Greenhouse deconstructed

National Review, March 16, 1992

THE ENVIRONMENTAL activists of the Left have long dominated the media. Decades of grandstanding have benumbed the perceptions of an audience exposed to the catastrophists 16 times more often than to the doubters. Scientists and technologists have suffered this barrage along with the rest of us.

At long last the silent scientific majority has found a voice: the Center for Science, Technology, and the Media. In a ground-breaking study of what climate scientists actually think about the climate-change debate, the Center got the Gallup poll to interrogate a large and randomly selected cross-section of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. The results are startling. What had been presented as scientists versus the White House turns out to be scientists versus scientists.

Even as Democrats running in New Hampshire were denouncing John Sununu as "the only American who isn't worried about the greenhouse effect," the other CNN channel was covering the Center's report. Just 41 per cent of the real experts thought there was "scientific evidence" for global warming, and 90 per cent of them characterized research on climate change as "emerging science." While 70 per cent consider the caliber of the underlying work to be "fair to poor," 66 per cent nonetheless believe that some climate change induced by man confronts us or our posterity.

The last statistic is less paradoxical in the light of the Center's parallel investigation into what the media have been drilling into the AGU/AMS membership (along with the rest of America). Last year there were nearly five hundred network television and mass-circulation stories, more than one-fifth of them devoted to coastal flooding due to global warming. The most quoted individual was the foremost advocate of warming--NASA's Dr. James Hansen popped up 104 times. And a large majority of the stories were "ominous in tone."

The objective and dispassionate investigation of the interaction of science and the media is long overdue. It can only benefit both. By illuminating the difference between what a few scientists (about 2 per cent in the AGU/AMS poll) tell to the media and what the majority say to each other, the Center should contribute to two valuable goals--reducing the credibility gap in the climate-change debate and conserving something that all should cherish, left, right, and center: the political neutrality of science itself.