Should reporters portray the climate consensus as an open scientific question?

By Steven T. Corneliussen

What truth standard should journalists uphold in reporting on science's assessments of the planet's climate? Consider a contrast:

In February, a New York Times news article

• called the Heartland Institute "an organization known for attacking climate science,"

• charged that Heartland "is planning a new push to undermine the teaching of global warming in public schools,"

• called Heartland's plan "the latest indication that climate change is becoming a part of the nation's culture wars,"

• explained that the curriculum that Heartland seeks to promote asserts that "whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy"—but

• stipulated unambiguously, "It is in fact not a scientific controversy."

This week, a Wall Street Journal news article

• calls climate science the "battle du jour in school districts across the country,"

• explains that the National Research Council will soon make public a draft of new science standards treating climate change as "caused in part by manmade events" and as potentially having "large consequences,"

• notes that "most climate experts accept those notions as settled science"—but

• emphasizes that "they are still debated by some scientists" and

• says that skeptics at Heartland want to "teach the scientific debate" as "a grand challenge."

Climatologists at the blog RealClimate have long espoused the journalistic principle that treating the existence of anthropogenic global warming as an open scientific question means exercising the "false objectivity of 'balance.' " The Atlantic's James Fallows calls it the "false-equivalence trap."

As reported earlier, the WSJ's opinion page recently hosted op-eds promoting the belief that human-caused climate disruption remains an open question among scientists. The co-authors were 16 climate-consensus disbelievers representing various scientific and technical fields, including climatology in some cases.

---

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.