[Scott] Coming up on "Energy Switch," we'll hear from leading climate journalists.

- We're often asked, "Well, are you biased against research that is saying that climate change isn't that serious?"

Well, the answer is absolutely not.

I mean, we're always eager to have research papers that are contrary to dominant narratives as long as they're interesting, important, and passed through a peer review process.

- I think there is a sort of a storied myth of journalists who operate, just completely apart from their personal experience.

And that's not real.

You should acknowledge that we all are humans.

At the same time, it's important to be able to separate that to some degree and really make sure that the work that you're doing is searching for truth.

[Scott] Next on "Energy Switch," the challenges of communicating on climate change.

[Narrator] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by, The University of Texas at Austin, leading research in energy and the environment for a better tomorrow.

What starts here changes the world.

[upbeat music] - I'm Scott Tinker, and I'm an energy scientist.

I work in the field, lead research, speak around the world, write articles, and make films about energy.

This show brings together leading experts on vital topics in energy and climate.

They may have different perspectives, but my goal is to learn, and illuminate, and bring diverging views together towards solutions.

Welcome to the "Energy Switch."

Climate science is complex, and, like every other field, it's full of uncertainties.

That's what excites scientists, their research papers explore the nuances.

While general audiences want conclusions, sometimes scientists build studies on extreme or unlikely climate scenarios to make findings easier to discern.

When translated to mainstream reporting, those are sometimes confused with reality.

We'll hear from experts on the challenges of communicating on climate.

Michael White is a senior editor in charge of climate and the oceans for the science journal, Nature, which publishes leading edge research papers for the scientific community.

Justin Worland is the senior correspondent for climate for "Time Magazine" and the Visiting Fellow in Journalism at the University of Chicago's Energy Policy Institute.

On this episode of "Energy Switch," we'll look at the field of climate journalism.

Welcome.

Sure appreciate you taking the time today and look forward to this dialogue on journalism and climate.

We always start with the big picture, which is why would our listeners, why would our viewers even care?

- I think you could look at it in at least two ways.

We are causing climate change and that there are clear solutions that are within our grasp.

And the way I think about it now is instead of a knowledge deficit, we should be thinking about an empathy gap.

Scientists are not trained in how to communicate their findings, which are often highly nuanced and complicated and have a lot of uncertainties to people whose lives might actually be affected by these changes.

- That's a good way to frame it.

- Justin?

- I mean, I agree with that.

I guess I would say climate change is a huge problem.

People do not understand the scale of the problem or perhaps the nuances of the problem.

And I think the nuances are important.

- How do journals like Nature actually evaluate the research project?

What's your protocol, if you will?

- So, I think what people may not realize about many journals, but especially journals like Science, Nature, and Cell, is how long the process is.

So scientists are submitting papers to me now, particularly in paleoclimate, old climate science, where the cores were taken 15, 20 years ago.

And I have about roughly a week or so to evaluate the paper in terms of if the paper is true, would it be interesting for our audience?

And Nature is a wide audience journal.

And it needs to have a high level of novelty.

It can't be a repetition of a different technique on the same topic.

So then the paper comes in and I tend to decline without review, roughly 70% of all submissions.

- Wow.

- Then for the 30% that go to review, what I do is look at the paper and say, "Oh, okay, I have a paper.

It's a straightforward analysis of physical oceanography.

I'll send that paper to two independent scientists."

Then the paper is read and evaluated by those scientists primarily for technical merit.

And if they say, "We see these issues with the paper," then it'll go back to the editors and we'll evaluate that whole set of feedback.

And then we'll tell the authors, "Well, you know, we're still interested, but we need to see revisions in all these points."

And this process gets iterated potentially up to four or five times.

Our position is that we want to try and publish papers that are correct.

So the process can take anywhere from in the most lightning fast time, one month up to multiple years.

- Right.

- And then the press team at Nature, which is an independent team, writes a short press release for every single paper in Nature.

And the idea there is that this gives the journalist time to talk to independent scientists in the field, get independent opinions, talk to that author, for example, all in advance of the day that the paper is actually published.

[Scott] So it's kind of firewalled until then, or... - Yes, exactly.

But publication is not the end point.

There are mechanisms for post publication review.

And in cases where there are research flaws, either intentionally or not, there are cases of clear fraud, then the paper can be retracted.

- Interesting.

Thoughts on any of this?

- Well, first I would say that was really interesting insight.

I resonated in some ways with what you said.

I mean, you're talking to a wide audience within the scientific community and we're trying to do the same speaking to a wide audience that is interested in a bunch of different issues and how do we make climate one of those issues.

And so, I mean, I think a lot of that process is similar to my process and just trying to pick stories to pick research to pick threads that are going to have broad appeal.

- How informed are most climate journalists?

Do they have the background?

This is technical stuff.

Are we even able to communicate this in ways that?

