Via Climate Change: “Crappy Headline” Ruins New York Times Story on Link Between Climate Change and Extreme Weather

Ah, kismet.   So I’m about to start writing a post criticizing the New York Times for the dreadful headline it ran on John Broder’s Thursday piece, “Scientists See More Deadly Weather, but Dispute the Cause,” when who should call me on the phone?
Broder was calling for some comments on climate politics, as he does every six months or so.   I said I thought the headline did not accurately reflect the story he wrote.
Broder called it a “crappy headline.”  He said of the two scientists he spoke to and quoted — NOAA’s Thomas R. Karl and NCAR’s Kevin Trenberth — “they don’t dispute the cause.”
Note:  It is always tricky when a reporter is talking to a blogger, so I specifically asked for permission to use each of these two quotes, and he gave it.
I have written about the work and the words of both Karl and Trenberth a number of times and, as readers know, each understands that climate change is contributing to more extreme weather.  The story makes that clear.
What is especially dismaying about this kind of misleading headline is that most people never read beyond the headline and NY Times headlines sweep across the internet.  This one appears to have been repeated at least 55,000 times.
The grim statistics on how few people actually read newspaper articles was something my parents, who were both in the newspaper business, told me repeatedly.  Here are some stats I found on the web:

[Readers] see 56 percent of the headlines. But they are aware of only 25 percent of the text, and read just a portion of that. Only about 13 percent of the stories in the paper are read in any depth – that is, at least half-read. And that’s under the best of circumstances: These test subjects, frequent newspaper readers, were uninterrupted, supervised, and given prototypes with well-written, compelling stories.

One  should assume that the majority of people never get very far beyond the headline, which is precisely why it is incumbent upon editors to try as hard as possible to write a headline that accurately reflects the story, even as they inevitably try to make it as punchy as possible so people will actually read the story.
I am fortunate in that I get to write my own headlines, which isn’t true of most reporters.  That means there is no one to blame but myself if I have a bad headline or, when I’m in a hurry, rely too heavily on the headline of a story I am writing about or reposting.  But when I have a poor headline, it is virtually never because the headline doesn’t accurately reflect the story — the worst blunder for editors, I think.
There is really no excuse for the NYT headline.  If we look at the actual Broder story, we find this:

Government scientists said Wednesday that the frequency of extreme weather has increased over the past two decades, in part as a result of global warming caused by the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere….
Presenting a new NOAA report on 2011 extreme weather, Dr. Karl said that extremes of precipitation have increased as the planet warms and more water evaporates from the oceans. He also said models suggest that as carbon dioxide builds up in the atmosphere and heats the planet, droughts will increase in frequency and intensity.
“But it is difficult and unlikely to discern a human fingerprint, if there is one, on the drought record of the United States,” he said.
Some other climate scientists were more categorical about the human contribution to extreme climate events.
Kevin Trenberth, distinguished senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a university-sponsored institute in Boulder, Colo., said that when the greenhouse effect caused by burning fossil fuels is added to the natural variability of climate, weather disasters can be expected to occur more frequently.
“Global warming is contributing to an increased incidence of extreme weather because the environment in which all storms form has changed from human activities,” Dr. Trenberth said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “Records are not just broken, they are smashed. It is as clear a warning as we are going to get about prospects for the future.”

Karl can certainly sound more cautious, especially on attribution for specific weather events, but nobody who talks to the director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center for any length of time would be confused about what he understands.
Here is Karl in an AP story also from Thursday, “Extreme Weather Events Unprecedented, Scientists Say”:

Tornadoes, floods, wildfires, snowmelt, thunderstorms, drought — for Americans, it was a spring to remember.
Government weather researchers said yesterday that, while similar extremes have occurred throughout modern American history, never before have they occurred in a single month, as they did in April….
Contributing to the thrashing were the La Niña conditions in the Pacific Ocean, unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, and the increase of moisture in the atmosphere caused by the warming climate.
While Karl cautioned against focusing on any single cause for the unusual events, “clearly these things interconnect,’’ he said.

Here is Karl in Friday’s ClimateWire story, “2011 already among most extreme weather years in history”:

Overall, NOAA experts said extreme weather events have grown more frequent in the United States since 1980. Part of that shift is due to climate change, said Tom Karl, director of the agency’s National Climatic Data Center.
“Extremes of precipitation are generally increasing because the planet is actually warming and more water is evaporating from the oceans,” he said. “This extra water vapor in the atmosphere then enables rain and snow events to become more extensive and intense than they might otherwise be.”

As for Trenberth, he said last year

It’s not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability. Nowadays, there’s always an element of both.

And that’s from a front-page New York Times 2010 article on last summer’s extreme weather headlined … wait for it … “In Weather Chaos, a Case for Global Warming!”
And that makes the “crappy headline” doubly frustrating, because the NYT got the headline right last year.  If only there were some group of people at the newspaper who oversaw the reporters and wrote all the headlines and thus could give them some consistency and continuity over time.  A blogger can dream….
Related Post:

• Exclusive interview — NCAR’s Trenberth on the link between global warming and extreme deluges: “I find it systematically tends to get underplayed and it often gets underplayed by my fellow scientists. Because one of the opening statements, which I’m sure you’ve probably heard is “Well you can’t attribute a single event to climate change.” But there is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago. It’s about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change. And the prospects are that these kinds of things will only get bigger and worse in the future.”
• Media wakes up to Hell and High Water: Moscow’s 1000-year heat wave and “Pakistan’s Katrina”:  BBC, Reuters, USA Today, Time link warming and extreme weather; Trenberth, Stott, and Masters explain the science
• Munich Re: “The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change”