Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Coverage of IPCC SPM: The Bad

It's been a pleasant surprise that the MSM has been devoid of the "false balance" articles that used to show up whenever climate change was discussed. All the deniers/obfuscators are in Fox News, fringe internet news services and Op-Ed pages.

CNSnews - (Kevin Mooney) I've never heard of CNSNews but none other than MIT Prof. Richard Lindzen is willing to provide them quotes. The only new spin here is an attempt to malign the IPCC process which released the summary of the Working Group I report before the actual report. Also notable are some of the names to keep an eye on for providing anti-IPCC quotes: Lubos Motl (recently?) of Harvard, Christopher Landsea of the National Hurricane Center, Sterling Burnett of the National Center for Policy Analysis and author Bonner Cohen.

FoxNews - (Brit Hume) Although the title is "Not all Scientists are Buying what the UN is Selling on Global Warming" this short blurb only quotes Motl and Lindzen from the above CNSnews article.

National Post (Lawrence Solomon) - this Canadian paper allows Israeli professor Nir Shariv to spout his "its all cosmic rays" assertion for the cause of 20th century warming. This has been thoroughly debunked by Stephen Ramhstorf (a realclimate.org contributor) in this article.

Washington Post Op-Ed (Robert Samuelson) - We're all DOOOOOMED. Mr. Samuelson claims there's no solution to the global warming problem. This serves the "do nothing" position: its hopeless, so lets enjoy our cheap energy and damn the future generations. Samuelson focuses only on cap-and-trade schemes and says they can't solve the problem by themselves. Only an unlikely technological maricle will save us. Its true that cap-and-trade alone won't solve the problem but no one is saying it will. See the Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton for how global warming can be curtailed with current technology.

Wall Street Journal Editorial - The most conservative editorial page in the MSM has a take filled with inacurracies. See realclimate for an explanation.

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