- It's a good question.

I mean, obviously every journalist is different.

It is a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences and time in the field.

The idea is that journalists should be able to jump to different things, right?

So a lot of people will spend their careers doing a beat for five years and just sort of cycling through.

Climate really doesn't lend itself to that.

It's just the learning curve is too steep.

And so I think it poses a big challenge for journalism to figure out as a institution, how do you adjust to have a deep enough bench to really understand, engage in these issues.

- Look, I find journalists to be some of the most informed people I know, is really broadly educated.

'Cause you have to be.

How about on the editorial side?

Are you seeing similar challenges, Mike, with that?

- I came into Nature in 2008.

I was generally informed about climate, but every day for the first year, there would be a topic I had literally never heard of.

- Yeah.

- And then you have...

I don't know what it's like for you, but I would have sort of a day to come up to speed on these topics and to reach editorial decisions.

Now for most papers, I will know within 10 minutes whether it's a potential paper for us or not.

- Interesting.

We all have biases.

I'm a scientist, I have my own biases.

How does that influence your reporting?

How do you keep that from influencing your reporting?

- You know, I think there is a sort of a storied myth of journalists who operate, just completely apart from their personal experience.

And that's not real.

We should acknowledge that we all are humans.

And in some ways that can be helpful.

It can help figure out what questions to ask or give a certain curiosity about things that other people might not have.

At the same time, it's important to be able to separate that to some degree and really make sure that the work that you're doing is searching for truth, right?

Truth that is apart from your own personal experience or your own personal perspective.

- Yeah, interesting.

Your thoughts on that, Mike?

- So whenever I go to do a visit to a group of scientists, I'm almost always asked, "Are you biased against certain lines of research or certain lines of work or countries or individuals?"

[Scott] You're asked that by the scientists.

- Yes, absolutely.

And the response I gave was kind of two-part, one of them is, "Well, the problem with having an unconscious bias is that you don't know that you have it, of course, because it's unconscious."

But if you give yourself time for introspection and thought on given topics and decisions, you can recognize that and say, "Well, am I making this decision because this is an uninteresting paper for Nature or is it because it's from an African scientist and we get almost no submissions from Africa?"

Those are very different decisions to make and you should be aware of them and think about them.

We're often asked, "Well, are you biased against research that is saying that climate change isn't that serious?"

Well, the answer is absolutely not.

I mean, we're always eager to have research papers that are contrary to dominant narratives as long as they're interesting, important, and passed through a peer review process.

And one classic example for me as an editor is a paper I handled many years ago, and the title was something like No Trend in Global Drought Over the Past 50 Years.

But over this five decade study period, they couldn't detect any trend in global drought.

Not that there aren't regional changes, but as an entire planetary drought system, they saw no change.

And it isn't the kind of thing that would necessarily have an immediate media appeal, 'cause it is a negative story in that sense.

Negative meaning a finding of no change.

- Right.

- But hugely important given the importance of the topic itself.

And I think just an example of how journals like Nature don't have a predefined narrative of what we want to publish to support the idea that climate change is taking place uniformly in all areas at all times.

- Right.

If we were to hear the same story through the lens of different journalists, say Time, Newsweek, The Economist, Mother Jones.

- Yeah.

- They're very different takes on that.

Is that the newspaper or magazine driving that or is that the journalist or?

- No, I see what you're saying.

I mean, I wrote a story several years ago about the narrowing of uncertainty about outcomes for a particular climate phenomenon.

And I got a bunch of negative feedback from people saying, this makes it look like climate science is a bunch of nonsense because you're talking about the uncertainties within climate science.

And I said, "Well, that's-" - That's 'cause it exists.

- That's 'cause it exists.

And that's how we talk about things that are real, nuanced, honest way.

So that's just one anecdote, whether we would pick up that particular story about droughts that you're alluding to.

I mean, I don't know.

I don't think we would shy away from it.

I do know that if we didn't cover it, we would get some negative feedback for sure, for sure.

- Here's one, I mean, this is kind of real.

We've had climate scientists on this show, and they've said RCP 8.5.

This is one of the scenarios.

It's just really unlikely to happen.

Not impossible.

But we still continue to see papers on this.

Am I out to lunch here?

That's what I've heard.

Are we?

- No, you're absolutely right.

So the question then editorially is, what did we do with the paper if it comes in and it reports some remarkable finding for what are now called SSP585 or shared socioeconomic pathways in scenario five, which is burned it all.

Like what do we do with that?

It could be quite interesting editorially, but is it realistic?

And if it's not realistic, should we even publish those kind of papers?

Because it can create, really, it's some kind of mass hysteria about the way that climate will change in the future.

We just had a paper looking at the future recurrence of multi-year La Ninas.

So the reverse part of the El Nino, the cool part of the system.

