Climate "Disruption" and Publication Bias
Quite a while ago I wrote an article about climate publication bias called Summer of the Shark.
let's take a step back to 2001 and the "Summer of the Shark." The media hysteria began in early July, when a young boy was bitten by a shark on a beach in Florida. Subsequent attacks received breathless media coverage, up to and including near-nightly footage from TV helicopters of swimming sharks. Until the 9/11 attacks, sharks were the third biggest story of the year as measured by the time dedicated to it on the three major broadcast networks' news shows.
Through this coverage, Americans were left with a strong impression that something unusual was happening -- that an unprecedented number of shark attacks were occurring in that year, and the media dedicated endless coverage to speculation by various "experts" as to the cause of this sharp increase in attacks.
Except there was one problem -- there was no sharp increase in attacks. In the year 2001, five people died in 76 shark attacks. However, just a year earlier, 12 people had died in 85 attacks. The data showed that 2001 actually was a down year for shark attacks.
The point is that it is easy for people to mistake the frequency of publication about a certain phenomenon for the frequency of occurrence of the phenomenon itself. Here is a good example I saw the other day:
An emaciated polar bear was spotted in a Russian industrial city this week, just the latest account of polar bears wandering far from their hunting grounds to look for food.
Officials in the Russian city of Norilsk warned residents about the bear Tuesday. They added that it was the first spotted in the area in over 40 years.
I am willing to bet my entire bourbon collection that a) hungry polar bears occasionally invaded Siberian towns in previous decades and b) news of such polar bear activity from towns like Norilsk did NOT make the American news. But readers (even the author of the article) are left to believe there is a trend here because they remember seeing similar stories recently but don't remember seeing such stories earlier in their life.
