Scientific American editor-in-chief Mariette DiChristina (10/28/10) responded to criticism from Climate Progress‘ Joe Romm (10/26/10) and FAIR Blog (10/27/10) of the magazine’s recent coverage of climate change:
In actuality, Scientific American reports on climate-related science in depth in nearly every issue and frequently online. You can see a sample list of past print and online-only articles at “Want to Learn More about Climate Change?,” including coverage of carbon and climate back to 1959. Climate is the issue of our time. We covered the debate surrounding Judith Curry as a news event in this topic area—and as a way to foster discussion of climate issues in general. As is clear in the article, the vast majority of the scientific community—and Curry herself—believe the evidence supports the reality of anthropogenic climate change.
Climate Progress and FAIR also have criticized a related reader poll about climate change: Consumer media outlets frequently conduct reader polls about content, and Scientific American is no exception…. Such polls are surely not “scientific,” and nobody claims they are, but their interactive nature promotes audience engagement. It’s unfortunate—although in hindsight not surprising—that certain people would take the opportunity to manipulate the results by repeat voting.
Last, both sites have noted a Shell poll with advertisement, and speculated about its significance. Advertisements are handled by the ad-sales department without the editorial board’s input or consent.
As the author of the FAIR Blog post that criticized Scientific American, let me clarify that my worry is not that the editorial staff there doesn’t believe that human activity is raising Earth’s temperature. Anyone who takes the science seriously believes that—anyone, in other words, who looks at the findings of climate scientists and doesn’t believe they are engaged in a massive conspiracy to hoax the public, or that the field’s scientific method is fatally flawed. My worry, rather, is that Scientific American is engaging in false balance—that is, pretending that there is a legitimate debate where they do not actually believe one exists. That is the implication when a science magazine polls its readers—whether “scientifically” or not—about “what is causing climate change.”
The message I get from Michael Lemonick’s article (11/10)—which is subheaded “Why Can’t We Have a Civil Conversation About Climate?”—is that scientists should treat the arguments of climate denialists as serious and constructive contributions to the scientific discussion: If denialists are all “lumped together as crackpots, no matter how worthy their arguments,” Lemonick writes, then they have “cause for grievance.” It’s hard to imagine Scientific American suggesting that similar respect be accorded to other pseudo-scientific movements: Why can’t we have a civil conversation about Bigfoot? Why can’t we have a civil conversation about Atlantis?
More to the point, why can’t we have a civil conversation—one that concedes that “both sides” have “worthy arguments”—about the link between tobacco and lung cancer? That’s an article that I trust we won’t soon see in Scientific American. But then, Scientific American doesn’t accept tobacco advertising—but it does take ads from oil companies like Shell, the sponsor of the pop-up poll that appeared on the magazine’s website. (An aside: News outlets ought to have ethical guidelines that prevent the ad-sales department from selling ads, like that one, that are designed to confuse readers into thinking they are editorial content.)
Finally, if “climate is the issue of our time,” as DiChristina says, then why did her magazine run an article last year (10/09) by an oil industry executive about the future of oil that ignored that issue altogether?
Joe Romm (10/28/10) also responded to DiChristina’s defense of her magazine. SciAm contributing editor John Rennie (PLoS Blogs, 10/28/10) defended Lemonick’s article but criticized the magazine’s Web poll. Salon‘s Andrew Leonard (10/27/10) also criticized the poll.
They either say;
I. No climate change going on, or
II. It is going on but it is natural,humans are too small and weak to cause it.
III. We are actually cooling.
but in all cases we humans have to do nothing and let things go as they have been for the past 250 years. So far the CONGs are winning even to fooling the science illiterate into believing them by 45%! Not good for us because it will get harsher in climate and more difficult to live. Something the corporate-theocrats can use.
Thank you, Jim Naureckas for your astute observations of the rotting firewall between advertising and editorial content at Sci Amer.
Any scientist who has earned his or her PhD should be able to find some statistical data, which when adjusted for contentious variables such as inaccurate measuring capabilities of prior scientific instrumentation should raise newly questionable issues.
The above article does not need but a few words to state its case/belief.”WE BELIEVE THAT ANYONE WHO DOUBTS CLIMATE CHANGE,AND THE RIGHT OF GOVERNMENT TO GOVERNANCE OF ALL INDUSTRIES AND PRIVATE INDIVIDUALS WHO THEY DEAM RESPONSIBLE -SHALL FROM THIS DAY FOWARD BE KNOWN AS INSANIACS!INSANE AS A GROUP>INSANE AS AN INDIVIDUAL.DOUBTERS!!
!(Boy I am sure glad the left is up for open honest debate, instead of the Vp sexual assaulters claim that the” science is closed”.)
