[flooow]

> "My role was to identify the voices that were not in the mainstream and to give those voices a stage," Rheem says. [...]

> He says the media was hungry for these perspectives.

> "Journalists were actually actively looking for the contrarians. It was really feeding an appetite that was already there."

A rare example of the BBC breaking the media omertà on itself here. You thought journalism was supposed to help you understand the world? Nope, reading our slop will actually make you *less* able to make informed decisions.

There was a good paper written about this all the way back in 2007 [1]. Makes for some eyebrow-raising reading in the year-of-our-lord 2022.

[1] https://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/publications/downloads/boykoff07-ge...

[truculent]

In the UK, you need a substantial amount of meta-knowledge about the media outlets and political landscape in order to use news reporting to become more, not less or dis-, informed.

It’s a shame that the idea of learning media studies and related subjects at school or university were so maligned in the 00s, but probably not a coincidence either.

[flooow]

> In the UK, you need a substantial amount of meta-knowledge about the media outlets and political landscape in order to use news reporting to become more, not less or dis-, informed.

This is most-certainly true, and an interesting corrollary is that journalists themselves very likely underestimate the impact their work can have. Being on the inside, they of course know (because 'everybody knows') that this Daily Mail article about Jeremy Corbyn being a soviet spy (yes, it is real [1]) is utter dreck, basically just popcorn nonsense for bored retirees to flick past on the way to the sports pages. Journalists might have a hard time believing/understanding that people actually trust and respect them, and may even take what they say at face value, with actual consequences.

Of course, their proprieters understand this full-well, which is why e.g. Murdoch is willing to plough endless cash into loss-making endeavours like The Times.

Not that I intend to absolve journalists whatsoever. Their actions have literally destroyed everything (we just haven't realised it yet).

[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5401097/Jeremy-Corb...

[mhh__]

Informed about what? The vast majority of news articles are factual, it's more subtle than you suggest.

[truculent]

Well, quite

[Comevius]

Just because a perspective is different it doesn't mean that it's the truth, or should be treated equally importantly for the sake of some kind of balance.

Climate change denial is a good example, because it's not the truth, and it's not important. It doesn't have it's own scientific literature, nobody ever tries to prove it, it's contrarianism at best, propaganda at worst. And yet the media tends to give it an equal amount of screen time, which makes the public believe in it's legitimacy.

This might be shocking to the HN audience, but contrarianism by itself is not enough to discover the truth.

[consp]

There is a nice visual example of this made by John Oliver on his show to illustrate this to a more understandable level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjuGCJJUGsg

[flooow]

Thank you for semi-articulately saying my argument back to me.

[Comevius]

No offense, but in my experience semi-articulate wins the day. I bet you a beer nobody knows what "media omertà" means. Even Google can't define it, but it references a book called A Climate Vocabulary of the Future that defines it as the media silence on climate change.

[origin_path]

It sounds like you never actually spent any time reading anything by people who dispute popular narratives on climate change. If you did you'd know that nothing you just said is true. They frequently prove the points they're making, often via reference to climatologist's own papers, and it's not mere contrarianism but rather is pointing out places in which their science either isn't reliable or is being misrepresented.

Look at it this way. In the past few days HN has had a bunch of submissions on the news that a major paper in Alzheimer's research appears to be entirely fraudulent. It was noticed by outside "deniers", not any scientists within the field itself, and the science based on it went 16 years and received hundreds of millions of dollars in NIH funding. All based on some dodgy Photoshops, or so it appears.

When people argue with climatology and (often) absurd media claims that aren't even well connected to published science to begin with, they're usually arguing about actual, concrete problems with what scientists are doing. To believe that it's all mere contrarianism and propaganda is the sort of naive "Believe The Science!"-ism that has trashed trust in public health in the past two years, and worse, created a culture in which researchers think that they can get away with anything.

[Comevius]

Climate change deniers rarely argue about the details, or even know about them. The way science works is that there is a big picture, and the details are slowly filled in. Like Newton's law, which is an approximation to general relativity, which itself is an approximation to something we don't yet understand, possibly quantum gravity. At the forefront of such research there are uncertainties, mistakes, hype, fraud even, because that's how humans are, and yet there is progress.

At this point however there is no reason to wait for climate change research to discover additional details no matter how important they might be, because it is already clear that action is needed. The risks are dire and constantly underestimated.

Climate change deniers usually maliciously deny the big picture, or sometimes use new developments that are in the flux as an example of how science can't be trusted. They do this without ever engaging the science and publishing papers. It's all about the social media for them.

[origin_path]

Please do cite some examples because that just doesn't reflect my experience at all. They are never malicious, they only argue about the details to often mind numbing degrees, and are routinely engaging with the science by e.g. citing new datasets recently published.

[jfim]

There are simple observations that even non climatologists can do that show the climate warming up. For example, here's a look at the glaciers in glacier national park: https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/glacier-repeat-photos....

