In The Field

AAAS: Talking about talking about climate

Everyone at a big conference like this knows that there will be many times when you are torn between two sessions that both sound interesting. A case in point this afternoon: a session entitled “Transforming our ability to predict climate change and its effects” and a session called “Global warming heats up: How the media covers climate change”. I wasn’t sure which to go to — but I had a pretty good sense of which would be more popular. And so it proved: the new climate science session had 50 people in the audience at the beginning, the media session was standing room only with about 200 people. Hearing people talk about climate science loses out to hearing people talk about talking about climate science in a pretty big way. And I’d be pretty sure that the proportion of journalists in the audience at the media talk was way higher than at the other talk.

It would be easy to snark about this in a let’s-not-forget-that-we’re-the-real-story-here way — and indeed I reserve the right to do so. But to be fair, how the media report climate change is important, both to scientists and to the media. And it deserves to be discussed. Some of the discussants made points that are well taken — Andy Revkin of the New York Times pointing out that the more complex a story is the less space it gets, for example. And David Dickson of SciDev.Net on the role NGOs play in facilitating climate reporting as a way of amplifying their own messages (not just NGOs — interesting to learn that the British government funds workshops on climate reporting for journalists in China). But I’m pretty sure that I could have learned equally interesting things at the other session (yes, I stayed in the media panel: Hypocrite bloggeur)

What was most striking was the lack of anything very new or any particular way forward coming out of the discussion. Andy and David explained what was wrong eloquently, and Matt Nisbet talked his talk about framing meta-narratives (check out Matthew’s blog). But there wasn’t really any sense of progress, or of what might be done differently (though someone did ring up the intriguing possibility that when America gets an administration that doesn’t get caught trying to brush climate science under the carpet it will become harder for that climate science to become front page news:" White house suppresses report" is far sexier than “Government releases report”…).

Unsurprising, sure — but if we’re going to be self obsessed, maybe we should be so a bit more productively.

And now I really should go to that other session.Or the one on biomass conversion. Or to the one on systems biology. Or to the one on the US presidential candidates. Or the press briefing on population. Or…maybe I should just bump into journalistic cronies in the halls and complain about things. We’re very good at that.

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