And the authors came in with an RCP or SSP 8.5 submission, and they had done some work on the other SSPs, but then editorially we said, "Look, that needs to be front and center in the first paragraph.

We need to clearly signpost to the readers that this is a range of possibilities, that the high end is a high end.

It should never be called business as usual."

- Right.

[Mike] It's an extreme scenario.

- Interesting, and so does "Time Magazine" still look for the more dramatic things because that's what your readers want.

- I do think that there can be value to scenarios that are looking at extremes.

I think to Mike's point, signpost, right?

If you're going to write about an RCPA 0.5 study, you gotta be very clear that this is an extreme scenario.

I think the sort of bigger perspective that I try to bring, and I think Time tries to bring is, let's think about climate less as the most extreme possibility, which is maybe a tail-end risk.

And let's not look at the other tail, which might suggest that this is all overblown.

Let's look at the sort of base case and the most likely scenario.

And you still have a lot of really compelling storytelling there.

[Scott] Right.

I've written some stuff and I'll put a title on it.

It's never the title it comes out with, there's some other title.

And then there's the content and the headline is almost opposite of this three sentence, the actual really important part of the story that's sitting in there and it's kind of buried here near the bottom.

Are you seeing that?

How do you manage that, Justin?

- I mean, I do think you see this widely where there's a gap between what the story says and what the headline says.

And that is an attempt to drive, you know, clicks to drive people to the story.

[Scott] Right.

- I think it isn't necessarily bad to want people to read your stories.

- Right.

- Can you find a way to get them to read it by doing a good story, right, rather than doing something that's just- [Scott] Click bait.

- Click bait, right.

Garbage with a good headline that, you know, so.

That's an important distinction.

I'll say though, one thing that we are taught is, I mean, this is like born out in the data is that if you mislead readers, they don't come back.

- Right.

- And so,I think there's always a fine needle to thread to try to find a headline that is most compelling as it can be while also sticking to the content of the story because you don't want to turn readers off.

- On the research side of things.

I'm not engaged with the click universe at all.

But we're engaged with the citation universe.

- Yeah.

So that's the click equivalent almost.

- That's the click.

So when the paper is published, another paper in a different journal might make reference to that paper, and that's called the citation.

[Scott] Right.

- And that will appear in the tracking of the paper in Nature.

So I know very well which papers I publish will get a lot of citations, but that is not the main motivation for publishing papers.

It's interest, importance, novelty.

So I had a paper that I published on episodic deluges and hot house climates.

It's a purely theoretical climate paper that has really no direct relevance to our modern world.

But the underlying climate dynamics are just so fascinating that we publish papers like that just for the beauty of the science itself.

- Yeah.

How does a short term turn on the news cycle affect the stories that are covered?

- There's always a focus on what's happening in the next, in the news cycle, which I think sometimes makes it difficult to get into the depth and the nuance that we've been talking about.

I mean, I think the other thing is just from a consumer perspective, right?

Attention spans are shorter.

- What'd you say?

[laughs] - Oh yeah, there we go!

I's amazing that we've been able to sit here and have this conversation, right?

Because to some degree, like people just don't have the time or they don't feel they have the time.

[Scott] And there's a phone in my pocket.

- And there's a phone- - Buzzing.

- Buzzing and it's gonna push alert you with all sorts of different headlines.

[Scott] Yeah.

- And what you see today is going to be completely different from what you saw yesterday.

And that just doesn't really provide a great context for going deep.

- Yeah.

- It's a challenging place to be an organization like Time, which particularly in the last 30 years has been a place where there's a lot of long form storytelling.

Having said that, I think we focus on topics that are,keep coming up in some ways, right?

Things that are longer term, that are always sort of simmering in the year or, you know, season, et cetera.

And so it's going to have a shelf life that's a little bit longer than the churn, right?

[Scott] And then there's social media.

- Social media.

- The great oxymoron.

How that contributing to kind of, I'm just gonna use the word confusing climate understanding?

- I mean, so much of social media, these algorithms relies on getting people up in arms.

And so, if you don't believe in climate science, you could easily go down a rabbit hole of social media folks who all believe the same thing and are taking that much further.

You also could find people who believe that the world is ending tomorrow.

And you could take it in that direction.

- Half the students in my classroom.

- You know, this is my view as a journalist analyzing this and not so much as it pertains to my own work, but clearly there's some value in getting people to care, right?

- Yeah.

- But it's important that that care is rooted in an understanding of, you know, facts.

And again, I mean, I don't know, how do you feel about it?

I mean, in some ways, it must be good that your students care, but you of course, wish that they were carrying in a way that was a little more grounded.

- Yeah, and that didn't cause them to become depressed.

- Right.

- Doom is a narrative in many circles in social media.

And like Justin was saying, social media encourages tribalism and circling of the wagons.

