Pooley’s piece on the media’s acquiescence and abandonment of their traditional investigative and disseminate-the-facts role should be the subject of a one hour Frontline piece on PBS.

Meanwhile I continue to quote this piece on my own blog and see daily evidence of its truth and insight as I read the morning newspapers and monitor the network and cable news channel nightly broadcasts. The pictures are in high def but the information is fuzzy and out of focus.

I don’t hurl insults.

http://climateprogress.org/ 2008/ 05/ 02/ nature-article-on-cooling-confuses-revkin-media-deniers-next-decade-may-see-rapid-warming/

I read this blog mainly for expert opinion on policy and solutions. For science, I tend to go to RealClimate – a site put together by active climatologists, as their discussion is very detailed. But they don’t have time to debunk every piece of media spin. The above post does this nicely, and reveals the key graph from the study in question.

I also liked the following post:

http://climateprogress.org/ 2009/ 04/ 26/ the-green-fdr-obama-first-100-days/

I want to see more “summary” posts like this – how far we’ve come this year in creating a sustainable future.

I think published commentaries would do much more to move the country to climate action, than would a book.

I understand why this is true. It’s such a large and serious problem, and it scares a lot of people here. It scares me too. But part of being a good leader in an actual crisis like this one is being non-reactive, calm and sane.

If you ask me, people like Casey are worth reaching out to, and I think the first step is being much less shrill and partisan. The stakes are really high. The rhetoric of environmentalism has got to become a rhetoric of positive leadership that does more than preach to the choir.

My complaint is that you who do so are clearly hotheads whose opinions must be regarded with deep suspicion. You cannot be taken seriously. I am looking for the serious positions, and am disinclined to accept yours since they issue from a neurotic, defensive, paranoid place. See?

But if one substitutes “affirmers” for “deniers” in your post, it reads very plausibly. And this: “And yet the career denialists continue their calculated and well-funded campaigns of confusion and delay, although they know they are condemning their children and grand children to a devastated world” is the worst kind of grandiose slandermongering.

The only way to arrive at the truth about anything is for the believers to present convincing arguments for their own sides, and supportable refutations of the others’. Calling names and hurling slanders is for children who lack resources for existing civilly in the world. Resorting to that behavior is a de-evolution of who we are or hope to be. Were we all to do that, the world would be better without us, and so, perhaps, it will be.

Hope you weren’t just heeding the master’s command for the elders to deal with the trolls. Some blogs eat themselves.

As for views of the future, Joe Romm’s “Hell and High Water” and Mark Lynas’s “Six Degrees” are both recommended.

For the history of climatology (and actually much else), “The Discovery of Global Warming” by Spencer Weart:

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.html