There is a distinct difference between doubting some of the data collected or how it is interpreted than in saying the whole thing is a hoax. Please don’t confuse the two the way some people on both sides of this are doing now. That is the problem.
However “insanity” is a legal definition misapplied. The doubters tend to be those corporations who don’t want to see t their ionosphere high profits move down into the stratosphere or eventually to zero as that technology is discarded as we did with buggy whips. Corporations and their profiteers should not be telling us what to do. We should be telling them.
Science is funny; it never makes any claims about the truth but rather attempts to give the interpretation or theory about what is happening. Consequently, it is always modest and always equivocal.
Sorry FAIR, I think you were unfair to SciAm.
Jim, I think you make some valid points here, though I think any attentive reading of Michael Lemonick’s whole articleâ┚¬”Ârather than just the unfortunate title and deckâ┚¬”Âshows that Scientific American is not in fact engaging in false balance. Lemonick’s article really leaves no doubt that anthropogenic climate change is real and perilous, for example.
As for what Dana Franchitto calls the “rotting firewall between advertising and editorial content,” as someone who worked beside that wall for 15 years at SciAm, I can attest that it’s in far better repair than he and others may believe. All commercial publications wrestle with these problems (and have for decades), but the people on both the editorial and business sides of SciAm work with exceptional integrity to preserve that church-and-state separation. The Shell poll bugs me, too, but I suspect its deficiencies are the result of errors, not venality.
Finally, Jim, your final question about the oil article from last year seems a bit desperate. First, the article does mention climate prominently in its 6th paragraph: “Although oil and other fossil fuels pose risks for the climate and the environment, for now alternative energy sources cannot compete with their versatility, cost, and ease of transport and storage. As research into alternatives goes on, we will need to be sure that we use the oil we have responsibly.” Second, the article is less about “the future of oil” than it is about improving oilfield pumping technologies; hence the title “Squeezing More Oil from the Ground.” Even those of us who yearn for a quick transition away from fossil fuels can still recognize the oil recovery problem as important and worthy of discussion.
Scientific American publishes constantly both in print and online about the realities of climate change and the need for action to forestall it. It’s done so for years. Don’t take my word for it; go to http://www.scientificamerican.com and look. Even if it makes some mistakes, it deserves more of a benefit of a doubt than you’ve shown it here. It certainly deserves not to have you contrive some ominous trend by connecting problems with the current online package of content to an article from last year you seem to think should have been about something else.
I think the climate is changing, it’s being caused by overactive cellular phone use between mars and your anus, I mean Uranus. Hello. The planet goes through cycles, has for a long time, probably will. During the last warm spell, well before cars and freon, did Al Gore’s great-ancestor say ooooohhhhh it was caused by something we did. No, because it just happens. Are we helping the situation, probably not. Did we cause it, definitely not.
Ed you just don’t get it.We are to blame for(just fill in the blank)…..We being white, anglo saxon protestant, conservative ,educated greedy people who make over 250 thou specifically and are Americans.It is all us.We did it.Not only that…. but I killed mrs Marble with the wrench in the study after I killed Col Mustard with the rope in the billiard room.
Just saw where they dug up an iron age copper quarry at the base of a glacier(supposedly melting due to global warming)Point is….it is at the base under 50 feet of ice . Even if it all melts and exposes the mine, it will only be a repeat of what has happened in the past far before man- made considerations.By the way …it was melting- but has now regained 80% of its mass with the latest global cooling.Even if it continued melting at its highest rate it would of taken 60 years.Bottom line is do we hamstring our entire economy for this theory?
I think the real issue here is not that SciAm ran a article critical of climate change research, or that there are those who are critical of the conclusions drawn, and in that respect I had no quarrel with the article per se. What bothers me is the, is the unmistakable shift towards right wing viewpoints, and the advancement of same. If this magazine is going to start to take political and economic standpoints, clear and full disclosure should be made. John Rennie’s defense of the climate change article notwithstanding, I can in no form of imagination see an article extolling(or maybe not, but we really rather think so) the virtues of the privatization of what was the role of NASA in launch technology under his watch. Mariette DiChristina has not only changed the layout, and in my opinion, again, the IQ of the magazine, I would not be surprised to find out she is a Rupert Murdoch mole. I’m not a fan of conspiracy theories, but this ubiquitous and unrelenting assault on anything government, and advancement of free market ideology is, to say the least, alarming. If SciAm is going to go down that road, then lets have a real debate on the economics of a managed economy, vs. a free market left to its own devices…rather than a subtle, but ham-handed effort to promote an economic vision.
yes, I see it. “What bothers me is the unmistakable shift toward…”
Ok, I see this article is a few months old, so my comments will be so much bantha fodder…