This post ends with an exclusive look at James Hansen's response to NYT journalist Andy Revkin's piece commenting on Hansen's (draft) article on why we need a CO2 target of 350 ppm. But first the backstory.
Revkin used me as the "balance" for his piece:
Some longtime champions of Dr. Hansen, including the Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm, see some significant gaps in the paper (it is a draft still) and part ways with Dr. Hansen over whether such a goal is remotely feasible.
I complained directly to Revkin about the first part of that characterization. I was going to let it go at that, but then I got e-mails from people directing me to a media interview of Hansen (and Mark Bowen, whose new book is Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming). The reporter cited Revkin's quote directly to Hansen to argue the paper is "controversial."
Well, obviously, the reporter should have called me directly, rather than taking some hearsay characterization from another member of the media. But that just isn't the state of journalism today. [Note to media: You don't need to cite me in order to call a paper saying we need to go back to 350 ppm "controversial" -- it's kind of obvious, given that we're at 385 ppm, rising 2 ppm a year, and not currently doing anything to stop emissions from rising, but I digress.] Anyway, at that point, I felt obliged to write Hansen an email titled "I don't see 'significant gaps in the paper'":
I complained to Revkin about that characterization.
I think it is a solid and important paper and told everyone to read it.
I just say you don't know how much we can overshoot and for how long, which your paper acknowledges. You quite naturally take a conservative approach -- best not to overshoot too much for too long. Since I don't believe we can possibly get to 350 ppm this century, I interpret your paper to say that we should shoot to stay below 450 ppm this century [almost certainly politically impossible but worth a shot] and 1) plan on going to 350 by 2150 and/or 2) waiting to see if the science becomes clearer on the overshoot issue and we need to act faster.
I don't think we disagree about much on the technical side. On the action side, you need a WWII-scale effort ASAP for decades. Whether we can get 450 or 400 or 350 with such an approach is something neither of us knows for sure.
Hansen forwarded my email to Revkin with this cover note (which he has given me permission to reprint):
Andy,
It does seem to me that you now go out of your way to make a "fair and balanced" summary of everything that I write, which is why I hesitate to send you things these days.
Sometimes there are actually conclusions worth reporting without denigrating them down to speculations disputed by other experts.
In reporting the first significant paper that I wrote (in 1981) on this topic Walter Sullivan included grumpy caveats of a couple of people but then wrote something to the effect "these caveats were all noted in the paper by Hansen et al." (remarkable in indicating he actually read the paper, which covered 10 pages in Science) -- unfortunately the version of the Sullivan article that I kept seems to be an abbreviated version which does not include this little bit.
I guess that the "fair and balanced" approach is not aimed at me -- it seems to infest a current popular style, which goes something like: well those are some opinions, what are yours? Which encourages responses, and propagation of responses, by people who don't really understand what they are talking about. Maybe this style is inherent with modern electronic communications. But I liked the old style, which had a little more permanence.
Jim
This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Comments
View as Flat
sunflower Posted 9:24 am
24 Mar 2008
I follow Jim Hansen's public missives as digestible and depend on Joe Romm for heads-up on new posts from JH. I feel less alone, more hopeful, when I read Andy Revkin in the NYT.
But I need to travel to the pleading edge to find the most dire science and the most likely outcomes of our collective ignorance.
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apsmith Posted 10:04 am
24 Mar 2008
does Hansen agree with you that getting back to 350 ppm by 2150 is ok? I read his article, and have seen Bill McKibben's comments on it as well, and it sure sounds like they're talking about a much nearer-term target. Whether you see that as disagreement with Hansen or not, I think Revkin's description of it was reasonably appropriate, though I would have liked to see all of you be more specific on the timelines under discussion.
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Andy Revkin Posted 10:11 am
24 Mar 2008
Joe, you did assert there's a significant gap in saying the paper doesn't say how long the concentration of CO2 could overshoot Jim's chosen goal of 350 ppm before tracking back to that level. That is a hugely important question in terms of how hard society has to work, and how quickly. Am I missing something?
Jim and I go back a long way (1988), and I think -- even though he's focused on this "balance as bias" idea now -- he'd see most of my 20 years of coverage as fair and ACCURATE. I've written repeatedly about the "tyranny of balance" in traditional news coverage and how it impedes effective coverage of complex science. (A book chapter including a discussion of balance was posted when I did an On the Media interview on this issue.)
That doesn't mean stories can't frame the range of discourse on a contentious scientific issue (see my piece tonight on ecological disruption and climate). What stories do need to do is to characterize the voices and not just include them.
3) A Dot Earth post on a DRAFT paper posted by Jim expressly to gain review and comment is NOT the same as a news story written once that paper has been formally peer-reviewed and published in a journal. When Jim's paper has passed those hurdles, I'll write a fair and accurate story about it.
Andy
- Andy Revkin
nytimes.com/revkin
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Steve Bloom Posted 12:49 pm
24 Mar 2008
This became "some significant gaps in the paper" in Andy's post. I took Joe's phrasing, and in particular his use of "inherent," as pointing out that there's a gap in the science (not the paper as such). Literally this can't be a gap in the paper since the paper discusses it. As well, I'm not sure where the plural "gaps" came from. Finally, "gap" (referring to an absence) is a much stronger term than "weakness" (referring to something that's present but isn't strong enough).
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ids Posted 2:36 pm
24 Mar 2008
I also find Revkin characterizes you properly in writing something you believe not to be politically actionable as something having significant gaps in your view.
It seems to me your critical lede was in part to be a "fair and balanced approach." It seems this stirring is your bad.
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LGT Posted 6:18 pm
24 Mar 2008
The following excerpts are from colleagues' blogs:
There's a fundamental systemic problem. It's called exponential growth economy and it's degrading, polluting, tearing apart destroying and otherwise killing off everything in its domain. In the absence of a `radical' change to the economic system our world is rapidly falling apart.
Here's a sample of what we are up against concerning CO2e GHG in high altitude:
Worldwide Airport Traffic Summary [YE December 2007]
Passengers : 4,479,822,865 (Up 6.4% YoY)
Air Freight (Mt) : 80,342,643 (Up 2.5% YoY)
Aircraft Movements : 68,636,424 (Up 2.4% YoY)
http://edro.wordpress.com/2008/03/23/how-many-are-up-ther ...
Without a 'radically' different economy there's ZERO possibility of effecting any change even by 2050!
For some peculiar reason 2050 has become the magic buzzword, while the world's topsoil inventory is falling below the critical 6-inch level in about 4 years, at which time a sharp decline in production would decimate terrestrial food crops.
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gzuckier Posted 11:34 am
25 Mar 2008
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