Behind Hot Headlines: Whiplash Weather, Climate Collapse, Methane Solutions
A reader's, and reporter's, guide to avoiding the whiplash effect in tracking climate news
UPDATED - I'm trying to do more pieces revealing important realities hidden too often by overheated headlines. My hope is that we can boost and spread the ability to avoid issue burnout and gain traction on climate-safe actions.
Please share this post and weigh in below with your favorite tactics and tips for identifying useful insights, observations and developments amid the din. And of course subscribe to Sustain What.
In today's overheated media environment, the relentless effort to capture your attention 🔥 NOW🔥 , even on crucial issues like conservation and climate, can distract more than inform and energize.
Surviving media whiplash
This happens, for instance, when media trumpet a single alarming study, then do the same a short while later for another study that cuts in a different direction. The result is what I've long called a harmful "whiplash effect."
I even made a warning sign for that. Please deploy it in your social media posts when some new hot "moment" feels like it's jerked you too hard!
The latest example is coverage of “whiplash weather.”
To me, whiplash weather certainly exists. What doesn’t yet exist is a trend(*), as Jennifer Francis, an author of the paper I referenced above, said in a reply to my tweet.
Below we'll look at a few examples ripped from fresh headlines that reveal ways to avoid self harm or harm to others when we pass along hot news without scrutiny. Yes, I've done this once in awhile:
Methane solutions
I hosted a Sustain What conversation looking at the latest climate headlines and realities. My journalist guests were Rebecca Leber of Vox and Paul Voosen of Science Magazine, my Columbia Climate School colleague Dale Willman and two longtime methane-focused analysts from the Environmental Defense Fund, Mark Brownstein and Steven Hamburg.
The concentration of heat-trapping methane is on a worrisome rise 📈, but there's never been more clarity on how to stop leaks from one important source - oil and gas facilities. EDF calls this "our methane moment." Watch on Facebook, LinkdedIn or YouTube:
To avoid running AMOC, track trends, not studies
For years, actually decades, researchers have been exploring whether global warming could disrupt, or possibly is already disrupting, great Atlantic Ocean currents that are part of a key marine component of the climate system - a globe-spanning conveyer belt for heat. AMOC stands for the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.
Recently the media picked up on the latest work hinting that warming (in part through dumping surges of cold fresh meltwater from Greenland into the Atlantic) are shutting this circulatory system down. That's why I was happy to see Jon Robson (@jonirobson), a climate scientist at the University of Reading, write a blog post adding vital perspective. Robson's key point, and my core takeaway, relates to the periodic assessments of climate knowledge by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The most boring and important part of the panels' work is assessing the confidence level scientists have of key climate findings. As with peer review, this process is imperfect. But by gauging changes from assessment to assessment, policy makers, or citizens, can get a sense whether further inquiry is solidifying a risk or not.
So how's the AMOC faring? Robson writes:
[I]n the sixth assessment report for the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) working group 1, the confidence in a long-term 20th Century AMOC decline was assessed as low (down from medium confidence in the IPCC special report on Ocean and Cryosphere in a changing climate, SROCC).
As one of the authors of the sixth assessment, he goes on to provide a valuable deep dive on why variability in short-term fluctuations in Atlantic dynamics makes it tough to call out a warming-triggered change.
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Insert, 12/26/22 - I’m realizing this is not Robson’s first valuable corrective on this issue. Click back to this 2013 tweet from climate scientist Ed Hawkins for another example:
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This doesn't mean relax, and it doesn't mean humans shouldn't work as hard as possible to slow warming and build resilience to climate extremes.
When you see COLLAPSE, ask “By when”
It does mean that when you see the word "collapse" in the next tweet or news feed on ocean changes in a heating climate, have a look but don't fixate.
As we've already explored in my "Watchwords" segment on the word collapse, the same is true for the next news surge related to Antarctic ice sheets and shelves. At the very least, when you see collapse, ask by when!
For more on Atlantic Ocean dynamics, it's worth clicking back to this fine 2017 feature in, yes, The Atlantic, by Robinson Meyer. His story holds up very nicely, particularly his advice about the importance of distinguishing scientific debate from what goes on in, say, Washington:
"The instability of AMOC is one of the great open questions remaining in our understanding of climate change, one of the ongoing explorations into global warming’s 'degree and extent.' It is, in other words, an active debate in climate science."
