From the Pew Research Center
No Denying the Heat of Global Warming Debate in the Blogosphere
Global warming has of late been a very hot topic in social media, and last week it was hotter than ever. Much of the added fuel came from climate change believers who engaged in the debate that had been dominated by skeptics.
From Dec. 7-11, more than half (52%) of the news links in blogs were about global warming, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. That represents the most attention to the subject in any given week this year, and marks the third week in a row that global warming has been among the top four subjects in blogs. It was also prominent on Twitter last week, registering as the No. 3 topic with 14% of the news links.
And while mainstream media have generally covered the issue less than have social media, global warming filled 10% of the mainstream newshole last week, the highest level of coverage since PEJ’s News Coverage Index began tracking it in January 2007.
Over the past few weeks, the social media commentary has been led by climate change skeptics focused on “Climate-gate” — the hacked emails from a British research unit that raised the possibility of climate data manipulation. Skeptics claimed that the actions undermined the science behind global warming and de-legitimized the Copenhagen summit which began Dec. 7. Last week, many of the online commentators continued to voice doubts about global warming fueled by Washington Post op-eds by prominent conservatives and global warming skeptics George Will and Sarah Palin.
But there was a noticeable change in the social media debate last week as those who believe in the dangers of global warming increased their presence. These supporters criticized the emphasis placed on “Climate-gate” and applauded the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to regulate greenhouse gases.
Following global warming, the rest of the leading stories in the blogosphere represented a wide range of topics.
An investigative report by USA Today revealing that the government’s standards for meat in school lunches were lower than those of most fast-food chain restaurants finished second with 9% of the links.
The subject of Iran finished third (at 9%), triggered by multiple stories including a Fox News report that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused the United States of trying to thwart the return of Mahdi, the Imam believed by Muslims to be the savior. Also in the mix was a BBC article about clashes between police forces and anti-government protestors in Tehran.
The fourth biggest storyline (at 7%) was a correction in the Washington Post which some found humorous. The paper acknowledged it had falsely identified a song from the rap group Public Enemy as “9/11 is a joke” instead of the actual title, “911 is a joke.” And a story about a bus crash involving the lead singer of the rock band Weezer finished fifth at 5%.
On Twitter last week, where technology stories usually dominate, Tiger Woods won the No. 1 spot with 18% of the news links.
Reports about the Dec. 7 call to 911 from Woods’ house and the ambulance that then took a woman (later identified as Woods’ mother-in-law Barbro Holmberg) to the hospital gained attention early in the week.
Receiving almost the same amount of attention was President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech (2nd at 18%). Global warming was third at 14%, followed by a story about the privacy settings for Facebook at 9%. And a story about a battle won by a 90-year-old Virginia veteran to keep an American flag displayed in his yard finished fifth, at 7%.
Global Warming
Skeptics of man-made global warming continued to focus on the “Climate-gate” scandal as they have the previous few weeks. They were bolstered by columns from George Will and Sarah Palin questioning global warming science and the motives behind the forthcoming Copenhagen summit.
“The e-mails have popped the credibility bubble of what Roger Pielke Sr. of the University of Colorado, has called ‘the climate oligarchy'” wrote Teófilo de Jesús at Vivificat. “Suddenly I don’t think that I have all the facts, that the sober analysis of competing hypotheses has not taken place, that the global consensus often bandied about is a fallacy — a variation of ad populum argument — and that our nation cannot commit itself to irrevocable courses of actions based on compromised science.”
“The climate change … movement has gone way beyond reasonableness,” added Too Conservative. “The data scandal and burying of conflicting opinions that has recently come to light show that this is indeed more a cultish lemming movement than any scientific phenomenon….”
But Palin proved to be a lightning rod for some on the other side of the global warming debate, who criticized her op-ed piece and the Washington Post‘s decision to publish it.
“I cannot understand how a fringe, ignorant, conspiracy theory imbibing, secessionist is given space in the Washington Post to pen on issues she has no knowledge of, which happen to be the extreme-right wing scandal du jour,” responded Larisa Alexandrovna of at-Largely. “Amazing how anti-science advocates like Palin and her ilk suddenly want ‘trustworthy’ science, is it not?”
