A Few Things Ill Considered

A layman's take on the science of Global Warming featuring a guide on How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic.

Monday, April 10, 2006

send this to... Digg it! | Technorati | Del.icio.us | Reddit | Furl | Spurl

High Sticking?

An interesting story from the Society of Environmental Journalists, called "Has Balance Warped the Truth?" (internal, non-framed link) all about the Wall Street Journal, Steve McIntyre and Joe Barton's investigation into the Hockey Stick. Worth a read for some insight into the human attitudes behind the machine.

Sometimes I read or listen to a news report and wonder who do they think they are kidding, who are they writing this for? In the case of this poorly researched and severly biased Wall Street Journal article discussed in the above article, I think it was written specifically for Joe Barton.

Labels:

4 Comments:

  • At April 10, 2006 12:59 PM, Blogger Jenn said…

    Have you heard anything about the global climate data cited in this editorial that just came out - or what would you say to this argument against global warming?

     
  • At April 10, 2006 3:04 PM, Blogger coby said…

    Dano, what have you been smoking, and can I get some!? ;-)

     
  • At April 10, 2006 3:13 PM, Blogger coby said…

    Hi Jenn,

    I think the best thing to do is just offer whomever is impressed by that argument (1998-2005: no GW) is what Tim Lambert suggests (the Deltoid link) and look at the whole record.

    Be sure to quote from that page:
    "Record warmth in 2005 is notable, because global temperature has not received any boost from a tropical El Niño this year. The prior record year, 1998, on the contrary, was lifted 0.2°C above the trend line by the strongest El Niño of the past century."

    There is a high degree of inter-annual variation, so picking any single year as a start or end point does not necessarily mean what one might want it to. The 5 year mean trend line in the GISS analysis is only going up, and ends in 2003 BTW. We won't know what the trend for 2005 was until 2007. But anyway, no one sincere can look at the temperature plots and say the temperature is not rising.

    See also here and here.

     
  • At April 12, 2006 9:38 AM, Blogger Wag the Dog said…

    Returning to the issue of balance vs. truth, I like to refer to this quotation from Paul Krugman:


    "The media are desperately afraid of being accused of bias. And that's partly because there's a whole machine out there, an organized attempt to accuse them of bias whenever they say anything that the Right doesn't like. So rather than really try to report things objectively, they settle for being even-handed, which is not the same thing. One of my lines in a column -- in which a number of people thought I was insulting them personally -- was that if Bush said the Earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: 'Shape of Earth--Views Differ.' Then they'd quote some Democrats saying that it was round."


    Replacing "Bush" with AGW denialists, and "Democrats" with climate scientists, would make this an accurate representation of journalism on climate research.

     

Post a Comment

<< Home