Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

UPDATE:  Climate scientist Ken Caldeira has just sent me an email titled, “I can’t believe the New York Times has done it again …” that I’ll reprint in its entirety at the end.

You can contact the NY Times public editor, Clark Hoyt, at public@nytimes.com.

The NYT has published arguably its worst climate story ever, “U.N. Climate Panel and Chief Face Credibility Siege,” by Elisabeth Rosenthal.

Dr. Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University, whom the NYT itself quoted last year as “an expert on environmental communications,” emailed me that the piece is “the worst, one sided reporting I have ever seen.”  When I called him up, he went further saying:

In this article, the New York Times has become an echo-chamber for the climate disinformation movement.

You might think it impossible for any newspaper — let alone the one-time “paper of record” — to run a story raising “accusations of scientific sloppiness” about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that never quotes a single climate scientist.

You might think it inconceivable that the NYT would base its attack on the accusations and half-truths provided by “climate skeptics, right-leaning politicians and even some mainstream scientists” where

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“You know you’re in trouble when you’re being spoofed on YouTube.”

So begins one of the most shockingly unprofessional “news stories” you are ever likely to see from a major network that isn’t Fox.

The news organization that gave us Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite now bases its reporting on YouTube videos.  Thursday, CBS libeled climatologist Michael Mann on the basis of nothing more than a jingle someone uploaded to the Web:

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The mainstream media takne as a whole acts as a center-right institution that supports the status quo on key issues (see Newsweek stunner: Why the “status quo” establishment media’s coverage of global warming is so fatally useless, Part 1 and Part 2).  That’s why one of the great triumphs of conservative messaging has been selling the myth of the “liberal media” (see “Working the Refs”).

That triumph of myth over reality has, among other things, helped guilt the media into giving equal time (and beyond) to the most extreme conservative views even when they spread disinformation on subjects they have no expertise on whatsoever.  Nowhere is that clearer than in the once venerated Washington Post (see WashPost goes tabloid, publishes second falsehood-filled op-ed by Sarah Palin in five months — on climate science and WashPost recycles another denier WSJ op-ed, this time from coal apologist Bjorn Lomborg. Funny how two new senior Post editors came from the WSJ.

Last week, Think Progress had a story revealing just how successful conservatives have been at selling this myth:

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… goes to Mike Musgrove of the Washington P0st for his piece, “As carmakers plug ‘green,’ Washington Auto Show consumers have plenty of questions.”

As evidence of the kind of questions that puzzled consumers have about how plug-in cars work, Musgrove writes:

The unmistakable message is that the day of the electric and hybrid car is at hand. But it’s also clear that there are plenty of questions among the crowd about how this alternatively fueled world is supposed to work.

“What if you’re driving and you don’t have any power left?” asks John Wu, who is checking out the Chevy Volt with some friends. “Won’t you just be stuck there?” The guys make cracks about Volt drivers running low on juice and pulling up to a stranger’s house, begging for access to an outlet.

Funny stuff — if you were writing a piece trying to mock regular people in the vein of the 1980s-era David Letterman.  But in fact there is nothing wrong with regular folks being underinformed about a brand new product — people would come up to me all the time when I first bought the Prius and asked me where you plug it in.

Most people just aren’t that plugged into the latest techno-news.  Why should they be?  There aren’t any for sale yet, after all!

What’s wrong and definitely not funny at all is that the reporter is underinformed — and has actually produced a piece that is only going to further confuse the public.  Rather than correcting the glaring error of the people he quotes, his next sentence is a non sequitur:

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Terrorists try very hard to spread their disinformation.  A key goal is to get others to spread it for them, especially ones who are holed up in a cave somewhere.  Thus terrorists craft their disinformation into a sensational message that they hope gullible members of the global media will repeat.

So who got suckered into repeating the message of the number one terrorist in the world?

Amazing.

But Limbaugh isn’t alone.  It’s a top story on Drudge.  And here’s FoxNews:

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The status quo media has a new anti-science columnist, Ed Wallace.  He had a column yesterday in Business Week, “Is Global Warming a ‘Crock of S*%t?’ “  Here is a typical pearl of disinformation:

Then, on the last day of 2009, Wolfgang Knorr of the Earth Sciences Dept. at the University of Bristol released new research showing the possibility that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has not risen in the past 160 years. Maybe he’s wrong, but at least he published his views for peer review in the Geophysical Research Letters.

Not even close.  As anyone with access to Google knows, that is not what Knorr said at all (see “Yes, the atmospheric CO2 fraction has risen at a dangerously fast rate in the past 160 years, reaching levels not seen in millions of years“).  See also the single most famous chart of observational data in the entire climate arena (above), the Keeling Curve of “Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2).”

Knorr’s study merely suggested the fraction of human-emitted CO2 that stays in the atmosphere may have stayed flat for 160 years.  It had a bad headline and confused many folks for a few days, but it was pretty quickly straightened out for anyone paying attention.