Some took aim at the Climate-gate controversy itself.
“An oft-repeated criticism of the theory of human influenced global warming researchers is that they use a small set of data to make predictions about a large phenomena,” wrote Cangrejero at The Midpoint. “The irony of a movement bent on denying all the work done by many scientists because of a few cherry-picked phrases from 1000 emails between colleagues is not lost on me.”
And others applauded the announcement that the EPA was going to regulate greenhouse gases as a threat to human health.
“Finally,” exclaimed James Rowen at The Political Environment. “After years of benign neglect and outright opposition from the Bush administration, the Federal government, taking its cues from a conservative Supreme Court, is finally stepping up to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse emissions.”
The issue of global warming went beyond the blogs as many Twitter users linked to related articles. Palin’s piece was of particular interest to both those who agreed and disagreed with her.
Supporters of the Copenhagen conference were also interested in a page on the site creativebits.org that displayed many innovative advertisements from around the world promoting the cause of fighting global warming.
“We can all save the world. exquisite ads to raise awareness,” tweeted Valentina Wahyu.
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Yep, we’re regulating CO2. It’s a crazy world.
But the real conspiracy is revealed:
MSM coverage ignores Weezer accident!
That says a lot about their approach to dissent, doesn’t it? Kinda like the “team”.
Chris Booker, together with Richard North, finally emerged from the UK Daily Telegraph blog and comments sections and into a full page 4 of the Sunday edition with this expose of Pachauris financial interests in Global Warming.
“The head of the UN’s climate change panel – Dr Rajendra Pachauri – is accused of making a fortune from his links with ‘carbon trading’ companies”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/6847227/Questions-over-business-deals-of-UN-climate-change-guru-Dr-Rajendra-Pachauri.html
“…those who believe in the dangers of global warming increased their presence.” At first this bothered me. But it was to be expected. It would be naive to think the warmers would cocoon.
The reality is that this topic is getting “media” coverage (one way or another) that a few months ago was unthinkable.
The more it is kept in the open the better.
Whatever…. make some progress on the political front.
This is what i was trying to tell you Saturday. You have no idea what kind of an impact you had, but now you see the graph.
Bogus report that missed the trees from the forest.
Approaching 30M hits Anthony….. another milestone.
Couple the general distaste of HealthCare bill with Cap & Trade/Global Warming and you have the makings of a total political rout in 2010 midterms.
The rising wave of skepticism is following the loss of favoribility of this administration.
This is the creativebits site. http://creativebits.org/inspiration/climate_change_advertising_revisited
Some are bizarre, “Travelling fruits cause pollution”. I am beginning to think that they may have the opposite effect.
I don’t think negativity sits well with the general public, particularly when young children are involved.
Hilarious riff at JoNova’s site titled “Shock: UN Finds Earth’s Thermostat”:
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/12/shock-un-finds-earths-thermostat/#more-5530
Larisa Alexandrovna,”to pen on issues she has no knowledge of,…” Does Larisa really think Al Gore knows any more of the actual science than does Sarah Palin? Did Larisa give Mr. Gore a pass all these years? What evidence is there that she has protested his aggressive presence in the debate? Not that I’m defending Ms. Palin, mind you.
For those who have been following the AGW science wars for the past several years, nothing revealed by climate gate is a surprise. We all knew about the data stonewalling, the methodological obscurantism, and the ghoulish and unending revivification of dead hockey sticks (it’s ALIVE!!), although the direct evidence of partisan influence mongering, now revealed by reconstruction of the email chains, was absent. We also knew for years, knew, that AGW so-called science found life only through constant insfusions of high-grade false precision.
All of this has been known public information and readily available for years, by now. So, it’s not without a little cynicism that we view the sudden clamor about the science only following revelation of a political scandal.
The news media are revealed as dominated by shallow sensation hounds; even those who think of themselves as science journalists. Hollywood mentalities, all. With the noted and gratitude-evoking exception of Marcel Crok. He deserves a Pulitzer.
Anthony, thanks for posting these exquisite articles. Very interesting.
Horror of horror! The pendulum of public opinion regarding AGW is swinging dangerously to the skeptic side. It makes sense that the AGW profiteers and the useful green idiots would mount a counter offensive.
