Worldchanging Interview: NY Times Science Reporter Andy Revkin
David Zaks: You’ve been a science and environment writer for more than twenty years now, and a lot has happened in this realm in twenty years, whether it be with policy, new social and environmental phenomenon, or our growing knowledge base. How has your perspective changed during that time, and what do you think is the most important lesson to be learned from that?
Andy Revkin: The most important lesson I’ve learned in covering science since 1983 is that what matters the most in any individual question is the trajectory of understanding. If it’s the human influence on climate then you see a very steady-state trajectory with a lot of variability along the way. There are always certain studies that will be outliers and there’ll be these early stages kinds of research. Even Greenland. The trends on Greenland’s ice, you know, whether it’s an overall gain or loss of ice has been very variable just over the last year. But the idea that Greenland will be a much shrunken piece of ice in a warmer world is very solid, so the idea that that contributes to sea level rise is very solid.
Nuclear winter is a classic example where the initial flush of the idea was really powerful and strong and dramatic and made for a great page one story and front of magazine stories. I won my first AAAS award for my long piece on nuclear winter, which I reread recently and it’s nice and it stated the complexities and uncertainties very well, but then shortly afterward Steve Schneider and others reran the numbers and it came out nuclear autumn, and it hasn’t stuck.
Chad Monfreda: At times, does injecting more information actually confuse a policy issue?
AR: My sense with what happened to hurricanes is a lot of people, particularly within the environmental movement got a sense that here’s our chance. Katrina was the great wake up call we’ve been waiting for, the perfect icon, the perfect way to get the average person to recognize the potential hazards of humans warming the oceans on the climate. Scientists are people too, and there’re some who have a real tendency to want to shout out when they see a risk like that building. I think that colored how some of these studies were done. Some of them have been sort of rushed into print because the journals also are competitive. They’re just like the media. They are the media.
Filed under: Environmental News, Of Student Interest by Andy Wetzel | Comments (0)