it is high time we called 'PR' what it is - corporate propaganda - in order to strip the discipline of the legitimacy it somehow retains. It's basically paid for BS, and when it comes to climate change, everyone is going to be paying the price
The BBC as a public broadcaster isn't in the business of hosting contrarians for profit but to broadcast factful news, so.. not really.
The opinion of scientists qualified to speak on the question of CC matters, letting literal oil lobbyists speak is like asking the fox if we should keep the door to the henhouse open.
> The BBC as a public broadcaster isn't in the business of hosting contrarians
In the past, the BBC certainly has been in the business of "hosting contrarians", though perhaps with the misguided intention of providing balance rather than attracting viewers.
For example, OFCOM found them to have broken broadcasting standards by allowing Lord Lawson (a well-known climate change denialist) to make false statements on the Today Program [1, 2] without being challenged or corrected. This happened despite a complaint being upheld about a previous appearance of the same guest on the same program [3].
Weird though that it's perfectly fine to host false statements so long as they're on the correct 'side.' Those become honest mistakes or 'the science changed,' etc. This helps no one, as does not allowing opposing opinions/'science' just because, especially if controversial.
As long as the journalists are ensuring they do enough diligence to not present blatant lies or propaganda, it should not matter which 'side' is presented, journalism is supposedly (?) about presenting honest data and information for the viewer/consumer to form their own opinions on.
If someone somehow forms the opinion that climate change isn't a thing, then present better arguments and information and debate with honesty and integrity. It's not as loud and might not get the internet clicks, but it will shine through better in the end, much as it doesn't seem to in the moment. Don't let the fear/threat of trolls block being challenged by opposing ideas.
> If someone somehow forms the opinion that climate change isn't a thing, then present better arguments and information and debate with honesty and integrity.
If you're not already climate scientist, or willing to seriously read up on the literature, then you have no chance of understanding and judging for yourself arguments about the field - this is true for most fields requiring advanced mathematics and statistics. You are deluding yourself if you think you can listen to two climate scientists debate a point and accurately assess who has the better argument; not that this may even be true if you are a climate scientist, as you often need to run your own experiments or at least verify equations and statistical models before making up your mind.
The purpose of journalism is exactly to process facts to the public at a level where they can be understood by most people reading/watching them. The proper way to do science journalism is two steps removed from the raw scientific discussion: you ask scientists in the field about the mainstream opinion, about how strong the consensus is, about plausible non-mainstream opinions; maybe you check with a few people close to the field but outside of it to see what are opinions about the field itself in the larger academic context. If you can, you also get information about consequences of these theories in terms that can be understood by a non-expert audience (such as time dilation and the way it is used in GPS satellites for special relativity).
Then, you present to the public a condensed version of this information.
What you don't do is ignore all of this burden of journalistic research and just bring some scientists that are for or against a theory and let them make some random simplified meaningless arguments to the public to see who has the slicker tongue and nothing else.
Ah, the old everyone's an idiot that can't think critically thing.
People might not form the opinion you want, but that doesn't mean they can't still be critical and come to an informed opinion.
I think none of these topics are the problem being actually hinted at. Instead, I would ask bigger questions:
- Why do we seem to have an increasing number of politicians/positions of power with little to no depth of experience in their field?
- After decades and more of scientific abuse and manipulation by corporations, how do we rebuild trust (I think this is particularly relevant to the discussion here)?
- How do we ensure social media companies do not influence discussion, but also try to avoid echo chambers and propoganda?
In other words, it's not people not understanding a topic or the 'wrong' voices getting too much attention or too many 'wrong' opinions that is the problem, these are just symptoms.
Good arguments, data and integrity and more discussion should always be desired and encouraged as the way to debate and understand. Most other options are roads to tyranny of some form.
This is not my point at all. Instead, the problem is that scientific topics require huge time investments to be able to form an informed opinion.
To check whether someone's scientific arguments hold (assuming they are not ridiculously bad), you will need hours, days or weeks of research of your own, if you don't already know everything. You will need to check their math, to check their models, to compare with others' models in the literature, to do some small experiments of your own (even if just statistical experiments). You can't just listen to two people speak for 1 hour and meaningfully decide for yourself who is right.
Einstein couldn't have listened to two climate scientists debate for 1h and have decided for himself who is right. It just takes far more effort.