I can smell the sweet smell of panic in the air. I mean, if your best tactic is to attack Palin (a strawman) and to urge people interested in climategate to “move along now, there is nothing to see”, then it’s obvious that you’re deathly afraid that people will uncover the nasty truth behind the curtain.
This is encouraging, however IMHO this ideological battleground will not be decided in the blogosphere.
We all have contacts with plenty of Mr. and Ms. Ignoramus. They are not reading the blogs, and the attention span is not longer than 20sec. when you try to explain to them about climatgate. And when you try to describe the connection between the central star of the solar system and the planet they live on, well you lost it.
The Berlin wall fell, not because of the samizdat, but because the masses switched. The AGW-green-left alliance will fall, when the masses need a new circus. And they will get one… / pessimism off 🙁
Global warming dominates the blogs – as it should. It is the biggest, most outrageous scam and fraud in history.
The collusion of scientists, officials and politicians is mind boggling.
And shamlessly they carry on, even after being exposed, as if nothing has happened.
Come out and plead guilty – thats the least you can do.
And you honest but duped masses, wake up. You have been conned and decieved. Dont side with those who are corrupt and want to steal your money.
Its not about controlling pollution, its not about saving the Earth. These are just conmen, who want to steal our money and deserve to be in jail.
retrieve my post please
REPLY: stop writing posts with so many links and banned words please
Collusion? You bet there is.
Here is some of the unfolding saga from the emails of Climategate, as compiled by Terence Corcoran:
“The 13-year email exchange, while often chaotic and disjointed, follows two main tracks that, in the end, must somehow converge. The first is to develop a convincing history of global temperature going back over thousands of years. The second is to develop models and scenarios that allow the scientists and the IPCC to forecast climate change to 2100 and beyond.”
“What really rocked the paleoclimate work at CRU, and ultimately shook the IPCC, was a seemingly out-of-the-blue email on June 17, 1998, from Michael Mann to Phil Jones, then head of East Anglia’s CRU centre. Before then, no mention had been made in the email cache of Michael Mann, … It is, in many ways, the email that rocked climate science.”
Dear Phil,
Of course I’ll be happy to be on board. I think the opportunity for some direct collaboration between us (me, and you/tim/keith) is ripe, and the plan to compare and contrast different approaches and data and synthesize the different results is a good one. Though sidetracked by other projects recently, I remain committed to doing this with you guys, and to explore applications to synthetic datasets with manufactured biases/etc remains high priority. It sounds like it would all fit into the proposal you mention. There may be some overlap w/proposals we will eventually submit to NSF (renewal of our present funding), etc. by I don’t see a problem with that in the least.
Once the collaboration is officially in place, I think that sharing of codes, data, etc. should not be a problem. I would be happy to make mine available, though can’t promise its the most user friendly thing in the world.
In short, I like the idea. Include me in, and let me know what you eed from me (cv, etc.).
cheers,
mike
“With Mr. Mann on board, everybody else seemed to go overboard. In the emails, he soon elbowed out Keith Briffa as the prime tree-ring guru. The Mann hockey stick, and the science work behind it, would end up consuming thousands of email hours over the next decade ..”
The unfolding story from the emails from Terence Corcoran-
“Two scientists, one British and the other American, straddle the initial Climategate battle over recent global temperature history. Later, the same two scientists appear to abandon their internal disagreements and join forces to present a united front to fight off critics and put down skeptics. ”
“Over the next 10 years, the emails become a zone of internal conflict and external battles to suppress criticism, ridicule critics and resist all outside interference with the official science story they had assembled: The late 20th century was the warmest in history, and the next 100 years could be a climate nightmare.”
“The epic stories in the emails, in any honest reading, do not produce any concrete results or conclusions regarding the state of the science.
What exists now in the public domain is scientific conflict and uncertainty that goes to the heart of climate change science — past, present and future.”
“Masses of computer code and data are imbedded in the Climategate documents, enough to keep a full science inquiry busy for months, if not years. Exactly who did what with which data requires a full investigation by competent scientists and official bodies.”
