You won’t find them next to the operating systems on the shelves of your favorite store, but climate models are pretty important software packages. They allow climate scientists to test hypotheses about the causes of climate events in the past, and they can also compute the probable effects of, say, continued fossil fuel use over the next century.

Climate is complex—there are a myriad of interconnections between components governed by different physical, chemical, and biological processes. You simply can’t stuff it all into your head and mentally work through the consequences of that interplay. That’s where computers come in. They solve this network of equations at each location on the planet, and for each time step, simulating an entire climate system at your command.

All scientists get George Box’s dictum beaten into them: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” And some are very useful, indeed. Gravitational models of the solar system, for example, allow space agencies to slingshot their spacecraft around planets and land on a moving bulls-eye more than 50 million miles away. If you’re not impressed by that, you might need medical attention.

Because of their key role in the future projections that drive public policy decisions, however, climate models have become a flash point in the popular debate over climate change. The Heartland Institute’s NIPCC report (the industry think tank’s not-so-subtle response to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports) described climate models as “nothing more than a statement of how the modeler believes a part of the world works”.

This image of models being nothing more than meaningless computer games seems to resonate with some people who, after seeing a clear weather forecast for the weekend, have instead quite literally had it rain on their parades. If we can’t predict the weather a few days in advance, the popular thinking goes, how can we know what climate will be like in 50 years?

Climate models in the media

To see how climate models were discussed in the media, a group of researchers from George Mason University analyzed stories in four of the largest US newspapers, as well as some other outlets frequented by the politically attuned. What they found fits in with the all-too-familiar state of science communication in the media—it’s not great.

The researchers first looked at articles published between 1998 and 2010 that mentioned climate change in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today. The quantity of coverage peaked in 2007, when the fourth IPCC report was released and public acceptance of climate science hit the high water mark. Yet even in 2007, climate models rarely got a mention. Over 4,000 articles (including opinion pieces) about climate change were published that year, but only 100 made reference to climate models. And that fraction continually declined through the period studied.

It’s not necessarily surprising that so few articles dig into the nuts and bolts of the science, but a couple interesting nuggets jump out. The New York Times accounted for nearly half of all stories that brought up models—likely a testament to its still-thriving science section. (About a quarter of those stories were written by journalist-slash-blogger Andrew Revkin.) And The Wall Street Journal—where many prominent climate contrarians have published opinion letters over the years—was the only paper in which the majority of climate model mentions occurred in the opinion section.

The researchers argue that this paucity of detailed coverage signifies a real problem with the reporting on climate change—it lacks sufficient explanation. Readers are too often left with a superficial understanding of the science, making it seem less authoritative.

This stems from the litany of issues facing journalism today. Tight budgets have closed down most science sections, placing the burden of science reporting on overloaded non-specialists who have neither the time nor the expertise to learn and subsequently communicate the science behind the news. It’s much easier to quote a climate scientist on one side, a contrarian on the other, and call that balance. Unfortunately, that totally ignores the only thing that matters— the balance of the evidence.

Science meets politics

The group also examined media sources favored by “high-political-knowledge audiences”. These included Time Magazine, The New Yorker, PBS NewsHour, Newsweek, NPR, The Nation, The National Review, and The Rush Limbaugh Show. In 2007, contrarian viewpoints expressed in The Nation, The National Review, and The Rush Limbaugh Show accounted for one third of the stories mentioning climate models among this group. When the researchers tallied up sentences instead of stories, they found that two thirds of the discussion of climate models took place in those outlets. And of course, those contrarian voices were overwhelmingly adversarial.

Interestingly, NPR’s Science Friday contained the fourth-most statements about the inaccuracy of climate models, though there’s certainly a huge difference between discussing evidence of ice sheet dynamics that could accelerate sea level rise beyond a given projection and declaring climate models to be utterly useless.

Partly because few of the voices in media are specialists, and partly because most outlets see in-depth science explanation as outside their mission of news reporting, those who spend significant amounts of time on the topic of climate models are more likely to be axe-grinders than science communicators. And they'll probably attract more attention. After all, what will draw a bigger audience—juicy, political drama or a technical dissection of the inner workings of climate models?

So what’s the upshot of this information? The dividing line of public opinion on climate change seems to be carved deeply and politically, meaning that ideological information filters insulate many folks’ opinions from the irksome effects of evidence.

But the researchers still believe that better communication can make a difference. They write, “When most of the US public is already either confused about or sceptical of the reliability of climate models in projecting future climatic conditions, providing greater access to sources of explanatory content other than opinion and political commentary may assist in helping individuals to overcome lay mental models of the science and better comprehend this form of scientific inference.”

Swings in public acceptance of climate science seem to be dominated by factors unrelated to scientific data or communication, such as political and economic events or the weather. That capricious behavior suggests that there are a number of people who don’t understand climate science well enough to form a strong opinion. Perhaps that segment of the populace could get a lot out of a more detailed explanation of the science—so long as you can get them to read it.

It's not what you know...

But what if those fickle opinions are simply uncoupled from scientific evidence altogether? In a separate study (also published in Nature Climate Change), another group of researchers tested the idea that general science literacy would correlate with concern about climate change. On this view, those who knew more about science would be more likely to key in on the concerns of the scientific community.

Survey respondents answered science knowledge questions developed by the National Science Foundation, cultural value questions (the sort used to delineate roughly “left-wing” and “right-wing” viewpoints), and rated their concern about climate change. Rather than seeing concern increase with science literacy, it diverged along cultural lines. Those with the greatest science knowledge were simply the most polarized— egalitarian-communitarian people were most concerned, and hierarchical-individualists were least concerned.

That supports what the researchers call “cultural cognition”, through which “different segments of the public… are motivated to fit their interpretations of scientific evidence to their competing cultural identities.” Those who are doubtful of supposed environmental or health problems because of their potential economic or regulatory impacts will seek out information that reinforces their position, and thus their cultural identity. On the other hand, those who are predisposed to think of industry as irresponsible will eagerly accept research that is likely to be accepted by their cultural peers.

(The framework is easily applicable to other controversies, such as genetically-modified foods or the link between tobacco and cancer.)

Of course, general science knowledge is an entirely different beast from an understanding of climate science, but the researchers argue that “simply improving the clarity of scientific information will not dispel public conflict so long as the climate-change debate continues to feature cultural meanings that divide citizens of opposing world-views.” After all, they write, “[f]or the ordinary individual, the most consequential effect of his beliefs about climate change is likely to be on his relations with his peers.”

Nature Climate Change, 2012. DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE1542, 10.1038/nclimate1547 (About DOIs).