested in the twittering per se may possibly want to check out this further post at Heliophage

Posted by Oliver Morton on March 11, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Conferences and Meetings, Features, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There's a technical session on geoengineering at the meeting today, and I thought I'd try twittering from it. Since this is a personal experiment and may not pan out, I'll be using my personal twitterfeed, http://twitter.com/eaterofsun, not the naturenews feed.

Posted by Oliver Morton on March 11, 2009
Categories: Conferences and Meetings, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Oliver Morton | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will head up a new climate and energy research institute at Yale University from this Fall.

The announcement was made by Yale University President Richard C Levin today at the plenary session of the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen.

Pachauri will serve at the Yale Institute on a part time basis and will retain his current positions as IPCC chair and director-general of India’s Energy and Resources Institute, TERI.

Further details of the centre are available over on Economic Times.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 10, 2009
Categories: Conferences and Meetings, Features, In the News, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Olive Heffernan, Research | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over 2000 delegates from 80 nations have gathered this week in Copenhagen to update the global assessment of climate change, and I’m fortunate enough to be one of them.

Over the next few days, the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change will hear from world experts including climatologists, social scientists and economists on how the prognosis for global warming, and its physical and societal impacts, has changed since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its last report in 2007. The science in the 2007 report is now effectively 4-5 years out of date, so it’s clearly time for an update, which is why experts are here this week.

The updated assessment will be in the format of a 30-page synthesis document, to be published in June.
It will be peer-reviewed but not IPCC-style; that's because the ultimate aim of the congress is to deliver a hard-hitting message on the urgency of climate change to policymakers and the media ahead of the UN Conference in December, where delegates will again converge on Copenhagen, this time to agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

Among the speakers who kicked off proceedings this morning was congress chair and marine scientist Katherine Richardson, who spoke to me ahead of time about why the congress is taking place and what it hopes to deliver. Read the full interview here.

I’ll be speaking in a session on Thursday on communicating climate change (and particularly on the role of blogs) and both I and my estimable colleague, Oliver Morton, will be blogging over the next few days on anything that especially surprises or interests us. For the full programme, see here.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on March 10, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Communicating Climate Change, Conferences and Meetings, International Scientific Conference on Climate Change, March 2009, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)