To write this piece and not even bother using Google for 30 seconds to fact-check it is a sign of utter disdain for the truth.

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Journalism has been melting down faster than Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier.  Science journalism is “basically going out of existence,” as one top science reporter recently put it.  And Columbia University suspended its Environmental Journalism Program even though “our graduates have done well in their careers.” If you want to hear from some of the reporters themselves, here is a piece by Tyler Hamilton, first published here.  Tyler is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest daily newspaper.  He’s written some great stories — see “Toronto Star: ‘Why media tell climate story poorly’ ” and “Nuclear Bombshell: $26 Billion cost — $10,800 per kilowatt! — killed Ontario nuclear bid.”

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Keith Johnson of the WSJ’s “Environmental Capital” blog just announced its termination:

After more than two years and over 2,000 posts, Environmental Capital is closing its virtual doors.

Although I didn’t agree with all of the analysis, I’m quite sad to see this “Daily analysis of the business of the environment by The Wall Street Journal” go.

The WSJ obviously has a right-wing editorial board and an editorial page that is a leading source of anti-science disinformation.  But the blog seemed reasonably independent and was certainly a timely source of information on energy and environmental issues.

The NYT’s Revkin tweets:

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Okay, bloggers aren’t journalists, but some headlines are just beyond the pale for insensitivity:

No, I’m not going subject you to the full schoolyard headline.  The post has been up for a few hours (click here if you must), which suggests Watts is okay with it.  Even more amazingly, I see that the original piece that Watts is excerpting doesn’t use the word at all, which means it was added by the WattsUpWithThat folks.  Still, I suspect/hope the headline will be changed by the time you look, anyway, though the URL will probably remain….

I guess Watts didn’t take kindly to Rudd’s blistering speech last year (see Australia’s Rudd slams the “deniers” and the “gaggle” of “conspiracy theorists” opposing climate action).

Rolling Stone has two pieces on climate politics in its latest issue, by Jeff Goodell and Tim Dickinson.  “Planet Earth 911” is on “Big Oil and Big Coal’s lobbying campaign to block progress on global warming,” and “The Climate Killers” is on Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch, Jack Gerard, Rex Tillerson, Sen. Mary Landrieu, The Swift Boat smearer, Inhofe, David Ratcliffe, Dick Gephardt (!), George Will, Tom Donohue, Don Blankenship, Fred Singer, Sen. John McCain (!), Rep. Joe Barton, Charles and David Koch.

I don’t agree with either piece 100% but they are well worth reading, and not just because the latter piece quotes me a couple of times.  Rolling Stone deserves a huge amount of credit for continuing to put out first-rate work on the story of the century.

Let’s look a little closer at three of RS’s “climate killers,” starting with Buffett:

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I totally buy the argument that we need to set a cap on carbon emissions….

I was once again reminded how many business and investment types are thinking quite practically and capitalistically about green, job-creating technologies. For us Hamiltonian conservatives who believe in internal improvements, energy and infrastructure are obviously the two big areas where we should be investing.

David Brooks is one of the few leading conservative intellectuals who hasn’t been knee-jerk anti-science on climate change.   In a 2005 piece on conservative intellectual exhaustion, “Running Out of Steam” he even asserted:

Global warming is real (conservatives secretly know this).

Well, subsequent events have demonstrated that if conservatives (other than Sen. Lindsey Graham) know that global warming is real, it is the best kept secret since, well, that whole fake moon landing thing (see “Unscientific America, Part 1: From the moon-landing deniers to WattsUpWithThat” and Honey, I shrunk the GOP, Part 3: RNC Chair Steele withdraws support for Rep. Kirk over his vote on climate and clean energy bill).

Still, Brooks himself knows it, and in a pretty candid “New Year’s Resolutions” piece (with fellow NYT columnist Gail Collins), he spells out what he believes.  I would not that Collins does not particularly distinguished herself in this piece:

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I am less and less a fan of the more and more center-right Politico (see “Memo to Politico: Do you really aspire to being nothing more than a new media version of the MSM — stenographers of the status quo?“)  This TP repost has some blunt comments from a leading TV journalist:

Last month, Politico conducted an “interview” with former Vice President Dick Cheney. As ThinkProgress noted at the time, the paper’s top reporters — Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen — transcribed Cheney’s attacks on Obama without challenge, criticism, or rebuttal.

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Hint:  This person was forced out of political office in the shadow of disgrace and failure.  [Note to self:  Maybe that doesn't winnow down the field much here in Washington, DC.]

Hint:  This person has such staggering political independence and acumen that he said in July that Sarah “Four Pinocchios” Palin is a conservative leader on energy issues.

Hint:  In June, this person summed up the conservative ethos, saying “I am not a citizen of the world! I think the entire concept is intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous.”

Hint:  This person is an eco-fraud, who flip-flopped on the central policy issue of our time — reducing CO2 emissions.

And yes, this person tweeted of the recent East Coast snow storm:

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