02 Jan Availability Cascades and Global Warming
The New York Times has an extremely interesting article on the role of availability cascades in media coverage of global warming.
Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels….
The most charitable excuse for this bias in weather divination is that the entrepreneurs are trying to offset another bias. The planet has indeed gotten warmer, and it is projected to keep warming because of greenhouse emissions, but this process is too slow to make much impact on the public….
Once a cascade is under way, it becomes tough to sort out risks because experts become reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom, and are ignored if they do. Now that the melting Arctic has become the symbol of global warming, there’s not much interest in hearing other explanations of why the ice is melting — or why the globe’s other pole isn’t melting, too.
Global warming has an impact on both polar regions, but they’re also strongly influenced by regional weather patterns and ocean currents. Two studies by NASA and university scientists last year concluded that much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively little attention — and were certainly no match for the images of struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.
Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, recently noted the very different reception received last year by two conflicting papers on the link between hurricanes and global warming. He counted 79 news articles about a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and only 3 news articles about one in a far more prestigious journal, Nature.
Guess which paper jibed with the theory — and image of Katrina — presented by Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth”?
It was, of course, the paper in the more obscure journal, which suggested that global warming is creating more hurricanes. The paper in Nature concluded that global warming has a minimal effect on hurricanes.
Note that the article fully accepts global warming, but disputes attribution of particular climate changes to that threat. There is now a general consensus that global warming is real. But there has long been a general consensus that weather patterns are cyclical. Both are true and therefore attributing particular changes to cyclical changes or a permanent warming trend is difficult.
If you are like me, you have no independent way to verify why the Arctic is getting warmer or why Antarctica is getting colder. So I rely on experts to explain these scientific developments for me. But what this article highlights is that entrepreneurial intermediaries play a critical role in conveying and highlighting these developments and fostering information cascades. I never read the journal Nature, but I do read the Science section of the New York Times. Therefore, I am dependent not only on the scientists who publish in Nature, but also on the intermediaries who choose which scientific articles merit my attention.
Very interesting indeed. Thanks for posting it. To me, in addition to the discussion of the “availability heuristic,” what is most interesting is that the New York Times has published a reasoned view of why the near-hysteria over global warming has perpetuated so. This alone may just be the greatest evidence that the tide of “popular”, i.e., man-made, global warming is finally acknowledging the rational perspective of climatic cyclical normatives.