Here goes a scrambled post on a scrambled affair.
US media largely have had little in recent days on the troubles at the UN’s climate-watching IPCC – an agency under siege peripherally due to the largely dismissed flap over emails, right in the cross hairs for its Himalaya glacier melt forecast screw-up, and potentially over suggestions of systematic exaggeration of global warming’s signature in specific storms, droughts, or other natural disasters.
But the fracas continues making headlines in the UK, in Europe generally (see Sascha Karberg’s post here on German press), and especially in India, home of the IPCC boss and host to those melting glaciers.
The latest round of rebuff for IPCC, on purported exaggerated laying blame of disasters at global warming’s doorstep ran in the Sunday Times. Sci and Enviro Editor Jonathan Leake rounded up accusations that even if most IPCC reports and science are generally solid, some of their passages have consistently and for political effect gone beyond established science in declaring specific recent disasters as the likely result of global warming. The story reverberated powerfully in India, as seen in this from the Hindustan Times.
Other outlets are pumping out stories nearly every day. At the generally liberal-left UK newspaper whose coverage has been most aggressive in taking global warming seriously, The Guardian, Bob Ward argues that the Times’s piece is a sample of “opportunism” by long-time critics of the IPCC to dig up old complaints and thus pile on the beleaguered UN agency. At the Telegraph, a more right-leaning paper, Andrew Hough reports today, by contrast, that even the government’s chief scientist is calling for “a new era of honesty” in reporting scientific evidence by IPCC and other agencies. The adviser did not back down on his conviction that the peril is real, but said public confidence would be boosted by greater honesty about the inherent uncertainties in climate science. And the Telegraph‘s columnist, James Delingpole, as in polemics, goes full tilt after the IPCC as he asserts that Anthropogenic Global Warming theory is toast. That’s dumb, but he’s a columnist so has license. Just to show here that not everyone at the Telegraph is on the warpath, one must note that its environmental writer Louise Gray did a balanced job the other day. in reporting that IPCC members have a “robust defense” to offer to charges its reports systematically exaggerate natural disaster and climate change associations.
One finds similar, continued backs and forths among reporters and columnists in Indian media. Two examples: In the Times of India columnist Jug Suraiya takes a decidedly sour view of IPCC, lumping it with rumors that WHO exaggerated H1N1 flu dangers at the behest of big pharma and the vaccine industry. The Business Standard ran two contrasting opinion pieces back to back – one by a man urging that the attention be on the science, not IPCC, as refereed literature continues to persuade him that the Earth is changing fast and things should be done to slow that down, another by a well-known British blogger, Bennie Peiser, who sees the IPCC as hopelessly captured by a cabal of true-believers.
Meanwhile in the US press lately one finds practically nothing aside from non-science-savvy columnists. The NYTimes’s former climate writer, Andrew C. Revkin, filed a thoughtful long post yesterday at his Dot Earth blogspot. To be sure, the emails were in the UK, the IPCC head is from India, and the Stockholm meeting supercharged Euro media into covering climate politics. But one would expect a bit more on this side of the oceans (well, here’s one from Canada: CANWEST NEWS SERVICE – Richard Foot: Canadian scientist says UN’s global warming panel ‘crossed the line‘.)
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT – but pertinent, and funny.
In the UK at the Telegraph, enviro writer, blogger, and wordsmith George Monbiot has invented his own Booker Prize (ie, not the one for best book). He awarded it to a US newspaperman who not only denies global warming is serious or our fault but, by Monbiot’s count, set an all-time record for errors on climate science in a single published story. In a followup, he offers the annotated evidence of this festival of factual misconstrual. This Booker Prize, as it happens, is named for Telegraph columnist Christopher Booker for what Monbiot calls a habit of climate change howlers. One is inclined to salute the eponym as sensible – here is a collection of Mr. Booker’s recent offerings, including some on the IPCC’s latest spot of rough water. Thank you Seth Borenstein for bringing Monbiot’s wit to our attention.
– Charlie Petit
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