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.<\/p>\n
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).\u00a0We then argued that given the small temporal scale and\u00a0high uncertainty in the past data, how\u00a0can we be certain that the “warmer” temperatures we are experiencing\u00a0today are unprecedented?<\/p>\n
The main lesson I learnt\u00a0from the first\u00a0role play was that as a\u00a0non-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,\u00a0or use them to\u00a0back up your own\u00a0argument. 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\u00a0in\u00a0a very interesting and constructive manner!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 personallyContinue reading “Role-play 1 from a journalist’s perspective”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":463,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[6,14],"class_list":["post-553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-role-play-1","tag-ideas","tag-role-play"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/uncertain2degrees.blogs.uni-hamburg.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/journalist.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uncertain2degrees.blogs.uni-hamburg.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uncertain2degrees.blogs.uni-hamburg.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uncertain2degrees.blogs.uni-hamburg.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uncertain2degrees.blogs.uni-hamburg.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uncertain2degrees.blogs.uni-hamburg.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=553"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/uncertain2degrees.blogs.uni-hamburg.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1013,"href":"https:\/\/uncertain2degrees.blogs.uni-hamburg.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553\/revisions\/1013"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uncertain2degrees.blogs.uni-hamburg.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uncertain2degrees.blogs.uni-hamburg.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uncertain2degrees.blogs.uni-hamburg.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uncertain2degrees.blogs.uni-hamburg.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}