False Balance Lives: Media Biased Toward Fringe Climate Scientists Who Reject Global Consensus

A new study finds that the media disproportionately favors scientists who reject the basic scientific consensus on climate change.  By consensus, I mean the latest findings of the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC), which are already overly cautious and watered down.

Some — though not most — analysts have declared the media’s era of false balance in climate coverage is over.  But the truth is that the media continue to present the public a misleading picture on climate science, giving fringe scientists more attention (disproportionate to their actual number) than the leading climate scientists.

A new study in Environmental Science and Technology by Bart Verheggen et al, surveys “more than 1800 international scientists studying various aspects of climate change” and finds:

• There is widespread agreement that global warming is predominantly caused by human greenhouse gases.
• This consensus strengthens with increased expertise, as defined by the number of self-reported articles in the peer-reviewed literature.
• Self-reported media exposure is higher for those who are skeptical of a significant human influence on climate.

So what did the study find about false balance? It found that scientists who say that the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gas emissions is below the consensus range report getting the most frequent media exposure.

Similarly, some “30% of those few who said that greenhouse gases have caused an insignificant amount of global warming (or even cooling) reported frequent media coverage, compared to just 15% of climate scientists who said greenhouse gases have caused strong global warming,” as the Guardian put it.

False Balance Lives:  Media Biased Toward Fringe Climate Scientists Who Reject Global Consensus