Climate Change: Views Differ. Ask This Scientician!
By Great stuff from Eric Boehlert on the latest NYT hit piece on Al Gore. As he says:
Where the Times went so wrong was that after it discovered there was, in fact, very little serious debate within the mainstream scientific community (i.e. “the middle ground”), the paper still plowed ahead with its controversial thesis and tried to fool its readers by suggesting, very high up in the story, that there were deep rifts among “rank and file” scientists — “the centrists,” as the newspaper called them. If that were true, the Times article, written by William Broad, would have been brimming with rank-and-file scientists questioning Gore’s facts. It was not.
Instead, as blogger David Roberts noted, the article had “all the hallmarks of a vintage Gore hit piece: half-truths, outright falsehoods, unsubstantiated quotes, and a heaping dose of innuendo.” The article also had all the hallmarks of a journalist approaching a topic with an already confirmed belief and then working backwards trying to prove that point by selectively quoting sources.
The Times piece did prove that the newspaper was willing to cast a very wide net to locate sources with scientific affiliations who expressed doubts about An Inconvenient Truth. No offense, but if an emeritus professor from Western Washington University was the most prominent critic the Times could find (the prof’s the first person quoted in the Gore piece), I’m guessing Gore is on pretty solid footing. (Another critic prominently quoted by the Times isn’t even an environmental scientist.)
See here, here, here, here, and here for detailed analysis of the article’s obvious scientific shortcomings. In short, the article has been thoroughly demolished.
No offense intended to Dave’s alma mater, but that’s what you call manufacturing a controversy.