Will this happen – when so called responsible scientists are saying there is nothing to investigate?
As long as MSM was towing the line and only reporting one side, the warmists were content to huddle up in protected corridors of sites like Real Climate. Now that MSM has done some new polls and see there truly is a “story” here, the warmists are fanning out in something of a panic. However, they aren’t very good on their own from what I have seen in responses at MSM websites and certainly are bumblers in unfriendly territory like skeptic blogs. That’s to be expected when their battles were fought for them by media for so many years. They don’t have much practice. And skeptic numbers are getting huge online. You are even seeing a decent skeptic showing at HuffPo. That is is saying something.
One can question whether climategate (I still hate that name) contributed to Copenhagen failure. But what is certain is that combining both is a tide-turner. What I would like to see MSM explore is just how many of those 190+ world leaders are actually skeptics themselves. Surely there must be more than a few since the conference was a complete failure. These leaders have children and grandchildren. If they honestly believed those children (or humanity itself) would be threatened in the next 50-100 years, would they have quibbled over a 100 billion dollars? They may be crooks, but they aren’t insane.
Re: Gregg E. (23:36:21) :
“This reveals yet again the left’s tactics. Take the least significant item and elevate it to the highest level of importance then attack it while ignoring most everything else.
Palin wrote, what, one post about climategate?”
Yes, Palin’s not even worthy of mention in this debate.
About Larisa Alexandrovna, isn’t she the one from the former Communist republic of Ukraine who supposedly lost a source in a scandal recently that never materialized. http://bit.ly/6jZwiC Why would the MSM use her as a source on Climategate and climate change? She has no expertise covering the topic.
That article was junk, but the stats it was referring to were significant. In addition to the blogging, #COP15 and #Copenhagen were two of the top Trending Topics last week. I don’t need no BS MSM article to tell me that, and anyway that MSM’s data is from 2 weeks ago, what about last week?
I really dont think there is a lot of warmists. Like ‘the team’ they are a small select group often in positions of power. At green demonstrations they are poorly attended and that by rent a crowd. They have worked hard to give the impression they have public support – the reality however is they dont!
In karate class I learned that you can use your attackers own force to defeat him. For example, if someone is running towards you to tackle you, instead of trying to push back, you can stand aside and even pull or push them in the same direction they were going. Then they often fall on their face.
Perhaps, with the global warming extremists, we should egg them on. Let them increase their hyperbole, arrogance, lies and extortion until everyone sees them for the clowns that they are.
Oh wait, maybe we are already there.
We should demand that all engineers be moved to isolated compounds until they invent an electric jet. Electric jets are cool because electricity comes from a hole in the wall that is attached to a windmill somewhere in Idaho. That may take a little while, so meanwhile let’s all fly back to Copenhagen and protest the drinking of soda because opening one bottle of soda releases more carbon dioxide than owning a pet dog for a year. We should also all move out to the west coast because it is warmer there and we don’t need to burn oil to heat our houses. We only need air conditioning which uses windmill electricity. In fact, there are so many really big houses out in California that all the people in the North East can move in with all the people in California and no one would even know the difference. When we fly back to Copenhagen, we should all hold our breath until we get world leaders to give us what we want. Actually, you should all hold your breath because, I can’t really hold my breath for very long, but I’m sure some of you out there can hold your breath for a real long time. Come on do it for Mother Earth!
Come on I saw you breathing. You must hold your breath longer! The glaciers are melting! I saw the picture of melting water on TV! I didn’t actually go to the arctic to see for myself because it is too cold. And I hear that the polar bears are really fierce! They look all cute and fuzzy but they would eat you in a minute. They eat seals you know. Isn’t that terrible? I don’t think they eat baby seals though. I did go to the caribbean once to study the coral. It was so cool, we drove this monster speed boat out to the pristine coral reef. The sun is so hot there I had to put on about 5 layers of sunscreen to bock the UV rays. I’m telling you that It was so much sun screen that I could see a film of sunscreen floating on the water as soon as I got in. I’ve go to protect my skin from UV rays you know. Anyway the coral looked fine. But then we had a problem with the motor a spilled some oil. We went back again the next week and the coral was all dead. Must be from Global Warming.