To begin with, the mere title of the online article makes a huge claim by stating that ‘global rivers are drying up’. At no point in Dai et al.’s article do they imply that these rivers are in danger of disappearing, they merely point out that some rivers have a decreasing stream flow. This seems to be an exaggeration of the evidence on the part of the author to make a very catchy title. Throughout the article, Murray implies that all the rivers sampled, besides those flowing into the Arctic Ocean, are drastically decreasing in levels. He uses emotive language that appeals to the reader’s fears—lines like “dire consequences” or “rivers...could wither” paint a depressing picture of the future. However, this sense of urgency was not found anywhere in the journal article, and recall that decreasing trends were found in less than 1/3 of the 200 largest rivers—a fact that Murray manages to brush over in his article. As well, in the journal article, Dai et al. describe various reasons for the changes, concluding tentatively that the most significant cause is climate change, in particular the changes in precipitation that it has brought about. In Murray’s article on the other hand, there is no mention of these and climate change is the only thing to be blamed. As well, Murray makes no attempt to describe how climate change affects stream flow.
Finally, Dai et al. make a concerted effort to properly describe the sources of error in their study. There were many gaps in the historical gauging records and cases of unmonitored streamflow. These had to be filled in using linear regression. As well, rivers experience very large year-to-year changes in flow and this can make finding a significant trend very difficult. Neither of these sources of error are mentioned in the online article, which seems to paint the results of the study as unquestionable fact.
This is just one example where results of a scientific study have been stretched and exaggerated for the purpose of news story, and stands to remind the reader to always read with a critical eye.
Sources
Dai, Aiguo, Taotao Qian, Kevin E. Trenberth and John D. Milliman (2008). Changes in Continental Freshwater Discharge from 1948 to 2004
Journal of Climate, 22:2773‐2792.
Murray, James. (2009) Study Warns Global Rivers Are Drying Up. Business Green, 22 April 2009.
. Accessed 5 Oct 2009.
Your blog was well written, and I found your concluding sentence powerful and also found that it gave good advice for a type of audience that may read news reports and journal articles.
ReplyDeleteHowever you could of had another reason of how the primary article was different from the research article. Instead of just always talking about how the journal article constantly exaggerated the research from the primary article.
Other then that, you proved the difference between the primary article and journal article well.
Kendra Bester
I liked reading your blog because it seemed like an exaggerated version of what everyone would come across at some point. I remember coming across this article when I was doing this assignment. Now that I think back on it, maybe it was trying to say too much in a really small amount of space. I do agree that the statements were blown out of proportion. But I'm not sure how much truth could have been learned from an article so small (especially when the primary source was rather large).
ReplyDelete