Global warming and the press

Rich Karlgaard sees what he considers evidence of journalistic bias on the subject of global warming.

Does the mainstream media exaggerate the effects of global warming? Does it burn GW heretics at the stake?

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Here is the damning quote from NASA head Michael Griffin:

"I have no doubt that global—that a trend of global warming exists," the administrator of NASA, Michael Griffin, said in a taped interview that was broadcast Thursday on National Public Radio. "I am not sure that it is fair to say that is a problem we must wrestle with.

"I would ask which human beings, where and when, are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now, is the best climate for all other human beings," he said. "I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take."

Griffin's statement is agnostic but not unreasonable. Many have been the cycles and fluctuations of Earth's surface temperatures during the last thousand years. Earth has survived. Civilizations have evolved. Never have so many people eaten so well or lived so long.

The AP/NYT story doesn't think Griffin's skepticism is reasonable at all. Fair enough—the writer is entitled to his/her opinion. But if that's what the writer thinks, shouldn't he/she have the honesty and guts to put a byline on the story?

The un-bylined story prints two nasty rebuttals to Griffin's statement:

Jerry Mahlman, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said Griffin's remarks showed he was either "totally clueless" or "a deep anti-global-warming ideologue."

Totally clueless now! Wow—words my 14-year-old would use. My read of human nature is that teenagers and grown-ups don't say "totally clueless" when they are totally confident of their facts.

James Hansen, a top NASA climate scientist and lead author of the research paper, said the comments showed "arrogance and ignorance" because millions of people will probably be harmed by global warming.

Millions will "probably" be harmed? Is that a guess? From a computer model? Whose model? The AP/NYT doesn't ask the scientist what "probably" means and how he derived such odds. Of course the story's anonymous writer also fails to ask about the costs of preventing "probably."

With crystalline certainty, we can say that millions of people around the world will be harmed if their access to affordable energy is curtailed. Jobs will be lost. Children will go hungry. Dreams of a better life will be put on hold. You don't need a computer model to show this. You just have to go back 10 years, when a billion people who are middle class now were poor then, simply because they lacked the infrastructure and information that cheap energy makes possible.

What do you think? Does the AP/NYT story load the dice? Is their "heretic shaming" typical of the mainstream media's coverage of global warming and its effects? Post your comments below.