Biased Media Ignore Climate Scandal
bo-no
26 Nov 2009
QUOTE: When conservatives are wrong, conservatives are wrong.
When liberals are wrong, everyone does it, don't you know?
Here's a dirty little secret about the New York Times: It likes to leak
things.
Important things.
Things that change the course of the public conversation. From the Pentagon
Papers to the ruined terrorist-surveillance programs of the Bush era, the
Times has routinely found that secrecy is a danger and sunlight is a
disinfectant.
Until now!
A troublesome hacker recently released e-mails going to and from the Climate
Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain, e-mails that
exposed how the "scientific experts" cited so often by the media on global
warming are guilty of crude political talk, attempts at censoring opponents
and twisting scientific data to support their policy agenda.
The e-mails prove just how dishonest this left-wing global warming agenda
truly is.
And now suddenly, the New York Times has found religion and won't publish
these private e-mails. Environmental reporter Andrew Revkin, who's more
global warming lobbyist than reporter, quoted - sparsely - from the e-mails,
but declared that he would not post these texts on his "Dot Earth" blog on
the Times Web site: "The documents appear to have been acquired illegally
and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never
intended for the public eye, so they won't be posted here."
That rule didn't apply to things like the disclosure of the Swift global
bank monitoring program against terrorists.
Unlike our secret terror-fighting efforts, there is no grave matter of
national security to protect here.
There is only a danger of shredding the undeserved reputation of some
global-warming alarmists as nonpartisan, nonideological, just-the-facts
scientists with no preconceived environmentalist or statist agenda.
The networks also have ignored this emerging scandal with all the ignorance
they could muster.
But in the seven days after the New York Times revealed the existence of an
NSA program to monitor communications to terrorist cells abroad, the three
networks ran a combined 23 stories about the program, more than one story,
per network, per night.
Revkin's story in the Times did have some truncated quotes with ridiculous
details.
In a 1999 e-mail exchange about charts showing apparent climate patterns
over the last two millenniums, Phil Jones of the CRU said he had used a
"trick" employed by another scientist, Michael Mann, to "hide the decline"
in temperatures.
Dr. Mann confirmed that the e-mail was real, but he told the Times "the
choice of words by his colleague was poor but noted that scientists often
used the word 'trick' to refer to a good way to solve a problem," and not as
something secret.
Doesn't a network correspondent just smell the fraud when scientists start
offering lame excuses for words they somehow didn't mean?
Don't just listen to conservatives.
Try Nate Silver, a statistician and liberal-media favorite, recently named
one of Time's 100 Most Influential People. He says scientists in this
exchange were unethical:
"Dr. Jones, talking candidly about sexing up a graph to make his conclusions
more persuasive. This is not a good thing to do - I'd go so far as to call
it unethical - and Jones deserves some of the loss of face that he will
suffer."
But then he adds the typical liberal disclaimer: "Unfortunately, this is the
sort of thing that happens all the time in both academia and the private
sector - have you ever looked at the graphs in the annual report of a
company which had a bad year? And it seems to happen all too often on both
sides of the global warming debate."
When conservatives are wrong, conservatives are wrong.
When liberals are wrong, everyone does it, don't you know?
It's also important to note that these folks play a rough game of hardball.
This isn't about science. It's politics - the brass-knuckle sort.
In another e-mail from Jones to Mann, the Washington Post reported, there's
talk of cutting skeptical scientists out of the official UN report: "I can't
see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report," Jones writes.
"Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what
the peer-review literature is!"
In another, Jones and Mann discuss how they can pressure an academic journal
to reject the work of climate skeptics, perhaps with a boycott: "Perhaps we
should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no
longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," Mann writes.
"I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do
with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor," Jones
replies.
This kind of censor-your-opponents activity ought to disgust a journalist
who values openness and rigorous debate above all.
Every day the networks avoid this story, they're saying they don't really
care about either of those values.
In fact, they become willing accomplices in a cover-up of global
proportions.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=513537
Warmest Regards
B0n oz
"It is a remarkable fact that despite the worldwide expenditure of perhaps
US$50 billion since 1990, and the efforts of tens of thousands of scientists
worldwide, no human climate signal has yet been detected that is distinct
from natural variation."
Bob Carter, Research Professor of Geology, James Cook University, Townsville