And the purpose of journalism and the scientific establishment is exactly to spare the rest of us that effort: journalists can talk to established scientists and help many millions of people form an informed opinion on what we know about a topic, without having to dedicate their week to that single topic. Those that do want to dedicate more time, and who do want to meaningfully investigate the fringe opinions shouldn't get it from Fox or BBC, they should go and read up on the literature, pro and against, with detailed technical arguments, once they understand enough of the field for those arguments to make sense.
To summarize: anyone who wants to contradict climate change should show you the math. If they can't show the math for various time constraint reasons, then it mustn't be on TV. If a TV station or news article is willing to spend 4-8 hours to discuss the technical details, then by all means, invite both sides of the argument.
Integrity in news reporting has nothing to do with presenting every possible view as legitimate.
A news report about the Earth that invites both physicists and flat earth loonies is not in any way better than one that doesn't even mention the flat Earth "theory".
You are actively misleading the public when inviting climate change deniers to a discussion about climate change.
Yes it is way better! If flat Earth is so outlandish (which it is), it should be easily dismantled in debate and journalistic investigation. Not wanting to allow it full stop for fear of internet trolls grouping up is no solution at all.
Sure: journalistic investigation should quickly dismantle it, which means they shouldn't report it to the public. It would be like reporting someone's words that you have found are lies, just to be fair and balanced.
On the other hands, debates with a general audience (i.e. non-experts) are a terrible way to judge scientific arguments. Non-experts are simply unable to judge for themselves the strength of most scientific arguments, because they simply don't know the fields well enough. The vast majority of the arguments will fly by us and we'll be left as confused or more; and we'll pick winners based on charisma rather than any deeper thought.
Yes but people must do that every day anyway. It's like saying no expert opinion or statement is valid unless you check credentials first and they meet some arbitrary bar of merit.
And even then, we've witnessed a long history of 'credentialed' people being corporate puppets for certain agendas, peddlers of their own self-importance and fraud or just plain wrong.
We should pick experts, but we should pick from a range, not just the experts we like or decide are on the right side. And sometimes also pay attention to the non-experts, they can ask very interesting questions and provide good thought experiments, even if naive.
We should pick experts that other experts believe in. If we happen to be experts in a field, or even adjacent fields, then by all means, let's pick experts based on our own understanding of their arguments. Knowledge does transfer to some extent, so if you're a mathematician or physicist or statistician, you could probably judge some climate or medical papers based on their statistical methods - especially when you find flaws (even if the math is perfect, if you don't know why they chose a particular model and how well it might actually fit the thing being modelled, you may not be sure they are not choosing a known bad model).
But if we're not, the only thing we can meaningfully do is to look at what other experts are saying is the right opinion, and judge based on popularity in their field.
Here's a challenge I bet your little principle can't sustain: find a major long standing theory in human history that turned out to be wrong. Then apply your idea . The desired outcome for a rational principle would be that the truth and reality bubbles efficiently to the surface instead of gets burried and is taboo and something people are ostracized for promoting. I have yet to hear a principle that can deliver this outcome.
For pure scientific debates, I'm all for inviting any scientist with some amount of credentials to the table.
But for public policy debates, I think the track record is exactly the opposite: for every major public policy issue that required scientific knowledge, inviting the reactionary types dug out by the sleazy PR industry has done a dis-service to the public. We've seen this with tabacco, with led, and with global warming in just the last century.
And as I said: that's fine - let them publish in scientific journals, let them give lectures at universities, let them participate in scientific debates.
But as long as their opinion is out of the mainstream of their field, keep them away from discussions of that field with the general public - especially when the general public has to make policy decisions based on that field.
If their scientific arguments are not convincing to their scientific peers, then they shouldn't be given a podium to try to convince the public through rhetoric and charisma.
I wonder how long it would have taken to discover the gut-brain links if experts were not allowed to speak out of their fields. Do we also measure the credentials of the peers and check their biases before allowing them to approve arguments and enter the mainstream (whatever that's supposed to mean)?
This line of reasoning is fraught with danger, though yes we should always at least try to ensure the arguments come from expertise and experience.
The gut-brain link was not discovered by bringing in gut experts on TV to opine on questions of public mental health, nor vice versa.
I feel that you're mixing up two meanings of public debate: one is the more general notion of "any debate which is accessible to the public" (like an open-enrollment scientific conference, or publishing in a science journal), and the second one is "debating for the express benefit of the entire public", such as a news television debate.
In the first one, I completely agree with you: anyone willing to put in the work to present a rigorous scientific argument should be allowed in, even if their theory is currently way outside the mainstream, and even if they are potentially biased.