Or one can ask why the shipping routes in Northern Canada would start becoming passable if the climate isn't warming up.

Or ask why we keep on beating heat records in the last decade.

[origin_path]

But the people who argue with climatologists largely don't argue that the world isn't warming up, so that's irrelevant. They're mostly interested in whether the modelling is accurate (because if it's not there's no real problem; all concerning scenarios rely on modelled feedback loops), in how much of it is created by humans, in how expensive reduction is vs mitigation and so on.

There are people who argue that there have been pauses in that increase, but they're citing official temperature datasets from climatologists to show that. Usually satellite or weather balloon data because the surface temperature dataset has diverged from it, largely due to continual 'remodelling'.

"Or ask why we keep on beating heat records in the last decade."

We keep being told records are being broken but this is often on close inspection not really legit. Old data gets ignored, or datasets get altered such that years that supposedly broke records later get re-declared as not being record breaking after the fact so the same record can then be broken for a second time by the same temperature, or the record breaking temperatures turn out to be taken by weather stations at airports i.e. where they're being blasted by jet exhaust and hot tarmac.

If you actually go engage with the people criticizing the IPCC, which includes a fair number of climatologists, it's that kind of detail oriented thing you'll see being discussed. And these are important points. It's meaningless to talk about temperature records being broken if climatologists edit the historical record every few years, creating warming trends where previously none were visible.

[Comevius]

The same people used to completely deny it, they only pivoted lately to bargaining and it's really transparent.

The IPCC scenarios don't really rely on feedback loops, because we don't know enough about them. They are rarely taken into account, while even the mildest plausible scenarios based on projected human activity project at least a 2°C change, which can't be stable. We underestimate feedback loops, and we might also get human activity wrong, but even if we don't you still get a planet that's just barely habitable.

The warming trend is not created by IPCC fudging past temperature data. This is a climate change denier talking point, but it's a lie. Land and ocean temperatures have been adjusted separately to account for the changes in the measurement methods. Localized sources were compared to their neighbours in order to be able to account for changes in the instruments, urbanization and so on. High-accuracy sensors are used to create a reference network of perfectly sited stations. Roughly half of the stations reduced the warming, half increased it. Deniers like to cherry-pick the stations to make a point. The biggest adjustment by far was because of earlier ships. They used to throw a bucket overboard, pull it up slowly and measure the temperature of the water with a thermometer, without accounting for the air temperature. Ships later switched to measuring temperatures through engine room intakes. These days we have a global network of automatic buoys. None of this increased the warming trend, the adjustments actually reduced it. Mostly only data from before 1940 had to be adjusted. Studies continue to use raw data along it's interpretations, but the necessity of an adjusted interpretation is constantly shown.

[origin_path]

Which people are you talking about, specifically? I'm not saying you're wrong - there are so many people who disagree with one or more aspects of climate dogma that certainly there will be some out there who have changed their views over time. But you keep making precise claims about the views of abstractions, not real people.

IPCC feedback loops - they definitely do assume these. Look at any graph of temperature over time, or sea levels over time. Increases are small, slow and linear. Project them forward and even in 100 years you've got nothing of any concern. That's why the doomsday scenarios are always based on hypothesised feedback loops like melting glaciers, explosive release of methane from the ocean floor and so on. These things haven't actually been seen, they are hypothetical and supposed to kick in with higher temperatures.

The warming trend is created by the sort of adjustments you talk about. You don't have to take my word for it. Read this:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700

"An apparent pause in global warming might have been a temporary mirage, according to recent analysis. Global average temperatures have continued to rise throughout the first part of the twenty-first century, researchers report on 5 June in Science. That finding, which contradicts the 2013 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is based on an update of the global temperature records maintained by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The previous version of the NOAA data set had showed less warming during the first decade of the millennium."

So they were reporting a pause in temperature increases, which is by the way still readily visible in other non-surface datasets like satellites and weather balloons. It was even reported in IPCC 2013. And then, one day, they edited the data, released a new version and poof. The pause was gone. In fact, they claim it had never happened at all! If they were really just tweaking a few stations up and a few stations down with no impact, that Nature article shouldn't be possible, should it? And how can a rational person have confidence in the predictions of a group of people who for many years reported one trend in global data and then one day decides, oops, actually, everything we said was wrong. It's not rational to treat the predictions of these people as reliable when even their measurements aren't - by their own telling.

[Angostura]

I was a journalist. The intent here, is reasonable. Whenever you wrote an article with person A claiming a thing, the editor would ask you to 'stand it up'. That involved checking the claim's validity by finding supportive and contrary sources and talking to them. The intent was to then produce a balanced, authorative synthesis.

Unfortunately, with things like climate change, the result tends to be 'false balance'. The BBC recognised this several years ago - but too late.

[Tycho]

If it’s good enough for courts of law, it’s good enough for news reporting.