Editorial errors, social media mistakes, factual misrepresentations, and framing confusion

Kind of an interesting conundrum here. From The New York Times - As glaciers shrink, the melting is disrupting habitats for everything from bacteria to fish. by Henry Fountain. It is too easy to ignore suspiciously framed information, become exasperated or get shirty without understanding what your mental calculations are. The confusion and errors in this piece are an intriguing case study in epistemic communication.

On Twitter the NYT framing is within the context of climate in general and global warming in particular.

Along with losing water that billions of people drink, the crops they grow and the energy they need, the great melting of North America's glaciers will affect ecosystems and the creatures within them, like the salmon that spawn in meltwater streams. https://t.co/MGuK5ZmMOO

— NYT Climate (@nytclimate) April 17, 2019

However, when you dig into the details, almost nothing is as it appears. The editors have gotten all tangled up in their facts, in the graphical presentation, and in the wording, causing the reader to work hard to distinguish what they are intending to communicate.

For example, looking at the Twitter framing, you have an immediate cognitive reflex away from the piece because of what appears to be blatant misstatement of facts. North America has a population of only 580 million people. So no, billions of people are not affected. If the NYT is going to be that casual with obvious facts, why read?

As it turns out, that issue is simply a matter of bad editing. The NYT issued a correction indicating that while the tweet referred to glaciers in North America, the billions referred to the impact of glaciers worldwide.

That takes you into the wording of the tweet. The NYT editors have compounded bad factual reporting with bad English. What is the subject and object of this sentence?

Along with losing water that billions of people drink, the crops they grow and the energy they need, the great melting of North America's glaciers will affect ecosystems and the creatures within them, like the salmon that spawn in meltwater streams.

It is pretty clear that "The melting of North America's glaciers" is the subject but what about the object? Certainly salmon and spawn are the object. "The great melting of North America's glaciers will affect ecosystems and the creatures within them, like the salmon that spawn in meltwater streams" is a reasonably coherent sentence.

But what are we to make of "Along with losing water that billions of people drink, the crops they grow and the energy they need"? That doesn't fit anywhere. I think a fair reading might be:

The great melting of North America's glaciers will affect ecosystems and the creatures within them, like the salmon that spawn in meltwater streams. The glacial melting will also cause a loss of drinking water, crops, and energy which people depend on.

Assuming that the reader gets through that tossed salad of words, we now have some claims to assess.

Do melting glaciers cause a loss in energy production? Presumably that must mean hydroelectric production. But there is no direct connection between glaciers and hydroelectric production. Hydro is affected by seasonal snowmelt but not by glacier retreat per se. It appears that somehow the editors are confusing cold glaciers with cold snowmelt. No, retreating glaciers do not affect energy production. When you go to the article and do a word search on "energy", there is absolutely no claim in the article about glaciers and energy production. All there is this statement about the ecosystem:

J. Ryan Bellmore, a biologist with the United States Forest Service in Juneau, studies freshwater food webs, the complex what-eats-what relationships that show, in effect, how energy moves through an ecosystem.

No - glacial retreat does not directly affect energy production. The editors appear to have again become confused between two different issues: hydroelectric energy production and biological energy production within ecosystems.

Drinking water? I am unaware of any major water system anywhere in the world which relies on glacial melt for their water supply. I could be wrong. Googling "does anyone rely on glacial melt for water supply" returns no science papers and indeed not much of anything before 2010. This is a recent talking point with little science behind it.

This report, 200 Million Depend on Melting Glaciers for Water, seems a fairly representative example of the sloppy logic and casual evidence for an argument that retreating glaciers threaten the world's drinking water supplies. 200 million? 3% of the world's population but it is not nothing.

When you dig into the details though, there is no calculation of that 200 million. They are using loose proxies of people in the Andes and the Himalayas, and people who use rivers fed by snowmelt. The increment of glacial melt on broader snowmelt is minuscule. If indeed, the climate is warming (regardless of reason) and there is lower snowmelt, that is a serious problem. The glacial component is not material in the human scale time frame.

It is not pedantic to make the distinction. If the NYT were making the argument that we are experiencing lower snow falls and therefore have lower snow melt and that causes a problem, then we need slightly different information to resolve that argument. But that is not what they are claiming. It would be nice for them to be consistent across their argument as to what they mean.

The claim about lost crops? Same thing. They are eliding glacial melt and annual snow melt into an issue of potential loss of riverine flow and therefore irrigation and therefore crop loss. Again, snow melt and glacial melt are not synonymous. We have to either remake their argument for them or hold them consistent to their words and if we hold them consistent, then the loss of crops due to glacial retreat is close to baseless.

And that is just the confusion in the tweet.

There is also a framing issue. This particular article is in the Climate section of the NYT and therefore it is easy to leap to the conclusion that it is an argument that AGW is causing glaciers to shrink - a highly debated proposition within the scientific community. Part of the challenge for that argument is that glaciers have been shrinking since the beginning of the Holocene some 10,000 years ago.

Glaciers ebb and flow with the geological epochs and for other reasons having nothing to do with AGW.

The glaciers are only relevant to the AGW debate to the extent that glaciers might be retreating at an accelerating rate above what might be expected. But even there, the argument is messy. Within-epoch events are influenced by a range of things such as El Niño cycles, the solar cycle, etc. So while on average, within the past ten thousand years, glaciers have been shrinking, within those ten thousand years there are periods when they expand rapidly, shrink rapidly, and everything in between.

At a given moment in time, or even within a decade or century, glacier activity tells you very little about the underlying argument - whether the level of Co2 in the atmosphere is accelerating global warming above that which might be expected given the cyclicality of global temperature within the Holocene.

Anybody who advances the simplistic argument that shrinking glaciers are evidence for global warming is either ignorant or a charlatan.

But is that what the NYT is doing? This article is one of their experiments in trying to present news in a novel fashion. In this instance there is traditional text which you scroll through and as you scroll the background wallpaper of the screen shifts to related aesthetic photographs.

When you read the article, there is nothing about global warming in the article except the word in a subheading:

This glacier on Mount Rainier is far shorter than it was a century ago. It is one of thousands in North America that are losing ice as the world warms.

It is not even clear that this is intended as a subheading in the article. Given that it is a mixed media format, those words might be intended as notes to the underlying photographs.

This was the surprising thing to me. Given the climate framing, the article is not about global warming or climate change at all. It is a reporting from a number of research teams on the habitats and ecosystems associated with glaciers and how the retreat of those glaciers change those ecosystems and habitats.

I am interested in those topics and enjoyed the article. It is high level, almost superficial but I see no glaring errors or unsupported arguments. Micro-climates and niche ecosystems can be very interesting.

So what has happened here? How did an innocuous environmental article get framed within the AGW climate change argument?

My suspicion is that this an instance which happens with some frequency where the reporting staff and editorial staff are not communicating with one another. Headline writers (and associated social media editors) don't understand what is actually being reported and end up misrepresenting it in the headline.

This traditional problem is then compounded by the editors inaccurately shoe horning an ecosystem article into the tropes of AGW debate. And then further compounded by bad headline writing where not only do the editors fail to reflect the underlying article but they also get tangled up in simple Subject Object confusion. And the last compounding occurs when, experimentally, they try and meld this dog's breakfast or errors into an innovative social media formatting.

Editorial errors, social media mistakes, factual misrepresentations, and framing confusion - the NYT is making a lot of hard work for their readers and doing their professional reputation no favors along the way.