Climate Change: Media Seeding Doubt or Integrity?
The information below was sourced from the climatecrisis.net which featured in Inconvenient Truth.
Still we are in confusion. What I find interesting is adversarial politics in all its forms, we are unable to sit at the same table and work together to solve the problem. Clearly the climate is changing. Even where I am in Perth, they had the hottest January, when usually February is the hottest. Moreover, I was told by locals that it never rains, it was pouring with rain and thunderstorms which shocked local people. Now we are in February and it is cool. My gut feeling was that it would be, I said it jokingly to people. As change is clear. Nature is changing, can we change? Gold bar or entire planet? Interesting question. I also liked the reference to integrity. Values are key to change.
http://www.climatecrisis.net/
http://www.takepart.com/article/2012/01/31/climate-change
It’s only been a few days since The Wall Street Journal published a jaw-droppingly biased op-ed piece, signed by 16 scientists, that rejected the need for “drastic action to decarbonize the world’s economy.” Scientists and institutions are already refuting many of the article’s claims as misrepresentations.
Chief among them is William Nordhaus, an economist cited at the beginning of the article. “The piece completely misrepresented my work,” said Nordhaus to The New York Times over the weekend. “My work has long taken the view that policies to slow global warming would have net economic benefits, in the trillion of dollars of present value. This is true going back to work in the early 1990s (MIT Press, Yale Press, Science, PNAS, among others). I have advocated a carbon tax for many years as the best way to attack the issue. I can only assume they are either completely ignorant of the economics on the issue or are willfully misstating my findings.”
Whether it’s ignorance or willful misstatements, according to Forbes‘ Peter Gleick, newspapers like the WSJ are toeing a fine line as they sacrifice what’s left of their journalistic integrity in favor of blatant propaganda:
But the most amazing and telling evidence of the bias of The Wall Street Journal in this field is the fact that 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences wrote a comparable (but scientifically accurate) essay on the realities of climate change and on the need for improved and serious public debate around the issue, offered it to the Wall Street Journal, and were turned down. . . the Journal wouldn’t publish this letter, from more than 15 times as many top scientists. Instead they chose to publish an error-filled and misleading piece on climate because some so-called experts aligned with their bias signed it. This may be good politics for them, but it is bad science and it is bad for the nation.
Sadly, the Journal isn’t alone. Last week, The Daily Mail‘s David Rose attempted the same sleight-of-hand, claiming that the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit hadn’t found evidence of global warming in 15 years. The same day, his article was refuted by the Met Office itself:
This article includes numerous errors in the reporting of published peer-reviewed science undertaken by the Met Office Hadley Centre, and for Mr. Rose to suggest that the latest global temperatures available show no warming in the last 15 years is entirely misleading.
Despite the Met Office having spoken to David Rose ahead of the publication of the story, he has chosen to not fully include the answers we gave him to questions around decadal projections produced by the Met Office or his belief that we have seen no warming since 1997. (emphasis mine)
Here’s the question: If major news outlets like The Wall Street Journal and Daily Mail are unwilling to publish legitimate science, how can the we expect the public (much less the scientifically-challenged members of Congress) to ever fully comprehend the major global crisis of our future?
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