And I think it acts as an attractor of those kinds of viewpoints that then get amplified and reinforced.

So for young people, getting that understanding I think is very hard because the immediate stories you see are heat waves, floods, hurricanes, extreme events, all of which are getting worse in some parts of the world.

[Scott] Interesting.

- Can I just come in on this one point because I think part of it is like being alarmed about the right things.

Things that are maybe more mundane, but actually quite significant.

Migration that is clearly going to happen.

These are things that are happening in the base case.

[Scott] Right.

- And social media I think does not encourage that.

- Correct.

- And I think broadly speaking, media needs to find better ways to communicate the results of what's happening in the base case, rather than having to rely on the crutch of these extreme things that most likely will not happen.

- That's well put.

So what are the other challenges to good climate reporting and good climate science publishing?

- We're in a situation where on a regular basis, scientists within a narrowly defined field cannot communicate with each other.

[Scott] Yeah.

- And I've heard hundreds of scientific talks, and my main takeaway from that is that scientists think of their audiences as being genetic copies of themselves, people with equal backgrounds and equal interests.

And they make usually, for very good cultural reasons, little effort to think about their audience.

And I think that empathy question I talked about at the beginning really goes down to the scientists and their audience.

Who do you think of as being their audience and how can they communicate to somebody who is from a radically different scientific, but also just cultural background?

And scientists are not trained to do that.

There's very little professional reward system to compensate for the effort required to do it.

But that's the only way that we're gonna make progress.

- That's a really interesting point.

And particularly in complex topics like this that cross over so many different field.

So next steps, next steps to help scientists in journals, mainstream media, social media, all these things.

How do we better communicate on climate?

- So the scientists that I work with are deeply interested in the uncertainties in climate science, the interactions that are taking place in the system.

All of which means that they are pushing the boundaries of understanding.

They're never looking in the rear view mirror.

And what they see, if they looked in the rear view mirror, is smooth sailing.

We understand the big questions in climate science spectacularly well.

Ongoing emission of gases like carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous dioxide will warm the climate, will melt ice, will raise sea level.

[Scott] Yeah.

- Now that kind of narrative gets lost to a certain degree I think within scientific discussion, within scientists themselves, because there are no longer interested in those questions.

The interesting questions are out in the realm of uncertainty.

So they have to simultaneously be able to reinforce the core understanding while still being able to translate their excitement and their interest and the fascinating work that they're doing out on the frontier.

- Interesting.

Yeah.

How about on your end of things, next steps?

- Well, I think the big challenge for me, and I think for media broadly, and I think for anyone communicating on climate is how to take it out of the realm, the academic realm, right?

How do you take the very important work that's coming out of journals and showed that it's meaningful to people in a way that's grounded.

And so I think the more that we can continue to find ways to connect climate with people's realities, the more people are going to relate to it and understand it.

- Well, look, I've really enjoyed our discussion.

Really, I've learned a lot and hope you have.

Final thoughts.

If you wanted to leave our viewers with just a couple key things, Mike, what would that be?

- I think there needs to be a better bridge between my world and Justin's world.

I think there needs to be support for academics who want to be a bridge between research and media and who are good at it.

Like, not everyone is, but there are people who are passionate and who want to do it, but they have an incredibly hard time building a career doing so.

And I think that a very small adjustment to academic incentive, promotion, and tenure structures could support those people.

And it could be a hugely effective way of making this interaction better.

- That's a neat thought.

Yeah, thank you.

- Well, I'll say, I guess, I oftentimes have this discussion with various people out in the world where they'll complain about the state of climate journalism and I'll say, "Well, what publications do you subscribe to?"

And they'll say, "Well, I subscribed to this one, I subscribe to the 'New York Times'."

"Okay, well, how do you think we're paying for all this climate journalism?"

So I guess I would leave with the message of subscribe, subscribe to media and then shoot a note saying you hope to see some more climate journalism.

And hopefully that'll improve the state of things.

- Yeah, interesting.

Well, thanks for your candor and your experience and your knowledge.

- Thanks very much.

- I really enjoyed the dialogue.

Mike, thanks for being with us.

Justin, thank you.

- Thank you.

- Scott Tinker, "Energy Switch".

A science journal is still journalism, but it has seasoned scientific editors.

And research papers must pass through a peer-review process where their findings are challenged by other scientists before publishing.

These are primarily for a science audience, but then mainstream journalists have to decide which content would be interesting for a general audience and how to translate the findings for them.

Some journalists are experienced in this and some are not.

Short news cycles force them to move fast.

All are seeking readership and ever smaller niches which can encourage dramatic reporting.

To improve climate journalism, our experts recommend better communication between scientists and journalists and suggest readers support journalism by subscribing to reputable publications, then requesting better climate coverage.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by The University of Texas at Austin, leading research in energy and the environment for a better tomorrow.

What starts here changes the world.