Consuming Science News - Part 1

Science Direct vs Filtered Science

I have become nearsighted as I’ve aged. I have noticed it most often in facial recognition. I can make out someone’s face across the room or walking towards me on the street, but it is blurry. I get just enough information to think I recognize that person. We have all experienced the embarrassment of waving enthusiastically at someone only to realize they were not the old friend we thought we saw. I now use this disability to entertain myself. As I scan a crowd, I see Neil Tyson deGrasse approaching me at the mall or Sting waiting in line to board his flight at the airport.

I thought of this analogy as I approached this essay about science news. Most of us don’t read peer-reviewed papers. We rely on science news outlets or respected YouTubers or podcasters to provide a summary. This creates some ‘distance’ between us and the actual science. This distance has the chance to distort the findings from the original paper(s), analogous to my near-sightedness. As consumers of scientific news content, we all need to be aware of this and account for it when interpreting any given article.

I have noticed that science content on subjects like Astrophysics, Archeology, Paleontology or Geology are relatively close to the original research papers. An article on the latest findings of the James Webb Space Telescope or the inhabitants of Göbekli Tepe (a Neolithic archaeological site in southern Turkey) will typically point to the original paper or talk directly to the scientists involved. There is very little standing between the reader and the subject matter. Consequently, the consumer is getting the conclusions directly from the scientists (or very nearly direct).

Contrast this with sciences like climate change and medicine (particularly COVID). Both subjects have heavy governmental involvement. There are large bureaucracies created to fund, organize and manage the research.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a good example of bureaucratic layering, pictured in the graphic below. It is taken directly from their web page. The peer-reviewed papers from professional journals aren’t even in this diagram. They are below the block labeled “Authors, Contributors, Reviewers”.

The “Authors, Contributors, Reviewer” are a group of research scientists who have been directly involved in writing or reviewing published scientific papers. Not all authors are included in this group. A subset are selected by the Working Groups. This process introduces an element of politics to the science. There may be competing theories regarding a particular aspect of climate change, for example. Which scientist should be included? The one defending theory A or the one who favors theory B? The decision will affect the reports generated by that Working Group.

The Working Groups and one Task Force (the dark blue blocks in the diagram) are smaller committees composed of a few dozen political appointees and scientists. Their job is to condense the 100’s of thousands of pages of detailed scientific information published each year into a manageable report. This process naturally results in compromise, dilution and approximation. The term ‘consensus’ enters the dialog at this point to obscure the fact that the process is more political than scientific. In this way, the Working Groups act as another filter which blurs the nuance and context of the original research.

The reports generated by each Working Group are then passed to the Executive Committee (red block near the top) made up of a few dozen political appointees. They process the information further to arrive at an Executive Summary Report which is substantial but involves further compromises and approximations. This step further increases the distance between the public and the scientific research.

The Summary Report is condensed from a few hundred pages down to 10’s of pages to form the Summary for Policymakers. It is the Summary for Policymakers that often serves as the ‘source’ for headlines and news stories.

It should be apparent that the information reaching the public represents scientific research that has been filtered through two to three layers of bureaucracy. I find that the Working Group Summaries are reasonably accurate. The information in the Executive Summary is less reliable because it is too condensed and necessarily must leave out significant details.

Going back to the article on Göbekli Tepe, I found some statements by the lead scientist that made me question an established conclusion in the field. The claim is that Göbekli Tepe represents a place of worship but was not a permanent settlement. The author explains that the site does not have any signs of settlement, fire pits or home foundations, until thousands of years later. The lead scientist concludes that hunter-gatherers built monuments before they settled into villages and an agrarian life style.

This conclusion goes against established archeological theory – that humans settled into villages and later built large monuments to their gods. But because the distance between the science and reader, it is clear this conclusion is that of Dr. Schmidt, the lead scientist on the project. It is a point that may or may not be true. Archeologists from around the world are currently debating the merits of Schmidt’s theory to determine its validity. And each scientist is free to participate in the debate. The culture of this field is open and transparent.

The field of climate change is a very different. There are multiple controversies in the research literature that never make it to the popular media. The one controversy that I am most familiar with is the claim that the Sun has not contributed to warming in recent years. That is the conclusion of the IPCC but not necessarily held by scientists who specialize in measuring solar irradiance.

I would like to save the details of this controversy for another time. But to summarize, there are two primary datasets for solar irradiance in the satellite era (1979 to present) – the PMOD and the ACRIM datasets.

The ACRIM dataset was developed by the scientists responsible for the instrument that took the original data. This dataset indicates that the sun has contributed to the recent warming. One study I have read shows close correlation between the pause in global warming and a reduction in solar output that occurred in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s.

The PMOD dataset was developed after the original ACRIM data was published. The scientists involved in this research disagreed with the processing methods used by the ACRIM team. Their dataset indicates that solar irradiance has remained steady or dropped by a small amount over the satellite era. This is the data used by those who claim the sun has not contributed to the recent global warming.

The PMOD dataset is the IPCC’s favored dataset for tuning models and doing other climate research. This consensus was arrived at by the political process outlined above. This effectively removes solar influences from model predictions and other research that relies on accurate solar irradiance data.

I offer this example to show how consensus derived by a bureaucratic process will distort the science that is reported and create a distance between the reader and the science. We rely on science reporters to provide a clear and unbiased summary of the findings. But if the source material they rely on contains inaccuracies, biases and approximations, you must be aware of that. If you do not, you are developing a kind of near-sightedness that blurs your understanding of the subject.