live and dead frogsAt left, a golden frog, Atelopus varius, photographed during an outbreak of chytrid fungus in Panama in 2004. The position of the rear legs indicates that the frog was already sick. At right, a dead golden frog from the same region. The species is now considered extinct in the wild. (Credit: Forrest Brem)

Many instructive parables have been built around animals. Here’s a quick cautionary tale related to amphibians, climate and the media — focusing on the extraordinarily charismatic harlequin frogs that have vanished from misty slopes around the tropics in the last couple of decades.

An enduring conundrum at the heart of the global warming issue/challenge/crisis/emergency is that the dramatic facets that matter most to society — how fast and far seas will rise, how strong hurricanes may get, how many species will vanish — are the least certain.

That is no reason for people to relax, many experts in risk management stress. The reason people, and mortgage lenders, have fire insurance on homes is not because they know the structures will burn down, but to limit the hurt should the worst, however unlikely, come to pass.

But implicit uncertainty is one reason global warming remains a bad fit for conventional media. Nuance does not make for a fat headline or big front-page play. And, as I’ve said a lot lately in talks and in print, you don’t get extra space in a newspaper or time on a broadcast because climate science is more complex. In fact, the more complex or conditional a story is, often the less space it is granted.

In the meantime, we’re confronted continually with the hottest elements in some new research, and our own tendency to give extra weigh to the “front-page thought” can get in the way of accuracy.

Frogs entered the climate discourse in 2006, after a paper published in Nature and widely reported in the media (including a story by me) concluded that global warming was a “key factor” in such amphibian declines.

The research was presented by the scientists and funders as definitive and powerful. Here’s the opening section in the news release distributed at the time by the National Science Foundation:


Climate Change Drives Widespread Amphibian Extinctions
Warmer temperatures enhance growth conditions of fatal fungus

Results of a new study provide the first clear proof that global warming is causing outbreaks of an infectious disease that is wiping out entire frog populations and driving many species to extinction.

Published in the Jan. 12 issue of the journal Nature, the study reveals how the warming may alter the dynamics of a skin fungus that is fatal to amphibians. The climate-driven fungal disease, the author’s say, has hundreds of species around the world teetering on the brink of extinction or has already pushed them into the abyss.

“Disease is the bullet that’s killing the frogs,” said J. Alan Pounds, the study’s lead scientist affiliated with the Tropical Science Center’s Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve in Costa Rica. “But climate change is pulling the trigger. Global warming is wreaking havoc on amphibians, and soon will cause staggering losses of biodiversity,” he said.

There were cautionary hints aplenty from the get-go. Stephen H. Schneider, the veteran climatologist at Stanford, was quoted in both The Washington Post and my story in The New York Times as saying the frog findings were tentative. But explore where his statements came in the stories, and note that one ended up on page one and the other did not. (Neither story was inaccurate, mind you, just organized differently.)

Now, it turns out that the mix of forces that caused these colorful residents of cloud forests to vanish from misty slopes remains contentious even though they have become an icon in discussions of extinction dangers from rapid climate change. See my short piece in this week’s Science Times for more on this.

The definitive elements of that 2006 paper have continued to reverberate, while the caveats have often been left behind. Here’s how the Nature paper was described last year in the report on impacts of climate change from Working Group 2 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (chapter 1 at the link below):

“For example, a recent extinction of around 75 species of frogs, endemic to the American tropics, was most probably due to a pathogenic fungus (Batrachochytrium), outbreaks of which have been greatly enhanced by global warming (Pounds et al., 2006).”

What’s a journalist (or citizen) to do? The more definitive a statement, the more effort should go into testing its basis. Somehow, we need to figure out a better way to deal with complexity and uncertainty. That goes for scientists, journal publishers, and definitely journalists and readers.