Role Play 1: A journalist’s take on the question “How certain are we that the global average near-surface air temperature has increased since 1850”?
For the first role play, we decided to be right-winged journalists from the newspaper “The Sun”. We thought it would be interesting and challenging to defend a view that we personally do not agree with.
It was quite difficult for us natural scientists to get into the mindset of journalists. We struggled a bit with the formulation of the question, as it gave no evaluation or clear statement about global warming, but rather questioned the scientific data surrounding global temperature trends. We attempted to use this in our favour, stating that if we are already questioning the certainty of scientific evidence, we might as well not discuss the topic at all because the job of science is to decide between “true” and “false”, and not speculate. Together with the climate skeptics we argued that global temperature stations were inaccurate (due to inadequate locations, measurement error) etc., and that the data gained was not sufficient to come to any conclusions. Moreover, we questioned the timescale of the data (on geological timescales, the time period from 1850 until now is nothing). The natural scientists argued that the past temperature data is highly uncertain, but it’s the best we have and the only thing we can use in our models (as we cannot go back in time to take more measurements). We then argued that given the small temporal scale and high uncertainty in the past data, how can we be certain that the “warmer” temperatures we are experiencing today are unprecedented?
The main lesson I learnt from the first role play was that as a non-expert journalist, you are not really expected to make a clear statement about a topic, but rather take apart the arguments made by other stakeholders, or use them to back up your own argument. Whilst natural scientists can come to such discussions prepared with facts and figures, journalists are more required to think on their feet and be critical, questioning the arguments presented. I really enjoyed the discussion, and it’s a shame that we were very limited by time, as I felt that we could have continued in a very interesting and constructive manner!
I found your choice of playing “right-winged journalists” very interesting. Actually, you focused very much on playing the part of being “partisan journalists with predetermined mindsets” while somewhat disregarding the still necessary “function” of a journalist to find out and scrutinize new information about knowledge, arguments or opinions of the different stakeholders. (You wrote about this also in your blog entry.) I think that it is also important to think about why journalists should be interested in the topic: They need to sell news or emotional stories to their readers. Some readers might be attracted by heated debates on science and/or policy and others by apocalyptic future predictions…
I liked that you took the anti-science partisan journalist viewpoint to extremes with statements like “Science is only science if it provides statements without uncertainty.” or “Is there any difference between (your) science and religion?”
With respect to the latter question, I would like to share a link to an interesting online article on “Skeptical Uses of Religion in Debate on Climate Change” (Michael Svoboda, 2012):
https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2012/08/skeptical-uses-of-religion-in-debate-on-climate-change/