honesty is always the best policy
I
by michael lemonick
am often asked to speak
to science-journalism classes, and when I do, I usually start off with a question. “How many of you,” I ask, “got into journalism to make the world a better place?” Invariably, most of the students raise their hands. “Not me,” I tell them, to
2 4 onearth
summer 2010
general surprise. It’s true, though. I admire journalists who see their mission this way. I’m simply not one of them. I decided to be a science journalist because I love learning about how the natural world works, from the subatomic level right up through biology to the planets and the birth, evolution, and ultimate death of the cosmos. Journalism simply gives me a way to make a living at it. For whatever reason—a big part of it is undoubtedly the fact that my father was a physicist—I’m especially drawn to the physical sciences. I’ve been writing about astronomy and physics, for example, since my very first week on my first job at the now-defunct Science Digest magazine, in 1983. By 1987 I was working as a writer at Time, and that summer, when a group of climate scientists came to visit the magazine’s editorial staff, I was intrigued by the story they laid out for us. Since the Industrial Revolution began, they said, humans have been burning fossil fuel and, as a result, pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. CO2 is a greenhouse gas—it traps heat. Therefore, the earth’s average temperature is likely to rise. The scientists’ best guess was that the thermometer would rise by about 8 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. They acknowledged that this might not sound like a lot. But it would be comparable to the global temperature change that brought the planet out of the most recent Ice Age. And this time it would be happening a lot faster. I loved this story—it was about the physical sciences, it was clearly a big deal, and it was new and surprising to me. Most important, the science was both straightforward and entirely plausible. My enthusiasm, and that of my editors, led to a cover story in Time in September of that year titled “The Heat Is On.” It was, as far as I know, the first major magazine story about what we then called the greenhouse effect. (The story also discussed the hole in the ozone layer, which had just been discovered over Antarctica.) In putting the story together, I had to figure out how to characterize global warming. It was tempting to proclaim impending doom, which would grab attention and sell magazines. That would make my employers happy, of course. In my time at Science Digest, where Andy Revkin, Elisabeth Rosenthal, and several other prominent environment writers got their start, we did a lot of that. My favorite cover lines included “Spontaneous Human Combustion,” “Sex in Space” (I think it involved frogs), and “Space Telescope Sees to the Edge of the Universe! Ten Pages of Pictures” (a story about the Hubble, years before it was launched, with pictures of the telescope being assembled). I was now working at a more responsible magazine, though, and at that point climate change was only a potential threat. There were no definitive measurements showing that the earth was in fact warming or that sea level was rising. This didn’t refute the idea, however. Climate is a noisy system, with temperatures and other indicators wobbling up and down around an average value. The signal of climate change would be too small to see against this noise, even if it was there. It wasn’t long, however, before the signal did emerge from the background noise, in the form of temperature increases, sea level rise, glacial retreat, and dozens of other measures. During the 1990s, the skeptics’ arguments got weaker and the number of skeptics diminished.
illustration by michael byers
living green