Story tip: avoid the Beltway glue trap
For most American climate campaigns and much climate journalism these days, the focus is Washington.
It's not surprising considering that's where most climate-related funding and environmental regulations come from. But there's a decades-long habit of covering climate legislation fights like play-by-play sports coverage instead of examining what really leads to energy shifts in this country.
That process has put a perpetual spotlight and bull's eye on West Virginia's conservative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin - a pivotal vote as long as the Democrats have their fragile hold on the Senate, House and White House. It sometimes feels as if there's some expectation that if he were gone, we would magically decarbonize.
Good luck with that. On Twitter, I embraced Matty Yglesias's suggestion that progressives should build a healthier relationship with their favorite punching bag. For more, read my recent post on legislative options for climate-safe energy action.
There's plenty to write about Manchin's coal interests, of course.
But there's a huge opportunity cost when that coverage obscures where the real impediments, or accelerants, to clean-energy action lie.
This came up in the wonderful brisk Sustain What discussion I had this week with Jigar Shah, who's running the Department of Energy's Loan Program Office after a successful career in renewable-energy investing. I was joined by Kathiann M. Kowalski, who covers energy issues and options in Ohio for Energy News Network.
Watch all 30 minutes here, please. Here's a wonderful nugget:
And here's the key takeaway: Shah explained that the bipartisan $1.2-trillion infrastructure package included $46 billion for energy-related loans that can spur smart fossil-to-clean energy shifts in any one of America's municipalities. (He noted that the loan program earns $500 million a year in interest for American taxpayers.)
Even for this historic federal program that's already funded, and was supported by both parties, the path to action has nothing to do with Washington.
It has everything to do with building awareness and capacity so that entrepreneurs and communities and local officials or agencies in every town and city in America look around for energy-related business opportunities and apply.
Jigar Shah:
"Please, please apply for money. The Department of Energy got $62 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure law. That is the most money that the Department of Energy has received in its 45-year history. That's a lot of money. And that money is to help people.... I think justice matters a lot, and I think we're very committed to figuring that out. But part of justice is unlocking wealth creation, and making sure that all Americans understand that this is the largest source of wealth creation on the planet.
"The richest guy in the world, Elon Musk, made his money off of climate change solutions. For whatever reason, we're not recognizing that if you want to make a lot of money right now, you don't do it in crypto. You make your money by figuring out how to be the guy that helps the police force switch to electric vehicles. You figure out how to be the girl who figures out how to put solar on all these roofs. You figure out how to actually do that a and you get paid to make those changes."
That is a story that should be on homepages or front pages around this country.
Related reading: "How to Help Your Community Fund Electric School Buses in the US" by Michelle Levinson of the World Resources Institute.
Related viewing: Can Congress Get Beyond Posturing as Energy and Climate Crises Collide?
Other news guides
I hope you'll also subscribe to the Range Widely newsletter of my fellow Bulletin writer David Epstein, who has been offering great tips on how to navigate science news and messaging.
After seeing a burst of headlines like this - “Surgeons who listen to AC/DC are faster and more accurate” - Epstein dug into the study driving the news and, in an April post, found several issues undercutting that provocative conclusion, including a basic error.
This week, he described how a constructive exchange with one of the paper's authors is leading to a published correction. Bravo on two fronts - helping us all hone our cognitive tools and prompting more care in the research process. Here's his core takeaway:
We can’t improve the news we read, but we can improve how we respond to it:
1) stop to think about numbers in the news (and practice Fermi estimation; it’s tough, but you’ll improve!), and
2) be skeptical of small interventions that promise big effects.
For what it's worth, I do think he, you and I can - as news consumers - do quite a bit to improve the news we read by offering constructive, sustained feedback to publications and journalists, just as he did with the study author.
This Twitter thread involving Genevieve Guenther, the founder of End Climate Silence, shows how that can work - not always immediately mind you:
I've hosted upwards of a thousand guests on my 300 or so Sustain What conversations so far, but none topped the energy and enthusiasm with which Renee Hobbs, a professor teaching propaganda literacy at the University of Rhode Island, put into this discussion:
Thriving Online: An Expert in Propaganda Reveals How to Put Mind Over Media
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Correction 2 pm 12/26 - At the asterisk above I initially wrote Jennifer Francis replied there was no connection to human-driven climate change; she only confirmed there was no trend.