This link has been bookmarked by 3 people . It was first bookmarked on 06 Aug 2008, by Takuya Homma.
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01 Feb 09
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06 Aug 08
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When the work touches on issues that worry the public, affect the economy or polarize politics, the news media and advocates of all stripes dive in. Under nonstop scrutiny, conflicting findings can make news coverage veer from one extreme to another, resulting in a kind of journalistic whiplash for the public.
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This has been true for decades in health coverage. But lately the phenomenon has been glaringly apparent on the global warming beat.
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Scientists see persistent disputes as the normal stuttering journey toward improved understanding of how the world works. But many fear that the herky-jerky trajectory is distracting the public from the undisputed basics and blocking change. “One of the things that troubles me most is that the rapid-fire publication of unsettled results in highly visible venues creates the impression that the scientific community has no idea what’s going on,” said W. Tad Pfeffer, an expert on Greenland’s ice sheets at the University of Colorado.
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To support clarity, Stephen H. Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford, helped create a glossary defining what is meant by phrases like “very likely” (greater than 90 percent confidence) in the reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In a news media universe where specialized reporting is declining and a Web mash-up of instant opinion and information is emerging, Dr. Schneider said, it is ever more important for scientists to take responsibility for communicating in ways that stick, while sticking with the facts.
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He said his advice for scientists who wanted to “dampen the whiplash effect” was to “discuss the ‘So what?’ implications of the work explicitly, rather than leaving that step to advocates or politicians, or reporters.”
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Increasingly, scientists are taking their message straight to the public. Realclimate.org, Climatepolicy.org and Climateethics.org are among Web sites where issues are explored in an ongoing way, rather than in response to news releases and scientific papers. Other new Web ventures, like ClimateCentral.org at Princeton and the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media, focus on improving media coverage.
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