“you respect different sides of this polarizing issue by sticking to the facts. That is a model for great journalism”

The funny thing was that earlier speakers had lauded John Chancellor himself for “dispelling lies and ignorance” with his reporting.

Chancellor became prominent when he reported on the National Guard in Little Rock as they barred some black children entry to Central High School. The equivalent of climate “deniers” then would have been the many Americans who believed that blacks were second class citizens who should not have the right to receive an education alongside of white children.

I tried to imagine how a journalist could show “respect” to someone who believed that blacks should be re-enslaved, or that black children should not have the right to enter a school reserved for whites. “For his view, I now turn to Ku Klux Klan leader Dick Head, a prominent, respected man of our community, who is wearing a sheet over his head so no one will know who he is”. I have this funny feeling that Chancellor didn’t show respect to all sides of that polarizing issue.

I believe that some day, when the consequences of allowing the accumulation of the forces driving climate disruption to proceed even this far is obvious to all, that deniers will have the same status as Nazi propagandists do today. I wouldn’t be that proud to be known as a guy who made such people feel respected and a vital part of a fundamentally important debate.

There has been warming since the last Ice Age. Who is to say what the “correct” temperature is for earth, and doesn’t true science prove the temperature has fluctuated for nearly all of earth’s history?

In one era wine grapes were grown in England, followed by the Great Ice Age, followed by another period of warming in northern Europe (probably entire northern hemisphere), followed by the mini Ice Age of the 1850s, etc. On and on it goes.

Earth’s atmospheric chemical composition has changed during the epochs as well, long before obese chain smokers drove hulking SUVs in urban rush hour traffic. Again, who is to say what is the “correct” composition?

I urge everyone to refrain from enacting public policy & throw hundreds of millions of dollars at a so-called problem which has no consensus. Opponents are not ignorant or backward-thinking – they simply want to be proven that a problem exists before applying a solution, and a very costly one at that.

So you have to give him some credit for seeking a wide range of informed opinion. But is his judgment being skewed by some of the more strident responses that the “denier-eq” side is capable of coming up with? It seems that maybe that’s a real problem.

Reputation for any form of media or individual is a tricky thing to build up and hold on to; being consistently and reliably correct is really the only way to maintain that. If Revkin’s explorations of non-science policy-making are making his work less consistent it will be to the detriment of his own career and to some degree to the future of the NY Times. But the Times has far worse problems than anything Revkin has done (why, oh why, do they still employ John Tierney?)

[JR: I don't think this is a matter of EVER having misspoke. This isn't a single instance. I think this is a clear pattern that I have identified. One can scream too loud -- though I am not certain one can scream too loudly on this issue, and I hardly consider what I have written to be screaming, in any case. When there is marching in the streets, then perhaps people will be sufficiently riled up. Right now, the polling suggests, we have a screaming deficit. I certainly have revised remarks when commenters have convinced me I have gone too far -- you have to be willing to do that if you are a serious blogger -- but I don't think this is such an instance.]

(Red face on.) Surely, I thought, if there were a real problem, and the research were clear, our government would be on top of it immediately! After all, I’d seen U.S. leadership dealing with CFCs/ozone. (Red face off.)

Much has changed since then. I also appreciate what Joe is doing with this superb site. My big issue now is the size of the gap between what the scientists know and what the public knows–as pointed out by Jim Hansen, as discussed by Ross Gelbspan, and as covered in this blog today.

To quickly close this knowledge gap, (sarcasm on) we need to spend at least as much money as we’re spending to let the public know about the coming switch to digital TV. Can you imagine the pain and suffering that might occur if millions of citizens were unable to watch it?! (Sarcasm off.)

Even better would be if someone of authority, such as Obama, would go on national TV, to make a prime-time “State of the Climate” address to directly and clearly tell the American people, as he hinted last week, that climate disruption is real, it is serious, and we will address it, now!

As a caring father, with two young daughters, Obama can understand what motivates many of us to become active in this movement. It is a willingness to begin an aggressive transition to sustainable energy so that our kids and grandkids may continue to live in an America similar to the one that we enjoy today. To do otherwise is, to me, unconscionable.

We’ve had a “war on drugs,” we’re in a “war on terror,” and a war in Iraq, just to mention a few. What we really, really need is a “war on climate disruption!” This is where we face by far the greatest risk to our society!

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/what-if/

As for the role of CO2, this has been known since John Tyndall measure it in 1859 CE.

The middle stance deserves the middle finger.

Maybe there’s something going on at the NYT. This morning in Kristol’s farewell column he stated:

“That exhortation was appropriate for World War II. Today, the dangers are less stark, and the conflicts less hard.”

To which I posted a comment something on the order that that statement was delusional. Saving the planet from rapidly accelerating mass extinction attributable to climate change is going to be a far greater challenge to a much greater danger. Now, even though I posted very early in the morning it never got through the moderation, even though my ending, (Don’t let the door slam…) was far less stridently critical than dozens of comments that were posted later in the day, not one of which mentioned the rather obvious omission of the environment in Kristol’s column.