The U.S. Media and Climate Confusion

Erik M. ConwayHistorian16 October 2010

Public Perception of Climate Science

• In October 2009, a Pew Center poll found 43% of Americans didn’t think there was “solid evidence the Earth is warming” [ref 1]

• Yet most climate scientists have agreed that Earth is warming, and humans are the main cause, since the early 1990s [refs 2, 3, 4, 5]

• Why is the public perception of climate so different from that of scientists?

Two Threads to This Story

• Free-market think tanks and environmental skepticism

• The journalistic norm of balance

Think Tanks and Skepticism

• In the 1970s and 1980s, private and corporate donors created a network of “free market” think tanks, most in Washington, D.C.– Heritage Foundation– Cato Institute– George C. Marshall Institute– Heartland Institute, founded in Chicago in 1993– (and Hudson Institute, Pacific Institute, Von Mises

Foundation, Independent Institute. . .)• They joined a much older free-market think tank,

the American Enterprise InstituteRefs 6, 7.

Think Tanks and Skepticism

• Created a literature of environmental skepticism, including skepticism of climate change

• A 2008 study found:– 110 environmentally

skeptical books in print (U.S.)

– 101 had ties to these foundations [ref 8]

© George C. Marshall Institute, 2005

Skepticism and the Media

• Boykoff and Boykoff (2004) examined the climate coverage of four major U.S. newspapers from 1988-2002 [ref 9]

• New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times

• Balance

Boykoff & Boykoff’s data

52.65%35.29%

6.18%

5.88%

% of Newspaper Articles

"Balanced" accounts of human contributions to warming with skeptics

Human contribution dom-inant

Skepticism of human con-tribution dominant

Exclusive emphasis on human-produced warm-ing

Balance is a Form of Bias

• Journalists’ tendency to balance the claims of research scientists with claims of the think tanks creates a biased presentation of climate science

• Produces the appearance of controversy• Emphasizes views of a handful of contrarians• It is a major source of public confusion over the

evidence for human-produced climate change

References1. http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1386/cap-and-trade-global-warming-opinion2. Oreskes, The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change, Science, 3 December 2004, 16863. Oreskes, The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change: How do we know we’re not

wrong?, in Climate Change, ed. Joseph DiMento, MIT Press, 20074. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 1995: Contribution of

Working Group I to the Second Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, pg. 4

5. W. R.Anderegg, James W. Prall, Jacob harold and Stephen H. Schneider, Expert Credibility in Climate Change, PNAS, July 6, 2010, 12107-12109.

6. John B. Judis, “The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of Public Trust,” NY, Pantheon Books, 2000, chapters 5 and 6

7. N Oreskes and E Conway, Merchants of Doubt, NY, BloomsburyUSA, 20108. Peter J. Jacques, Riley E. Dunlap, Mark Freeman, “ The organization of denial:

Conservative Think Tanks and Environmental scepticism,” Environmental Politics (2008), 17:3 349-385

9. Maxwell T. Boykoff and Jules M. Boykoff, “Balance as bias: global warming and the US prestige press,” Global Environmental Change 14 (2004), 125-136