The Narrative Rules

Let's break them

Source: Texas A&M

Imagine that you work in public relations for a major university. Several of your researchers have published a new study projecting future deaths in this United States related to climate change, demographic change and adaptation to change.

The three statements below are each conclusions from that study. Which one do you choose to emphasize in the top line of your press release to the world?

1. Temperature-related deaths in the U.S. will increase by a factor of five with 3 degrees Celsius of warming¹

2. Overall, warming temperatures will result in 2,000 fewer deaths per year in the U.S. over the next 100 years²

3. Adaptation can significantly reduce temperature-related deaths no matter how much climate changes³

Here is the answer that Texas A&M chose:

Yesterday in London I participated in a convention on catastrophe risk. The panel I was on discussed differences between climate headlines and climate reality. The gap, we all agreed, was often very large. Some on the panel expressed a bit of anger at how science was treated by the media.

In another session, a speaker argued compellingly that climate change was real and important for the insurance industry to understand and prepare for — but that the effects of climate change had not yet been detected in insured losses. (The meeting was held under the Chatham House Rule so I cannot identify them.) THB readers will of course understand this argument very well.

There was general agreement among many I spoke to at the convention that a narrow focus on climate change was overshadowing important issues related to catastrophe losses — such as changes in exposure and vulnerability at the local level where catastrophes actually happen. Some shared concerns with me in hushed tones that simply by expressing such views they might be seen as minimizing climate change or even castigated as a climate denier. We have to walk a knife edge, one person told me.

Coincidentally, yesterday Patrick Brown of The Breakthrough Institute published a commentary at The Free Press documenting how he and colleagues shaped their recent Nature paper on climate change and fire around a narrative that placed climate change at the center — even though they knew that fire disasters were not primarily about climate change.

Brown did not mince words:

To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.

Brown explained the narrative rules that he has seen shaping how climate-related research should be framed to increase chances of publication in major journals:

Here’s how it works.

The first thing the astute climate researcher knows is that his or her work should support the mainstream narrative . . .

So in my recent Nature paper, which I authored with seven others, I focused narrowly on the influence of climate change on extreme wildfire behavior. Make no mistake: that influence is very real. But there are also other factors that can be just as or more important, such as poor forest management and the increasing number of people who start wildfires either accidentally or purposely. (A startling fact: over 80 percent of wildfires in the US are ignited by humans.)

In my paper, we didn’t bother to study the influence of these other obviously relevant factors. Did I know that including them would make for a more realistic and useful analysis? I did. But I also knew that it would detract from the clean narrative centered on the negative impact of climate change and thus decrease the odds that the paper would pass muster with Nature’s editors and reviewers. . .

Brown is not just picking on Nature, but all high-profile journals. Brown continues:

This leads to a second unspoken rule in writing a successful climate paper. The authors should ignore—or at least downplay—practical actions that can counter the impact of climate change. If deaths due to extreme heat are decreasing and crop yields are increasing, then it stands to reason that we can overcome some major negative effects of climate change. Shouldn’t we then study how we have been able to achieve success so that we can facilitate more of it? Of course we should. But studying solutions rather than focusing on problems is simply not going to rouse the public—or the press. Besides, many mainstream climate scientists tend to view the whole prospect of, say, using technology to adapt to climate change as wrongheaded; addressing emissions is the right approach. So the savvy researcher knows to stay away from practical solutions.

Have a look up at the top of this post at how the press release from Texas A&M was framed around a study that concluded that adaptation to temperature increases could reduce deaths, regardless the degree of climate change, but that conclusion was not included in the press release. This is a robust finding — for rich and poor countries, but is routinely ignored or downplayed.

Brown identifies a third “trick”:

Here’s a third trick: be sure to focus on metrics that will generate the most eye-popping numbers. Our paper, for instance, could have focused on a simple, intuitive metric like the number of additional acres that burned or the increase in intensity of wildfires because of climate change. Instead, we followed the common practice of looking at the change in risk of an extreme event—in our case, the increased risk of wildfires burning more than 10,000 acres in a single day.

This is a far less intuitive metric that is more difficult to translate into actionable information. So why is this more complicated and less useful kind of metric so common? Because it generally produces larger factors of increase than other calculations. To wit: you get bigger numbers that justify the importance of your work, its rightful place in Nature or Science, and widespread media coverage. 

Do read Patrick’s whole essay — it is brave and troubling, and I should add, completely consistent with my professional experience. Sure, I’ve been published a lot and am cited frequently, but that is because I also know the narrative rules.

For instance, a recently submitted paper of mine to a major journal, co-authored with a very prominent collaborator, showed unambiguously that global disasters have not increased since 2000 — It was desk rejected by that major journal based on the editor’s claim that the findings are already “widely known.” Um, OK. Fortunately, other scholars published this evidence in a less-major journal.

I haven’t given up totally on major journals, but I do know the rules.

In 2014, Dan Sarewitz presciently anticipated the totalizing narrative around climate change and what it meant for how we think about complex issues:

. . . it’s not that apocalyptic fears about climate change are utterly fantastic—climate change may well exacerbate a range of serious and potentially even disastrous problems—it’s that the monomaniacal, apocalyptic version of climate change gives us a picture of the world that is so incomplete that it’s much worse than simply wrong. Worse because, just like religious and political orthodoxy, it cannot be falsified. On the contrary, everything that goes wrong simply reinforces the conviction that there is just one explanation for all our problems—climate change—and that there is only one thing we can do to keep the world from collapsing—stop burning fossil fuels. And thus, worse because the climate-change-as-apocalypse orthodoxy thereby radically narrows the range of viewpoints we are willing to tolerate and the range of options we are willing to consider for dealing with complex challenges to our well-being like natural disasters and infectious disease and poverty and civil strife.

Sarewitz’s conclusion:

Indeed, with climate change being blamed for almost everything these days, the one phenomenon that seems to have escaped the notice of scientists, environmentalists and the media alike is that, perhaps above all, climate change is making us stupid.

Even so, I do have good news to report based on my interactions with people out in the real world who need to make decisions with consequences — many understand that narrative cannot rule — evidence, data and science must continue to matter, lest we make poor decisions. Scientific journals, university press officers and campaigning journalists who seek to enforce a simplistic narrative make it that much harder for science to find its way into the real world, which harms everyone.

Identifying a problem is the first step. It is time to break the narrative rules.

I welcome your comments and questions. Please do hit that like button and share around. If you are a member of the THB community — thank you! If you are not, please do join and participate. We’ve got a good thing going here.

1. But don’t mention that this is due entirely to demographic changes (mainly an aging population) and population growth. Note the clever use of the word “with.” In fact, at 3 degrees of warming the effect of climate is actually to reduce overall deaths, due to the reduction of deaths in cold temperatures.

2. From the press release: “Highlighted results from the study showed that climate change decreases temperature-related U.S. mortality by roughly a few thousand deaths per year for global warming below 3.2 degrees Celsius. This occurs because the duo found that the reduction in cold-related deaths exceeds the increase in heat-related deaths.”

3. From the paper: “For the strong adaptation scenario, temperature-related mortality decreases at all temperatures.”