New York Times environmental reporter Andrew Revkin posted an excellent article yesterday about the journalistic whiplash the public is suffering due to the "scientifically normal" amount of conflicting findings in the study of global warming.

The persistent disputes about global warming and many other scientific subjects is a normal process, according to scientists as they try to understand how the world works. But many fear that this back and forth stuff is distracting the public. I wonder if this blog is partially guilty of this?

Exerpts from the NYT article.............

"One of the things that troubles me most is that the rapid-fire publication of unsettled results in highly visible venues creates the impression that the scientific community has no idea what’s going on," said W. Tad Pfeffer, an expert on Greenland’s ice sheets at the University of Colorado.

"Each new paper negates or repudiates something emphatically asserted in a previous paper," Dr. Pfeffer said. "The public is obviously picking up on this not as an evolution of objective scientific understanding but as a proliferation of contradictory opinions."

The flow of scientific findings from laboratory (or glacier) to journal to news report is fraught with "reinforcing loops" that can amplify small distortions, said Dr. Kimberly Thompson, an associate professor of risk analysis and decision science at Harvard.

Dr. Thompson said climate science presented particularly tough challenges, given the long time lag before the worst effects kick in and the persistent uncertainty about the likelihood of worst-case outcomes. She said the news media sometimes overplayed the uncertainty by balancing opposing views in a story without characterizing the overall level of confidence in either side. And sometimes they do the opposite, sacrificing accuracy for impact, she said.

What do you think?