1. The U.S. Media and Climate Confusion Erik M. Conway Historian 16 October 2010

2. Public Perception of Climate Science In October 2009, a Pew Center poll found 43% of Americans didn’t think there was “solid evidence the Earth is warming” [ref 1] Yet most climate scientists have agreed that Earth is warming, and humans are the main cause, since the early 1990s [refs 2, 3, 4, 5] Why is the public perception of climate so different from that of scientists?

3. Two Threads to This Story Free-market think tanks and environmental skepticism The journalistic norm of balance

4. Think Tanks and Skepticism In the 1970s and 1980s, private and corporate donors created a network of “free market” think tanks, most in Washington, D.C. – Heritage Foundation – Cato Institute – George C. Marshall Institute – Heartland Institute, founded in Chicago in 1993 – (and Hudson Institute, Pacific Institute, Von Mises Foundation, Independent Institute...) They joined a much older free-market think tank, the American Enterprise Institute Refs 6, 7.

5. Think Tanks and Skepticism Created a literature of environmental skepticism, including skepticism of climate change A 2008 study found: – 110 environmentally skeptical books in print (U.S.) – 101 had ties to these foundations [ref 8] © George C. Marshall Institute, 2005

6. Skepticism and the Media Boykoff and Boykoff (2004) examined the climate coverage of four major U.S. newspapers from 1988-2002 [ref 9] New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times Balance

7. Boykoff & Boykoff’s data

8. Balance is a Form of Bias Journalists’ tendency to balance the claims of research scientists with claims of the think tanks creates a biased presentation of climate science Produces the appearance of controversy Emphasizes views of a handful of contrarians It is a major source of public confusion over the evidence for human-produced climate change

9. References 1.http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1386/cap-and-trade-global-warming-opinion 2.Oreskes, The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change, Science, 3 December 2004, 1686 3.Oreskes, The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change: How do we know we’re not wrong?, in Climate Change, ed. Joseph DiMento, MIT Press, 2007 4.Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 1995: Contribution of Working Group I to the Second Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, pg. 4 5.W. R.Anderegg, James W. Prall, Jacob harold and Stephen H. Schneider, Expert Credibility in Climate Change, PNAS, July 6, 2010, 12107-12109. 6.John B. Judis, “The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of Public Trust,” NY, Pantheon Books, 2000, chapters 5 and 6 7.N Oreskes and E Conway, Merchants of Doubt, NY, BloomsburyUSA, 2010 8.Peter J. Jacques, Riley E. Dunlap, Mark Freeman, “ The organization of denial: Conservative Think Tanks and Environmental scepticism,” Environmental Politics (2008), 17:3 349-385 9.Maxwell T. Boykoff and Jules M. Boykoff, “Balance as bias: global warming and the US prestige press,” Global Environmental Change 14 (2004), 125-136