March 23, 2009

Bringing Science to Journalism

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Chris Mooney has written an excellent WaPo column calling on journalists to agree to follow a more empirical process, one which is “constrained by standards of evidence, rigor and reproducibility that are similar to the canons of modern science itself.” He makes his case by calling out George Will, who is all too happy to continue misleading his global-warming-denying audience.

Will also wrote that “according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.” The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is one of many respected scientific institutions that support the consensus [.pdf] that humans are driving global warming… Climate scientists, knowing that any single year may trend warmer or cooler for a variety of reasons—1998, for instance, featured an extremely strong El Niño—study globally averaged temperatures over time. To them, it’s far more relevant that out of the 10 warmest years on record, at least seven [.pdf] have occurred in the 2000s—again, according to the WMO.

Readers and commentators must learn to share some practices with scientists—following up on sources, taking scientific knowledge seriously rather than cherry-picking misleading bits of information, and applying critical thinking to the weighing of evidence. That, in the end, is all that good science really is. It’s also what good journalism and commentary alike must strive to be—now more than ever.

Well said. This echoes what Mooney wrote for Mother Jones‘s September/October 2008 issue. After working for over a year as a fact-checker for MoJo, I must say that I couldn’t agree more.

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