For the second one, I don't think it's in anyone's real best interest to bring in dodgy experts that everyone in their field considers to be proven wrong. Especially not 1:1, suggesting to the general public a priori that what both experts are saying carries equal weight. Particularly so in something like a climate debate, where there are 99 scientists that are convinced the evidence for man-made global warming are overwhelming for every 1 that has even a moderate doubt.
Think of the following scenario: for some bizarre reason, Congress is considering a law to forbid GPS systems to make adjustments to their clocks based on the altitude of the satellites. The public will vote on this issue, so TV stations are presenting scientific views. To be balanced, they are bringing in both a world-renowned researcher in General Relativity (say, Niel deGrasse-Tyson), and a researcher who believes Newton's law of universal attraction is the final word on the effects of gravity (not sure they could find one).
Will the public be able to judge the merits of the GR non-linear equations to understand the merits of their arguments? Or would the public be better informed by only just bringing in Neil and letting them know that he represents overwhelming scientific consensus?
The BBC was started with the core mission to 'Inform, educate, entertain.'
The BBC World Service - funded by the Foreign Office, rather than from the core BBC license fee funding, did indeed have soft-power as part of its remit.
It's crimes against humanity, it's what it is. Sabotaging the human race for personal gain is the ultimate crime, it makes Hitler look like a saint. Any sentient species in the Universe wishing to prevail must, absolutely must be able to effectively discourage such behavior.
It seems that there are only two differences between Hitler and climate change deniers. First, Hitler had actual executive powers to implement the measures suggested by his own slander campaign. Second, unlike Hitler, we still refuse to acknowledge that climate change deniers do have a direct responsibility over the various disasters and subsequent deaths caused by climate change.
I clearly do. Hitler killed millions of people, not unlike the Black Death or Genghis Khan, but what can you do, life goes on. Climate change is different. Life will absolutely not go on if we don't start handling it. It's an extinction event, and that's not a hyperbole, we are actually in the middle of the Holocene extinction event, also called the sixth mass extinction.
The biosphere is not undestroyable by any measure. Prior extinction events haven't manage to permanently damage it, but we shouldn't set the bar that low and rely on life's magical ability to spring forth and prosper under any circumstances.
If it weren't for Hitler, World War II might have been over climate policy instead, and there might be no nukes. You gloss over Nth-order effects and cite a single statistic to compare relative damage done to humanity (spoiler alert: what you actually tried to do here is not possible to scientifically do at all - you are pro-science, right?). This tells me that you haven't done any real research on the topic, but are obtusely confident about it, on HN of all places. Who were your most influential authors on existential risks? Have you contributed to the literature at all?
The what if game works the other way around too. The Third Reich spent a lot of rethorical attention on environmentalism that soon became a less pressing concern. Under different circumstances however one might imagine that they would have tried to make the 1000-year Reich a reality, and nature conservancy and curbing pollution would have been a fit ideologically. But priorities tend to change, and the lack of individualism is not a guarantee against hypercapitalism.
Nuclear weapons were inevitable, they are trivial inventions.
Nobody would have fought over climate policy a 100 years ago. Climate change barely received any publicity before James Hansen's testimony in 1988.
...Sentence two, and y'all folks keep wondering who is fueling the lack of trust & emergence of conspiracy theories.
When you're fueling the emotional aspect with your words that unabashedly, you are making people who are on the fence or unsure certain something is really wrong with the mainstream claims. I can tell you this just from the reaction you gave me in the pit of my stomach.
No, it's an emergency. We've screwed the planet, big time. When they're cutting open whales to reveal heaps of plastic, find it on Everest's peak and also in our meat at the supermarket, and when 3M is still, to this very day, trying to weasel out of being forbidden from making PFAS (a pointless, stupid chemical group that we basically didn't need as a race), we can't afford to sit idly by and entertain the feelings of people who never really had an interest in anything outside of their yard.
I have strong sense of justice, but this is how countries are built to last. Rest assured that I wouldn't let some libertarian think tank and their corporate sponsors get away with such manipulation of public opinion for personal gain.
On the other hand if you are on the fence about climate change please call me ASAP, I have some property to sell.
"So you believe BBC exists ? Do your own research !".
Yes, though, I'm inclined to believe a sourced article from a major publicly founded outlet including quotes from the "accused" admiting to what they have done, over most corporate PR.
No - the claim that PR agencies were involved in climate change denial is pretty solid. It's basically their work. My point is that we should resist the renaming BS
