Open thread for night owls: In climate and other stories, headlines matter

At Climate Progress, Joe Romm critiques a bad headline on a good story:

Headlines are important because research shows that most newspaper readers don't get much beyond them. And NY Times headlines sweep across the internet through twitter, facebook, news aggregators and search engines.  Probably 10 to 50 times as many people see the headlines as read any substantial portion of the story.

So when The New York Times publishes a front-page piece eviscerating Dr. Richard Lindzen and his 'discredited' theory'the NYT's word'that the cloud feedback could somehow save us from catastrophic global warming, it ought to have a better headline than 'Clouds' Effect on Climate Change Is Last Bastion for Dissenters.'

Even worse, the heavily-trafficked front page of the NY Times website has this teaser for the piece:

Again, far more people are going to read this teaser'written by the editors, not the reporter'than actually read the story. What they are going to come away with is the notion that climate skeptics aka deniers aka disinformers have legitimate arguments that might 'save us.'

Obviously nothing could be further from the truth, especially when it comes to the discredited Dr. Lindzen. As the article notes:

When Dr. Lindzen first published this theory, in 2001, he said it was supported by satellite records over the Pacific Ocean. But other researchers quickly published work saying that the methods he had used to analyze the data were flawed and that his theory made assumptions that were inconsistent with known facts. Using what they considered more realistic assumptions, they said they could not verify his claims.

Today, most mainstream researchers consider Dr. Lindzen's theory discredited. He does not agree, but he has had difficulty establishing his case in the scientific literature. Dr. Lindzen published a paper in 2009 offering more support for his case that the earth's sensitivity to greenhouse gases is low, but once again scientists identified errors, including a failure to account for known inaccuracies in satellite measurements. [...]

I get that even the NY Times is under pressure to write headlines that will appeal to the most people, headlines that suggest controversy and dispute. But such headlines are inappropriate for articles whose actual content does not reflect controversy and dispute. It is time for the paper to review its headline policy, at least on climate, and, I think, give reporters some sort of a veto power.

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