Modern David Versus Goliath?

From my remarks on the Tran­script seed­ed today at Newsvine:

So when Lar­ry King has MIT pro­fes­sor Richard Lindzen, not­ed cli­mate change skep­tic, on his show to dis­cuss the top­ic of glob­al warm­ing, what equal­ly famous sci­en­tist does he turn to to get the con­sen­sus per­spec­tive? NASA’s James Hansen? Ohio State’s Lon­nie Thomp­son? Penn State’s Michael Mann? Any­one in cli­mate sci­ence at all?

None of the above. Try TV kid’s show host Bill Nye.

Now, I think the world of Bill Nye, but is this real­ly accu­rate­ly report­ing the con­sen­sus of sci­ence just two days before the IPCC report is expect­ed to 180° dis­agree with essen­tial­ly every­thing Prof. Linz­den has ever said? Is this the “lib­er­al media bias” that some would have you believe is why glob­al warm­ing ever makes the news (as opposed to it being a sin­cere world­wide concern)?

It’s a pathet­ic attempt to por­tray the two “sides” of this “argu­ment” as being remote­ly equal, or more like­ly, the skep­tics as hav­ing more weight. It is poor jour­nal­ism (or what­ev­er Lar­ry King pass­es for) on CNN’s part and is entire­ly mis­lead­ing to the view­ing pub­lic. It would be like some sci­ence fic­tion author being a sci­ence con­sul­tant to the Pres­i­dent. Oh, wait, that actu­al­ly hap­pened…

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

4 comments

  1. My wife recent­ly wrote about an arti­cle in USA Week­end (albeit, not known for its qual­i­ty of journalism)

    http://kaleandwine.livejournal.com/26781.html

    that dis­cussed glob­al warm­ing with a cur­rent NBA head coach. He was iden­ti­fied as per­son who would know about glob­al warm­ing because — I’m not kid­ding — he used to teach high school geo-GRA­PHY(!!). No typo there. He taught high school geog­ra­phy, he is now answer­ing ques­tions about glob­al warming.

    For­tu­nate­ly he was not spew­ing ener­gy indus­try pro­pa­gan­da. But it shows you what the peo­ple behind USA Week­end think qual­i­fies one as an author­i­ty fig­ure. I have a con­ser­va­tion biol­o­gy degree, so next week­end my arti­cle about earth­quakes will be fea­tured in USA Weekend.

  2. Just had to come back to add a quote from the USA Week­end arti­cle I men­tioned above:

    (Mia­mi Heat Gen­er­al Man­ag­er) Randy Pfund… is knowl­edge­able about the envi­ron­ment because he taught high school geog­ra­phy before begin­ning a career in basketball.

    Amaz­ing.

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