The pattern is rampant:
Here is a guest oped on climate change, on the New York Times coveted and highly respected editorial pages, extremely misleading, highly manipulative in effect, based upon nothing but circular logic, and written by someone that appears to know next to nothing about the subject matter. That’s not “perspective” and differing points of view.
The Times, which has very little space on its pages for opeds apart from its own editorials and opinion columnists, nevertheless, amazingly, published the piece - where the writer argues climate change is overblown because we are fascinated with death, supports it with the scientifically irrefutable evidence that “it seems to him,” ignores the countless (and far more compelling) reasons why climate change is under estimated, and spends most of the piece giving inordinate detail about an otherwise irrelevant and highly specific time when people’s fears were overblown. It did this as if providing an example of when we overestimated something that is otherwise completely disconnected from the present issue is in any way more relevant to the issue than providing an example (or many) when we underestimated. (It’s not.) And that was the entire piece. To call the piece a misleading (or even manipulative) farce would be valid, and reasonable. (And even a little generous.)
Here in another article where the Times, though not as egregiously as some other ostensible news sites, confused short term and regional weather patterns with longer term global climate; an almost unfathomable mistake given how elementary it is to the issue, for the “paper of record” to be making.
Even the Times’ environmentally leaning and climate change focused DotEarth blog (now in the opinion section), written by a long time former national environmental reporter and climate change advocate, repeatedly partakes of false balance reporting in order to come across, to a thus repeatedly misinformed audience, as “balanced,” rather than actually being balanced.
In an unusually egregious example of just this type of false balance, the same reporter in an article lazily compared syndicated columnist George Will, who does’t know anything about science and repeatedly, illogically, relentlessly, and often wildly misleads on the issue, to Al Gore, who takes the defensible position that of the risk range that climate change poses, actual results are likely to be in the upper end of that range barring effective remedial action. Yet the reporter presented them as two sides to the same coin, just, each, simply emblematic of inaccuracies and misstatements in opposite directions.
Here is an example where a NY Times piece on a key aspect of climate change does exceed the coverage of the Washington Post, but still both plays the false balance game, and omits a great deal of the most relevant information. As a result, it leaves readers misinformed on the issue, and of the impression that climate change is defined by trailing temperature data, rather than the far more consequential accumulating heat load of the earth, and the slowly (and, seemingly accelerating) processes which this seems to be correlated with.
In yet another, critical Times climate article, here is who Times reporter John Broder used as his expert – someone who purposefully manipulates graphs to change results, and whose central, poorly qualifying claim to expertise on the matter, is that he often posts on one of the most egregious and consistently misinformational websites in America. Ironically, the entire article by Broder is about an allegedly enormous scandal involving some climate scientists who may have erroneously averaged out data (who have since been entirely vindicated), and who, in private emails that were hacked into, crudely expressed annoyance at ideological interests and a desire to keep ideologically driven manipulation from posing as science; and Broder quoted as his implicit “expert,” a random (and somewhat extreme) climate change denialist who himself quite unambiguously manipulated data to present a different case.
In perhaps one of the most misleading and scientifically ill founded articles ever occasioned by a “leading newspaper,” a front page story in the Times last spring created the false impression that meteorologists were climate experts. It also falsely posited the “views” of meteorologists (and rather powerfully at that) on climate change as one side of an unsettled two sided debate as to whether or not we are changing the climate. Far more egregiously, it even cites a meteorologist — five sentences into the piece no less – who apparently knows little on the issue of science (beyond weather, which is not climate), has no expertise in the matter, is an extreme ideologue on the issue–or, simply, is blatantly and profoundly ignorant on the matter — and the Times’ piece presents this to its readers as if he were an expert worthy of being cited on page one of the New York Times and on an objective science matter of broad importance.
Last but not least, here is an article that essentially makes the case against Al Gore’s film “An inconvenient truth,” with the misleading, one sided, headline “From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype.” It cites two scientists making reasonable points, University of Colorado’s Kevin Vranes who was complimentary of Gore’s attempt to bring attention to the severity of the issue but was concerned about “overselling certainty,” and NASA’s James Hansen, who suggested Gore’s film was more speculation than fact and not careful enough about the hurricane issue.
