As part of the Graduate Seminar subject, all students take a turn in running a class. You also get to choose what topic you are going to present. That means there is a widely varying range of topics that we are being exposed to. So far we have looked at: The role for nuclear energy in biodiversity conservation, safety assessment of GM plants, next generation monitoring using environmental dna, human population reduction and environmental problems, antibiotic resistance and environmental contaminants and restoration and ecosystem services and biodiversity. Wow – what an eclectic bunch of environmental issues to cover. Then last week, we had my favorite two topics to date: Bias in the media, and Uncertainty in science.
The first paper we looked at demonstrated that US prestige-press coverage of global warming from 1988 to 2002 contributed to a significant divergence of popular discourse from scientific discourse. This failed discursive translation resulted from an accumulation of tactical media responses and practices guided by widely accepted journalistic norms. Through content analysis of US prestige press (New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal) the paper focused on the norm of balanced reporting, and showed that the prestige press’s adherence to balance actually leads to biased coverage of both anthropogenic contributions to global warming and resultant action.
Next we looked at how uncertainty is pervasive in ecology where the difficulties of dealing with sources of uncertainty are exacerbated by variation in the system itself. Attempts at classifying uncertainty in ecology have, for the most part, focused exclusively on epistemic uncertainty. In the paper, uncertainty was classified into two main categories: epistemic uncertainty (uncertainty in determinate facts) and linguistic uncertainty (uncertainty in language). In particular, the authors demonstrated the importance of recognizing the effect of linguistic uncertainty, by developing a clear understanding of the various types of uncertainty, how they arise and how they might best be dealt with.
Master of Environment 