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…
omg…
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.
Just had to come back to add a quote from the USA Weekend article I mentioned above:
Amazing.
Sheril R. Kirshenbaum just posted the video of this over at The Intersection on Science Blogs. It seems that most of her readers would agree that this was an uneven (and perhaps underhanded) matchup.