But it first cites what reporter William Broad conveniently calls a “rank and file scientist,” who takes carefully calculated and wholly one sided shots at Gore, and who is so “UN-rank,” and “UN-file” as to believe (the article does not disclose) that climate change is largely made up.
The article then cites the media’s favorite contrarian expert (without noting him as such), Roger Pielke Jr., whose credentials are solid, but who is one of the few climate credentialed scientists who — while not, obviously, an anti-science denialist — thinks that climate change is heavily overblown. And who, though a detailed examination of Pielke’s record and statements is beyond the scope of this piece, has exhibited a consistent pattern of non scientific ideology on the issue, and in fact often confuses science for ideology, and vice versa. (Even one of the four Amazon reviewers of Pielke’s book picks up on this fact, in a well supported review.) The article even includes Gore’s point that he Gore, updated to reflect comments, but manipulatively ends the paragraph, as if he were arguing the case against Gore, with, “He gave no specifics on which points he had revised.” We can’t trust what Gore says, the article– given the rest of its anti Gore context — implies (see below).
The piece, in sum, makes a case against Gore, relies upon Gore himself for for, as the paper puts it “defending” “his work,” takes pains early on to point out that Gore is “not” a scientist (even though Gore has been studying climate change for 30 years, and almost 20 years wrote a warning book, “Earth in the Balance,” that has so far turned out to be fairly prescient), and posits it all as objective, balanced reporting giving “both sides” to the issue.
The fact that this is nowhere near objective, balanced reporting, and/or very misinformed reporting (as seems likely to also be the case, given the Times’ pattern), is aptly confirmed by an unfathomable mistake that the article itself makes, which in some ways is more egregious than any of the mistakes Gore makes in his one hour forty minute movie, where standards are more relaxed:
It centers on the issue of rising oceans, key for understanding our risk parameters on the issue. Some of the conventional data, including the IPCC on the issue, only posits ocean rises based upon projected atmospheric warmths, and purposefully does not take into account numerous potential tipping points, permafrost melts (of which evidence is mounting in the past few years), clathrate melts, accelerated Arctic melting (evidence of which is mounting in the past few years) or portions of the Antarctic melting off (early signs of which are also now being seen.) It is a purposefully very conservative and likely very inaccurate, estimate. (The IPCC also even acknowledged at the time that its estimates were very “conservative.”)
If the Arctic were to melt — not an unreasonable proposition — sea levels would rise a bit over 20 feet. Were the Greenland ice dome to melt, which represents its bulk, they would rise almost 20 feet, all of which which is what Gore stated in his book and movie, along with the equally true, and reasonable fact that were the West Antarctic ice shelf to melt, the sea would rise by 20 feet (40 feet if both were to happen incidentally; far more than that if more of Antarctica were to melt.) All of this is not only accurately represented by Gore, it is probably far more relevant in terms of strategically assessing climate change’s reasonable risk profile, than the IPCC’s purposefully limited “guestimation” based on projections which specifically excluded ice sheet melt. (Which, similarly, also fail to take into account many other potentially very large feedback effects because we simply don’t know fully how to account for them — but this does not mean they are not relevant.)
Yet the Times neglected to mention any of this. And, in addition to the constant cacophony of harangues from scientific ideologues, with the occasional defense of Gore, by “Gore,” or expressed adulation by other scientists, thrown in, it paints Gore as a liar, or wild, serial exaggerator. (The same theme which the media over zealously ran with in 2000, changing the course of U.S. history and making Gore, falsely, untrustworthy to many voters.) It does this by falsely contrasting the IPCC’s estimate of 23 inches of seal level rise,with Gore’s 20 feet, without bothering to mention that Gore in both his book and movie specifically mentions 20 feet in the context of potential Greenland ice dome or West Antarctic ice shelf melt — thereby heavily misleading Times’ readers, and making Gore look disingenuous and extreme,when the melting ice postulations, in addition to being aptly qualified by Gore, are also actually quite reasonable, and highly relevant.
